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Ten simple rules for giving an effective academic job talk

* E-mail: [email protected] (SAS); [email protected] (JOLS)

¶ ‡ SAS, LLS, and MRA contributed equally to this work. CEGA, ACB, ACRG, MJ, GSK, JSM, JM, and ROM also contributed equally to this work.

Affiliation Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States of America

Affiliation Department of Human Genetics, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States of America

• Shayna A. Sura, 
• Lauren L. Smith, 
• Monique R. Ambrose, 
• C. Eduardo Guerra Amorim, 
• Annabel C. Beichman, 
• Ana C. R. Gomez, 
• Mark Juhn, 
• Gaurav S. Kandlikar, 
• Julie S. Miller, 

Published: July 25, 2019

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007163
• Reader Comments

Citation: Sura SA, Smith LL, Ambrose MR, Amorim CEG, Beichman AC, Gomez ACR, et al. (2019) Ten simple rules for giving an effective academic job talk. PLoS Comput Biol 15(7): e1007163. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007163

Editor: Fran Lewitter, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, UNITED STATES

Copyright: © 2019 Sura et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The authors acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (to SAS, ACB, and JSM under grant #DGE-1144087, and to GSK and JSM under grant #DGE-1650604), the NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology (to JSM under grant #DBI-1812292), and NSF research grants OCE-1335657 and DEB-1557022 (to JOL-S and ACRG). ACRG was supported by the CAPES Science Without Borders Doctoral Fellowship. ROM and JOL-S were supported by the US Department of Defense Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (RC-2635). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

You’ve finally completed your dissertation research and have your PhD in hand—yay! Maybe you’re also in the middle of a postdoctoral position. If you’re reading this article, chances are you are actively searching for and applying for faculty positions. (Check out reference [ 1 ] if you’re early in the application process and [ 2 ] for additional advice!) Unfortunately, many graduate students and postdocs are not taught the skills necessary for acquiring a faculty position after passing the “looks good on paper” part of the application and securing an on-campus interview. One of the last crucial steps in earning a faculty position is your academic job talk. No matter how great of a scientist you are, if you cannot give a compelling job talk, chances are low that you will be hired. Yet many candidates receive little guidance on how to ace this unique and vital test.

To help address this gap, we have put together these ten simple rules that will help you give an effective job talk. To be clear, these are rules developed for the academic job talk in a research-heavy department, which is typically in a seminar format. These rules are not targeted toward other formats such as chalk talks or teaching demonstrations, although some pointers may still apply. We are a group primarily composed of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) faculty, postdocs, and graduate students who participated in two recent job searches in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department. We evaluated ten job talks over the span of 2 months and discussed their strengths and weaknesses in a weekly seminar course. These ten rules are based on our discussions of what worked (and what didn’t) across the variety of job talks we observed, as well as our various experiences on the job market and search committees over the years.

Rule 1: Know your audience

As with any seminar or presentation, when preparing your job talk, you want to target your specific audience. Therefore, you need to consider the background knowledge and interests of the audience members. Learn as much as you can about the position and what institutional needs the position is meant to address within the department and broader university. If you’re applying for a position within a specific department, what is the scope of the research in that department? Does it have a mission statement? Are any strategic aims or future plans publicly available? Does the department work closely with other academic units on campus, and does the position you’ve applied for have any formal ties to other units? To answer some of these questions, you should read the job ad closely, read about the current faculty’s research, and look through the department’s web page (see also Rule 7 [Understand your potential new workplace] and 8 [Understand your new colleagues] from reference [ 3 ]). If you’re lucky enough to have network connections to the department, use them now to get insights before you visit. We also recommend that after you receive an invitation to interview, you consider setting up a phone call with the chair of the search committee to inquire about the job and ask any specific questions you have regarding the job or department. In particular, it is a good idea to ask what the search committee is looking for—it may have been a long time since the job ad was released, and the search committee’s focus may have shifted from what was initially stated. We recommend a phone conversation as opposed to an emailed list of questions because it saves time; also, people are often more candid and may provide more useful insights over the phone. Depending on when your job talk occurs during your interview schedule, you might even make small changes to customize your talk based on interviews and meetings with department members prior to your talk.

