Communications of the ACM
The Academic Job Search: How to Prepare Key Documents
Credit: Johns Hopkins University
While the academic job search can be a grueling nine-month process, there are several key steps that you can take to increase your chances of future job success. Before setting out on an academic job search, it's crucial that you prepare a number of key documents that will help you sell yourself as a candidate and future faculty member: the cover letter, CV, research statement and teaching statement. Then, you will need to develop the social media profiles that will provide another view of your aptitudes and experiences. Finally, there is the personal website where you can host your primary documents and published works. With that as an overview, the article provides a checklist and related advice to help you prepare the right application materials in a timely manner for the academic job search.
Your cover letter, CV, research statement and teaching statement will become your primary documents for winning a new academic job, so you will need to make these really shine. Create both HTML and PDF versions of these primary documents. In the cover letter, use bold face on the names of faculty member. Keep your cover letter very brief, two paragraphs at most. Ask local faculty members outside your area to read over your materials and then listen to their feedback. List impact factors or acceptance rates alongside your publications in your CV. This gives people outside your field a crude metric to judge your publications. Employers likely will search for your name, and they do anticipate you'll have a Facebook page or a LinkedIn account. It's okay to have online profiles, but clean up your image and politically sterilize them before your job search even begins.
You'll need a straightforward and professional website to host your primary documents and all your published works or links to them if they are restricted. In fact, your homepage is more important than even your CV. In terms of website traffic, roughly seven out of ten visitors will look at your homepage, but only two in ten will look at your CV and only one in ten will look at your research statement. It's also helpful to know that interviewers will usually wait until the last minute to download and print paper copies of your materials, perhaps the same day you arrive for an interview. Keep everything current. Once these application materials land you a few interviews, you'll still have to prepare a job talk, your answers to the standard questions that come up during the typical academic job interview, and your approach to negotiating and discussing start-up packages.
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