Reflecting on the Job Market Journey

Several weeks ago, I learned that my most recent job search yielded what should be a long-term position. In the upcoming fall, I’ll be joining the University of Arizona as a member of both its philosophy department and the W. A. Franke Honors College as an Assistant Professor of Practice. While the position is not tenure eligible, it carries the same promotional ranks as a “standard” Assistant Professor position and operates on long-term contracts. My hope and expectation is that the University of Arizona will be my home for the foreseeable future. (Prepping for this transition is part of why I've been preoccupied the last few weeks and have not posted anything in that time.)

The post-COVID job market was not favorable, even by the appallingly low standards of the typical job search in academic philosophy. While the number of tenure-track job openings returned to near pre-COVID levels, the market seemed even more saturated with candidates than usual because the job offerings the previous year had been so meager. While I had a few interviews heading into April, none of them had yielded any tangible results. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it was eerily similar to what transpired last time. But April yielded a new cluster of interviews – a combination of visiting jobs and long-term positions. I even got invited for a campus visit midway through the month. Ultimately, I missed out on that particular job but was offered a visiting position near the end of April. In early May, just before I had to make a decision about the offer in hand, I got the news from Arizona.

I’m thrilled with how it all ended, but having reached this juncture, I have been thinking about how much it required. Here is a short encapsulation of each time I was on the job market and what the results were:

• 2016–2017: 90 applications; 4 interviews; 1 job offer
• 2017–2018: 19 applications; 1 interview; 0 job offers
• 2018–2019: 118 applications; 13 interviews; 3 job offers
• 2021–2022: 54 applications; 7 interviews; 2 job offers

You may notice that there’s a great deal of variance in the application numbers each year. My second job search was a soft search: my postdoctoral position was guaranteed for a second year, so there was no pressing need to find another job. I applied selectively to tenure-track positions for which I thought I was a good fit. My first and third searches were more strenuous endeavors where I went to far greater lengths trying to secure academic employment. The 2018–2019 search almost destroyed me, however. It was simply too time-consuming and emotionally taxing to apply for that many jobs, so on this most recent job search, I opted to be more selective. My target number of applications was 60, and when I received my first offer, I had exactly 6 jobs left in my spreadsheet that I intended to apply for.

One advantage of having been on the job market several times beforehand was that I had some sense of what jobs were more likely to yield interviews. My insight into this was not nearly as clear in 2018–2019, so I may not have been able to effectively target job ads that were more likely to yield positive outcomes. There are always anomalous results, of course. Maybe the most glaring in my own history was getting an interview for a philosophy of law job in 2016 despite having neither an AOC or AOS in that area. But after 200+ applications, it’s easy to identify trends: I was competitive for jobs in ethics and applied ethics at a wide range of universities, but I had poor results for open jobs. Surprisingly, despite my research in environmental ethics, I learned over time that I was not competitive for interdisciplinary jobs in environmental studies or environmental humanities. I could never determine exactly why, but I never got an interview for any of these kinds of positions in about 50 applications. All this information played a significant role in what jobs I applied for and which postings I ignored.

After this long on the job market, I have learned a few things that were not obvious to me when I was sending out job applications for the first time, so I will share those for anyone who may be interested:

1. Not all tenure-track positions are better than non-tenure-track positions. Perhaps this will seem obvious to some readers, but it is easy to come away with the impression that a tenure-track job should be the ultimate goal of any job search. The norms of the profession reinforce this impression in many ways. But in reality, some tenure-track jobs have lower salaries and poorer benefits than post-docs and other non-tenured positions. In some instances, a tenure-track job may not even be all that secure: at some of the most distinguished institutions, it is normal for assistant professors not to get tenure, and at institutions facing financial difficulties, tenure-line faculty are not always protected from losing their positions.
   
   
2. There is an enormous variance in the amount of time it takes to apply for a job. In my experience, the range is between 15 minutes and 8 hours. There are two main variables that will affect how long it takes: (1) the quality of the online system to which you are submitting your application and (2) the number and types of tailored documents you need to apply for the position. Some HR systems are absolutely awful and will crash when trying to process your documents or fail to read your PDFs correctly for unknown reasons or require you to answer 50 ancillary questions to actually submit your application. On the other end of the spectrum, some applications will not even require you to use an HR system: you will just email all your documents to someone. When it comes to the actual documents needed to apply, some applications will only require a few documents. Others will require almost a dozen. The most time-consuming requirement (by far) is when you have to write an original document – such as a research project description for a postdoc or a syllabus for a course you have never taught or an unusual personal statement about the university’s general education program (or some similarly specific topic) – that you will only use for one application. Those kinds of submission requirements can add many hours to your workload if you are intent on applying for that job.
   