Rule 2: Sell yourself

The faculty and search committee are trying to choose the candidate they’ll be most excited to have as a new colleague, so you need to showcase the reasons you’re their best choice! It is smart to include an explicit introduction about yourself—i.e., the kind of science you do, your grand aims, and your approach to research. You want to communicate your identity as a researcher and, if appropriate given your career stage and research plans, how this differentiates you from your mentors (reference [ 4 ] is an excellent resource).

You also want to convey other traits as a scientist and potential colleague. Reflect on the qualities that make you an exceptional researcher (creative, persistent, thoughtful, rigorous, multidisciplinary, etc.), as well as the specific traits that your audience will be looking for, and try to demonstrate them subtly to the audience over the course of the talk via examples in your work. Consider ways to demonstrate your fundamental strengths as a scientist, such as the ability to question your methods and results to pursue deeper and more robust conclusions. If you have any particular successes on your record, such as big grants or markers of professional stature, don’t be shy about mentioning them (but don’t brag!). Having your publication citations and/or grants listed in smaller text at the bottom of corresponding slides is one way to show your accomplishments without explicitly mentioning them. Finally, you can casually highlight additional non-research skills (e.g., mentoring, outreach, collaborations) throughout your talk. For example, give credit to an excellent mentee who contributed to the data collection or to a gifted collaborator who added a component to your study. Your application materials likely included many of these things, but if you can find ways to incorporate them in your talk, a broader audience can see the full package of who you are.

Keep in mind Rule 1 (Know your audience) when deciding how best to showcase yourself, as different disciplines and subfields may vary in their perceptions of what makes a good scientist. For example, disciplines may vary in their appreciation for deep thought into specific mechanisms and experimental designs versus mathematical elegance and rigor. Others may prize applied over fundamental research or vice versa. This may be especially challenging if your research is interdisciplinary, so make sure to investigate what factors are valued most highly by the decision makers in the audience for your talk so you can design your talk to emphasize those aspects of your work.

Rule 3: Impress the in-crowd…

Likely there will be people in the audience who work in the same field as you. Make sure to impress these experts with your knowledge and convince them you are worthy of being their colleague. You want to show them you have the sophistication and skills necessary to tackle advanced problems. Therefore, it’s a good idea to do at least one “deep dive” during your talk in which you include one or two “muscle-flexing” slides. By this we mean slides with technical content that the general audience member may not be able to fully understand but for which you can flex your intellectual muscles and showcase your skills. Importantly, do not bluff or bluster in this section—a technical error in your deep dive would be fatal.

These deep dives shouldn’t be long, or you risk losing most of your audience. However, a glimpse into the more advanced aspects of your work will convey that you’re able to play in the big leagues in your field. Just make sure to reengage your audience after this show of prowess, ideally providing a big-picture summary of what you’ve just shown.

Rule 4: … but also appeal to the out-crowd

In addition to impressing the specialists in the audience, you want to make sure the people who work outside your discipline are able to follow and enjoy your presentation. When preparing your talk, consider how you can present and frame the material so that even audience members from far-flung disciplines are engaged and can appreciate the broader relevance of your presentation. Be attuned to the breadth of the department you’re visiting, as this can present various communication challenges. The diverse interests of faculty in a broad department (e.g., biology) can make it difficult to make your research program appealing to everyone. However, it can also be difficult communicating to a more focused department (e.g., molecular genetics) if your research is not exactly in line with what everyone else does. It helps to summarize the important findings of your research as you present them, in addition to their implications and why they are exciting, in case not everyone followed the technical aspects of your results. You can also make it easier for audience members from other fields to follow your talk by avoiding excess jargon and keeping your messages clear.

Emphasize the themes in your work that relate to the job and department you’re interviewing for. If applicable and appropriate, it can help to subtly highlight connections between your research to research of other members of the department who have different specialties. But be careful not to overdo this, as it can become distracting.

Rule 5: Play the hand you’ve got to optimal effect

Strategic choice of topics to include in your talk from among your entire research portfolio is critical for giving an effective and memorable job talk. Depending upon what career stage you are in (just finished PhD, postdoc, assistant professor, etc.), you may have a smaller or larger research portfolio. For an hour-long job talk, it is unlikely you will be able to effectively discuss everything you have ever done. And that’s okay, because that is what a CV is for!

For your job talk, you need to assess your portfolio of published work, unpublished but completed work, and ongoing projects to determine which projects showcase your work most effectively and best match what the department is looking for in a future colleague. The most effective talk structures we observed were ones that focused on 2–3 research studies and that combined higher-level information with a few “deep dives” into the nitty gritty of a particular study ( Fig 1 ). This talk structure will help you satisfy Rules 3 and 4 above, which discuss how you want your whole audience to understand and appreciate your talk, while also presenting the “meat” of your research and impressing those most familiar with your field. If you feel that this design doesn’t convey the breadth or quantity of your productivity, consider adding a slide or two on the conceptual structure of your full research program in which you can show (with all your best citations) how all the pieces fit together.

• PPT PowerPoint slide
• PNG larger image
• TIFF original image

You want to start broad during the introduction to get everyone on board and then go into more depth on a few specific studies, including some “deep dives” to show off expert knowledge. Finally, you want to conclude your talk on a broad scale similar to your introduction. The dashed lines indicate flexibility in how many specific studies you incorporate into your talk, based upon your own research portfolio.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007163.g001

In addition to presenting on your past and ongoing research, you need to clearly articulate your plan for your future research program. Tell the audience (and your potential future colleagues!) about your vision for your research lab both in the immediate future (next couple of years) and in the long term (5–10 years from now). This should also help differentiate you and your research from your previous mentors and their research programs. A critical part of establishing and maintaining a research program is your ability to generate funding. If you have already secured funding for your future research plans or you have a track record of successfully acquiring funding, then this is a great opportunity to bring this to your audience’s attention. If you don’t have independent funding yet, you can still demonstrate your awareness of the funding landscape and which funding opportunities are likely to support your research program. For example, in your future directions section, you might briefly touch on how one (or more) of your research questions aligns well with promising funding opportunities in your field, such as open research grants.

In organizing the structure of your talk and your transitions between topics, strive for a cohesive narrative that will make your talk more enjoyable to follow and easier to recall afterwards. What’s the progression of your research? How did one study lead to the next, and what shaped your decisions about how to proceed? What ideas do you have for future research at this new job? Telling a story is always a great way to keep your audience engaged and makes your science more memorable.

Rule 6: Give a good talk

A classic early paper in this series [ 5 ] provides ten useful rules for giving a good presentation. Read it! Showing you are a competent oral communicator is a vital component of giving an academic job talk. In addition to the universal suggestions from [ 5 ] (such as practicing for fluidity without over-rehearsing, making eye contact with the audience, and being enthusiastic and excited about your work), there are a few other pointers to bear in mind for a job talk. First, be aware that your job talk will be judged as an indicator of your ability to teach. Teaching is a crucial element of most academic jobs, but interview schedules often don’t allow time to address it explicitly, so this doubles your incentive to give a clear and engaging presentation. Bonus points if you are able to expand people’s understanding of technical aspects of your work—for instance, with a lucid explanation of your deep dive. Second, the job talk is a direct measure of your ability to sell your work and to act as an ambassador for the department in your future speaking engagements. Third, Rule 4 from [ 5 ] is “Make the take-home message persistent,” and this is a particular priority in the swirl of an academic search in which four or five candidates may visit over the span of a few weeks. We found that a strong thematic structure, including outline and summary slides, was an effective way to emphasize and reiterate your key points and make them memorable for the audience.

Our next three pointers are more pragmatic, but they are still useful to consider. First, be sure to ask for guidance on talk length if you’re unsure. For an hour-long seminar, the actual presentation length is typically 45–50 minutes, allowing for the fact that your host may burn precious minutes introducing you, and being certain to leave time for questions. Second, you should also make sure you understand the audiovisual equipment setup in the room where you are giving your presentation. If there isn’t seminar preparation time on your schedule, ask for it! This way, you can ensure your presentation is loaded properly, your presentation slides appear how you expect, and you are able to navigate through them without glitches. It is a good idea to save your presentation in multiple formats in case you encounter compatibility issues with the primary format (e.g., if your presentation is in PowerPoint, also save a PDF backup version). Third, don’t give your presentation while hungry. You want to exude energy and confidence, which may be difficult if you give a seminar later in the afternoon after many meetings and haven’t eaten since lunch—so take note of your schedule and, if necessary, bring a snack to revive your energy levels before your talk.