   
3. You will rarely be informed of your status in the search process in a timely manner. If your application does not pass the initial screening, you are not likely to get an official rejection notice for many months – usually around the time that the search is officially closed. Sometimes, you will never hear anything. In my experience, I got no response whatsoever about 30% of the time. But even if you get an interview, you can be in limbo for a long time. In one instance, I was informed about getting a first round interview over 3 months after the application deadline. And after your interview, you are unlikely to get concrete news quickly unless you advance to the next stage of the interview process immediately. Sometimes, you will be ghosted by the search committee even if they took the time to interview you. I have even had the experience of inquiring after a first round interview to notify a search committee about a job offer from another institution and received no response. For any application you complete, expect that you will learn nothing about it for months, even if you advance to the next stage of the search. Some search committees will defy your expectations, but most will not.
   
   
4. Initial interviews are the worst part of the job application process. You might think that the tedious and time-consuming process of completing all those applications is the worst part, but it’s not. Once you complete and submit an application, you can effectively forget about it and move onto the next application. Interviews are different: if you are getting an interview, you have a legitimate chance at getting the job. This introduces a lot of pressure, especially since one botched question in a 20-minute interview will usually be enough to doom your chances. Even in the age of virtual interviews, a single one can require hours of preparation – doing your homework on the search committee, teaching requirements of the job, etc., along with ensuring all the technology on your end is working properly – and after it concludes, there will inevitably be a lot of things you may second-guess regarding your performance. They are also exhausting despite their short length, and I found I was always so cognitively spent after a job interview that I could not work effectively the rest of the day. Campus visits are also exhausting and require extensive preparation. But your expenses are usually covered, and you have a lot of time to present yourself in a favorable light to the department. Making it that far is also a clear sign that you’re competitive on the job market – so much so that you might well land this particular job. All things considered, I found even the unsuccessful campus visits good experiences; I would not say the same about first-round interviews.
   
   
5. Interview preparation is important but not nearly as important as interview experience. Like many job candidates before me, I did mock interviews with faculty members of my department, and I was always fairly thorough in my prep work for actual interviews when they arose. But for my first 20 interviews, I was always asked at least one weird question that I had never been asked before. As you get more interview experience, this happens less frequently, and when it does happen, you will be less likely to get rattled. Additionally, once you have had a handful of interviews, you will start to develop an interview routine – a pattern will emerge regarding how you will rehearse your answers, review the job advertisement, investigate the search committee members, adjust your webcam settings, manage your appearance (e.g., picking attire, shaving), and getting a meal beforehand. Having an established routine will make these interviews less stressful and easier to approach.
   
   
6. You have to prepare to be on the job market for 8 months. More than 6 months into two of my job searches, I had no job offers and would not be able to renew my current contract. Both times, I managed to secure job offers in that perilous April – June window where the market winds down. Persistence does not always pay off, but you should be committed to seeing your job search through these last few months. The market gets more and more mentally grueling as it drags on, especially if you have to endure the disappointment of getting close to landing a job along the way. Plan for the possibility that you’ll still be sending out job applications in May: don’t overcommit to a bunch of things at the end of the spring semester or beginning of the summer. Sometimes, things will materialize very late in the game.

Those are the main things I learned that deviated from my expectations when I began my first academic job search. For readers who have been on the job market several times, what did you learn from the experience that you didn’t know or expect when you first started sending out job applications?

Comments

[some insight]

Here is a lesson:
It is very difficult to "move up" once you secure a tenure track job. Indeed, a sociological study I read noted that where an academic is 10 years after graduating with a PhD is generally where they will be the rest of their academic career. If you are at an R1, then you are mostly likely to be at one throughout your career; if you are at a four year college at year 10, then you are most likely to stay there or move to another four year college.

[anon]

Thank you for this post, Trevor!

For context, I’ve been on the job market for the last 3 years and reading this was both sobering and reassuring. I have found that much of the job market narrative is dominated by stories of “stars” who got multiple good job offers right out of the gate, including some of the other guest posts on this blog that offer job market advice that reeks of survivorship bias as candidates who were extraordinarily lucky. That experience is nowhere near the norm, and highlighting it makes it difficult to know what the average experience of the market is like. I know now that Trevor’s story is much closer to the reality for most applicants who nevertheless end up with a job, but the less we share these stories, the more bound up in shame, misery, and disappointment it is to need more than one or two shots at the job market to land something, especially when one is no longer ABD.

I would love to see a series on this blog where philosophers who didn’t get a job while ABD but eventually ended up with a permanent or long-term academic job within the last few years share what their experience was like. I think this would go a long way towards destigmatizing that experience and moving the spotlight away from the extremely few people who are lucky enough to not need to go on the job market more than once or twice. I know I felt a lot of sadness over the last few years, and had I read more reflections like Trevor’s, I might have felt less lonely.

[postdoc10]

My own search finally concluded in a (hopefully) permanent job after 6 years on the market, and a little more than 400 applications. Based on that (similar) experience, I think all the points made here are really apt. Interviews are grueling. Though I will say that I found flyouts nerve-wracking, difficult, and exhausting, more so than Trevor suggests. Perhaps oddly, I found *virtual* campus visits to be at least as bad, sometimes worse, than the in-person kind.

I was ultimately successful because I moved into research into a hot applied ethics field. In this last year, I had very few interviews based on my old research. Most were positions with an AOS in my new applied ethics work.

[interview hater]

!00% agree with points 4 and 5 about interviews (which is why I much prefer job searches that skip them).