The pragmatic pointers we mentioned are great for planning ahead, but overall, you should be adaptable. Problems can arise unexpectedly, and it’s possible you’ll be delayed by interruptions or a lengthy introduction. Do your best to not get flustered, to handle yourself with grace, and to end your talk on time. Make a note of places in your talk where you can go into greater depth if you’re running ahead of schedule or places (particularly toward the end) where you can skim over the details more quickly if you’re behind schedule.

Rule 7: Be kind to your audience’s eyes

Your slides should enhance your presentation, not distract from what you are saying. Make sure your slide aesthetics are appealing to the audience. Your slides should be clear and concise, without too much text. When you have text-heavy slides, you lose some proportion of your audience’s attention while they read the text instead of listening to your words. So only display text that emphasizes the key points you will say out loud. Also, since the figures and images you present are especially important, you will want to construct figures specifically for your slides, keeping in mind that formatting for a presentation is typically different from formatting for a published paper. Refer to Box 1 for additional advice on qualities of good slides and common mistakes to avoid. You should also check out [ 5 , 6 ] for additional advice, noting that the rules in [ 6 ] are not specific to figures for presentations.

Box 1. Qualities of good slides versus slide qualities to be avoided

Slide qualities to aim for:

• ○. Minimal text.
• ○. Figures that are readable and easily understood.
• ○. Figures created specifically for talks (rather than pulled directly from a paper). Talk figures are generally simpler than figure panels from a paper, with fewer items per plot, a focus on the key points, larger labels and axes, etc. Avoid having to tell your audience to ignore parts of the figure by remaking the figure without extraneous information.
• ○. If you have a complicated figure, you can animate your slides to build up the complexity as you explain it to the audience. For example, you can start by showing only a very simple plot and then layer on additional pieces of information as you explain them.
• ○. Clean background.
• ○. Consistent design throughout the talk.
• ○. Color-blind-friendly color palettes or alternative ways to distinguish differences on figures besides just color (e.g., using dotted versus solid lines to represent different measures in a plot).
• ○. Simple visual markers (silhouettes or clip art) that link ideas across slides and jog your audience’s memory (e.g., a human silhouette next to parameters estimated from human data and a mouse silhouette next to data estimated from mice).

Slide qualities to avoid:

• Too much text.
• Text that’s too small to read or overlaid on an image so that it’s not legible.
• Busy background (e.g., photograph) that distracts from the text and/or figures you’re showing on the slide.
• Figures with no or unreadable axis labels.
• Poor color combinations, including combinations that are difficult for color-blind viewers to make out (e.g., red/green, blue/green).
• Visual markers that don’t convey any meaningful information, such as changing fonts and background colors. Even minor inconsistencies are distracting and convey a lack of attention to detail.

Rule 8: Embody the future

Remember that you are the exciting next generation of scientists! Make sure to share your enthusiasm and your fresh ideas for research. Emphasize how your work is new and innovative, whether by showing new solutions to old problems or by describing ways to approach problems that have only recently been recognized. If appropriate, highlight how you will harness the latest technologies and methodological developments to advance your research. This will get the audience thinking about applications to their own research programs and how you’d be a valuable colleague to have around.

You can also emphasize other forward-looking traits you would bring to the job. Maybe you have developed a new online resource or are using a new mentoring or teaching style that helps make research more broadly accessible for students. Find ways to showcase how you are moving science forward and how you’ll be a dynamic force for years to come.

Rule 9: Don’t blow it in the question-and-answer session

You’re almost done with your job talk, so don’t blow it during the question-and-answer (Q&A) session! You want to leave your audience with the best final impression and show that you can think and speak clearly in unscripted moments.

Here are some tips for a strong finish. When someone asks you a question, it can be helpful to paraphrase the question before beginning your answer. This gives you some extra time to compose your own thoughts and make sure you understood the question and ensures the rest of the audience hears the question. Regarding your actual responses, one cardinal rule is to never bluff. If you don’t know the answer, you can say so, but then show how you would think through the question, or relate it to something you have done or know about. If somebody voices a fair criticism, then acknowledge it and discuss approaches to addressing it. If you can, convey enthusiasm in this situation—if it’s truly an idea you’ve never considered, then treat this as an exciting and valuable scientific exchange, not an oral exam you are failing.

Remember that your audience likely includes people from outside your area of expertise, so it is possible you will get questions that seem to have missed key ideas from your talk. As with all questions, make sure you understand what the questioner is asking, and then take advantage of the opportunity to address any misunderstandings in a respectful, productive way. This is a great chance to demonstrate your ability to explain concepts clearly and concisely.

If there are predictable follow-up questions to your presentation, it can be helpful to have a few extra slides prepared. For example, if you presented a mathematical model using a schematic diagram, you may want to have a backup slide that shows the actual equations in case someone asks for more detail. If there is an extra data set or analysis that you’d love to include but just don’t have the time, then a spare slide or two might enable you to deliver a home-run response if you get asked the right question.

Finally, remember to handle yourself with grace during the Q&A session. Be poised, calm, and respectful, and demonstrate your intellectual maturity—all of these are qualities people admire and are seeking in a future colleague. Another past article in this series gives rules for building your scientific reputation [ 7 ]; Rules 1, 2, and 3 are useful during both the Q&A session and the whole interview process! Which brings us to Rule 10.

Rule 10: Be professional

Throughout this whole process, remember you are asking the host department to hire you as a (hopefully) long-term colleague in a small, tight-knit unit. Therefore, it is important to present a good image of yourself. You should dress appropriately for your job talk (i.e., not too casually). Even if you end up being a bit overdressed, it is better to leave that impression rather than showing up underdressed and being remembered as not having taken the job talk seriously. Be conscious of your body language and use of slang throughout your job talk and in any interactions you have during your visit. Humor can be a wonderful way to humanize and enliven your talk, but don’t overdo it, and steer well clear of anything potentially offensive. While you are answering questions, or if you happen to be interrupted during your talk, remember to show yourself in the best light by being polite and calm, even if an audience member is being confrontational or rude.

You are an amazing and productive scientist (you wouldn’t have been invited to give a job talk if you weren’t!), but it’s important to be clear about your specific contributions to the various research projects you present, particularly when the research is part of a big collaboration. It’s essential to acknowledge your collaborators, especially junior mentees. This shows your audience that you are ready to mentor undergraduates, graduates, postdocs, etc., and most importantly, that you do not take collaborators’ contributions for granted or claim them as your own. It’s also good practice to acknowledge relevant previous work that your research and ideas are building upon, as you never know who is in your audience, and you don’t want anyone to feel you are uninformed about or taking credit for this prior research. Again, you’re asking to be hired into an academic family, and you want your new family members to be comfortable and excited about pursuing new research opportunities with you.

Finally, it is a nice touch to write thank-you notes after your visit (but see Rule 10 from [ 3 ] for an alternative opinion). These notes can be sent by email within a few days after the end of your job interview. How many you send is up to you, but we suggest sending follow-up notes to at least the search chair and the other key players in your interview visit. And don’t forget about all the people who helped coordinate the logistical details for your visit!

In summary, the academic job talk is unlike most other seminars in its goals, context, and aspects of its execution. We have outlined some rules to help you put your best face forward in the job market (and to help all of us get the most out of the job search experience). There are additional resources online (e.g., [ 8 ] and [ 9 ] as two examples), and people should glean whatever insights they can from these sources. So do your preparation, nail the talk, and go get that job!

Acknowledgments

This paper arose from discussions in a graduate seminar course jointly led by KEL and JOL-S. We thank other participants in the course including Katie Gostic, Natalie Lozano, and Bernard Kim for their thoughts on these topics.

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• 8. Reis RM. Giving a job talk in the sciences. 30 March 2011 [cited 2019 May 15]. In: The Chronicle of Higher Education [Internet]. Available from: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Giving-a-Job-Talk-in-the/45375 .
• 9. Aguilar SJ. Tips for a successful job talk. 10 January 2018 [cited 2019 May 15]. In: Inside Higher Ed [Internet]. Available from https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2018/01/10/advice-giving-effective-job-presentation-opinion .

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Tips for making a research presentation as part of a faculty job interview

A part of most faculty job interviews is the research presentation.

A doctoral student who is getting ready for a campus job interview sent me these three questions:

• How long do I have to make my research presentation?
• How much time should I leave to allow the audience to ask questions?
• Should my presentation focus on my dissertation only or should I also include information about my research interests and my academic background?

Let me start by saying that a crucial component of your campus visit is the chair of the search committee. That’s the person who can answer many of your questions.

The fact that you have been invited for a campus visit means that you are one of the top applicants for the position. Typically about three candidates are invited for campus visits. The search committee and the chair want you to do well during your visit. Part of your ability to do as well as possible means that you are informed about the expectations of the visit.

That’s where there’s sometimes a lack of communication.

The committee and the chair of the search committee may be so busy arranging your schedule on campus – including appointments with administrators and meals with faculty members — that they haven’t talked with you about specifics.

So ask the search committee chair.

I’m going to answer your questions from the perspective of a presentation for a communications position, realizing that research presentations have some differences depending on the academic field.

1. How long do I have to make my research presentation? 

Probably about an hour will be allocated to your research presentation. Often the time is based on class periods. At my university, that’s a 50-minute time block.

Your presentation time will include giving time for people to get settled. Sometimes refreshments or coffee is made available to help encourage attendance. You also will be introduced. And you want to allow time for questions (more on that later).

I’d say plan on making your research presentation in about 40 minutes if you have an hour.

Be prepared to make some introductory remarks about yourself. You may get an excellent introduction. If so, you may be ready to move into your presentation. But in many cases, the introduction will be rather brief based, in part, on the assumption of the faculty member making the introduction that everyone attending has read your curriculum vitae. That may or may not be true. Even if they did read your CV, they may have read the other candidates’ too and not remember you specifically.

Don’t go into great detail but highlight your background – degrees, professional experience, teaching experience, etc. This introduction can be a good way to segue into how you became interested in this area of research.

2. How much time should I leave to allow the audience to ask questions? 

Allow 10 to 15 minutes for questions — unless you receive other guidance from the search chair.

Sometimes you may be nervous about allowing time for questions, as you have the great unknown of what you might be asked.

Part of the purpose of asking questions is to see how you can think on your feet, defend your position, be open to different perspectives, etc. So you want to give the faculty a chance to see you in that role. If you use your entire time for presenting, the faculty won’t have the opportunity to see that other important aspect of yourself – going off script. Not allowing time for questions could work against you.

Don’t worry that there won’t be questions. The reason that some are attending your presentation is because they are interested in your research and you as a potential collaborator. Those faculty will ask questions.

And if no one on the faculty is into your research area, someone on the search committee will ask questions to keep things moving along.

Could you get a tough question? Definitely. You may be in a research area that is “the area” for someone else on faculty, and that person could challenge you. Someone else may not agree with your methodology or the value of your research. But that’s part of the life of the academy. Be prepared to defend yourself professionally – just like you would at a professional conference.

3. Should my presentation focus on my dissertation only or should I also include information about my research interests and my academic background?

As I mentioned earlier, you do want to include some information about your academic and professional background. Typically that works into your introduction to yourself and your research.

You do want to talk about your research interests beyond just your dissertation. You want to demonstrate that you have a line or stream of research to pursue. Your dissertation demonstrates your research ability, and your discussion of other research helps show that you have scholarly potential.

Not only does the committee and the faculty want a good candidate hired, but they want to hire someone who can make tenure. Your discussion of your research interests helps them see your potential for continued research and tenure.

You want to show how your research evolves and is connected. Your research doesn’t have to be in one area, but you do want to avoid sounded to spread out in your interests.

Before your campus visit, do your homework in investigating the research the faculty currently is doing. If you are going to interview at a major research institution, you could see how many faculty are working on grant projects, as that could be an expectation for you that you’d want to talk about during your campus visit.

4. How should I plan my presentation in terms of technology use?

The doctoral student who asked me for advice didn’t ask that question, but I am going to include it in my advice.

Plan to use some technology in your presentation. The typical candidate research presentation includes PowerPoint or Keynote slides. Of course, you can make an excellent presentation without slides. But part of the purpose of using the slides is to demonstrate that you can use slides effectively, as faculty would think you would need to use slides in your teaching.

Beware of getting too fancy with your technology. You may decide to show a streaming video and then find out the computer or wireless in your presentation room aren’t up to the task.

Ask the chair about the room you’ll be presenting in and the technology setup. Ask the chair to have an IT support person or a tech-savvy faculty member there to assist you in setting up if needed.

You don’t want to come across as someone who can’t use technology, however, your presentation might be in a special conference room that the faculty don’t teach in so they don’t know the tech setup. (That happened in a recent candidate research presentation I attended. The candidate lost at least five minutes and probably was more nervous by the time he was able to start his presentation.)

I’d be interested in the advice others would offer about faculty job research presentations. Any stories about your own experiences or insights into differences in research presentations based on the academic field?

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Another great post, Julie!

Thanks, Calvin. As a department chair, you are involved in many job searches. Any other advice on research presentations that you’d like to share?

Many thanks. I just got an onsite interview. Your article helps me a lot!

Best wishes with the interview! Do you have any questions about the interview that I might be able to answer?

Great post, Julie. Do you have any advice on how to write the abstract to send to the search committee for your presentation? I got an onsite interview and they want a title and abstract for my presentation. How long should it be? What should it entail, etc.?

Latonya, Thanks for your response. Congratulations on being invited for an onsite interview! I imagine that the search committee will use what you send to promote your presentation to the faculty … and perhaps graduate students, too.

Write the title and abstract as a way of introducing you and your research to the faculty. Faculty are busy, so what you write may encourage some to attend your presentation. Others who will have conflicts with the timing of your presentation will be forming their view about you as a colleague based, in part, on your abstract.

Avoid having a title that comes across as too clever or that is too technical. Write in a concise way that provides the focus of your presentation, methodology used, and brief findings. Many in the faculty may not be familiar with your area of research, so provide a brief explanation of why it’s important. If the research is tied to previous research you’ve done or with funding support, be sure to include that.

Best wishes! I’d be interested in hearing how it goes.

Thanks for the information. It is very helpful. I will let you know how it goes.

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The academic job interview: Three do’s and don’ts when preparing for a teaching demonstration

By Barbi Honeycutt

Most faculty job interviews include a research presentation and a teaching demonstration as part of the on-campus interview process. Postdoctoral scholars are experts in research. They know how to design experiments, test ideas and hypotheses, and analyze the findings. But while a postdoc may feel confident and prepared for a research presentation, the same person may not feel as prepared for the teaching demonstration.

This is especially true if the academic institution has not provided opportunities to gain teaching experience in graduate school or during your postdoc appointment.

This article explores three tips to consider in preparing for your teaching demonstration to feel confident and ready to ace this part of the interview!

First, what is the teaching demonstration?

There are two main types of teaching demonstrations: the “in class” demonstration and the “open” demonstration. If asked to give an “in class” demonstration, the postdoc will be the guest lecturer for students in an actual course and will teach in their classroom. The topic will most likely relate to the course material and fit into the course syllabus.

In an “open” demonstration, the postdoc will be teaching to a mixed audience that may include undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, faculty, staff and campus leaders. The audience will have been uniquely invited and have volunteered to attend. The topic will most likely relate to the postdoc’s research or a course they would likely teach in that department. The “classroom” will probably be a conference room.

There are pros and cons to both formats and every department will do things differently. Make sure to know the type of teaching demonstration expected and learn as much as possible about the audience before the campus visit.

Here are a few ideas to consider in preparing a teaching demonstration.

Three do's and don't when preparing for a teaching demonstration:

1. Do teach. Don’t give a presentation.

Search committees want to see how faculty candidates facilitate students’ learning. Teaching is about organizing complex information and helping students make sense of it. Two common mistakes are to give a presentation about how to teach or to try to impress the audience/students with a breath-taking breadth of knowledge about the topic. In a winning teaching demonstration, the presenter will shift the focus from themselves and demonstrate their skill of knowing how to create an environment where the audience/students feel comfortable, engaged and ready to learn.

2. Do engage the audience. Don’t just lecture.

Search committees want to see how you connect with and engage students. Unlike a presentation, a teaching demonstration should be more of a dialog; if a postdoc is delivering a lecture they could give without any students in the room, they need to re-think the approach. Don’t talk “at” students the whole time. Talk “with” students, and give them time to talk with each other. The teaching demonstration is different than teaching a course because it’s a one-time event. The “teacher” most likely will not know any of the students and have to figure out how to establish rapport while also demonstrating how effectively they teach.

3. Do use an active learning strategy. But, don’t do something you’ve never done before.

In planning a teaching session, integrate at least one active learning strategy to engage students. However, this is not the time to experiment with an entirely new teaching strategy. It is hard to feel or demonstrate confidence if the outcome is unknowable, so it is important to use a teaching strategy previously tried in a classroom, or with a group of friends and colleagues. The goal is to provide guided active participation by conveying confidence and authority, and not to suggest things in the classroom will be out of control under your leadership.

Final Tips:

Remember, an invitation to teach at a campus is an admission of status on the final list of candidates. Getting this invitation is a cause for celebration! The search committee members have chosen a select group of postdocs they feel have the capacity to be a good fit for their department. They have invested time and resources and they want to cement a relationship.

Be authentic. Show them who you are as a teacher and what kind of colleague you will be.

For more tips to help prepare for a successful teaching demonstration and a list of questions to ask before visiting the campus, visit BarbiHoneycutt.com .

Republished with permission from Barbi Honeycutt, PhD. Dr. Honeycutt is a teaching and learning consultant in higher education. She is a speaker, scholar and author. Honeycutt teaches online professional development courses, facilitates in-person workshops and creates resources to help higher education professionals increase student engagement and improve learning. Learn more at barbihoneycutt.com .

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Academic Interviews (Faculty Positions)

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Interviews for faculty positions often include two rounds:

First round – Phone or Video  (20-40 minutes)

This is an initial screening interview with members of the search committee.  Review the job posting, and make sure to learn as much as you can about the department and university you are interviewing with.  Look up the profiles of your interviewers.  Take time to practice answering questions out loud. You can schedule a mock practice interview with a CAPD career advisor.

It is important to prepare answers regarding research experience and future directions, teaching style and experience, prospective collaborations and plans for future funding of your research. This funding could include foundations, governmental agencies or industry.

Common questions include:

• Tell us a bit about yourself
• Why are you interested in this position?
• Give us an overview of your research proposal for the next 5 years
• What research resources do you need to be successful?
• Why are you interested in teaching?
• What classes are you prepared to teach?
• Tell us about your teaching experience
• Do you have any questions for us?

Second round – Campus Visit (or virtual visit) – 1-2 days

The second round lasts 1-2 days, and includes meetings with members of the search committee, individual faculty from inside (and sometimes outside) the department and the department chair.  You may also meet with a group of students and postdocs from the department, other staff in the department, and other university leaders (such as the dean).  For in-person visits, you will typically get a tour of the department, and will be eating meals with faculty or students.

You will be asked to present one or more of the following:

Research talk/ seminar/ job talk (45 minutes -1 hour):

• highlight your previous research; introduce the goals and significance of your work and choose 1-2 projects to go more in-depth
• give a brief preview of your future research vision and plans
• know your audience – your talk should be understandable to faculty and students outside of your field

Teaching demonstration (sometimes):

• you may be asked to prepare a lecture on a given topic, or to submit a teaching video
• show how you would engage students by preparing exercises, questions, and other interactive components

Chalk talk (sometimes – more common in research-intensive science departments):

• informal discussion about your future research plans
• you may use a real or virtual whiteboard to write an outline of your plans and draw out helpful figures; sometimes a few slides are permitted (ask about the format)
• be prepared to answer questions, defend your ideas, and respond to potential limitations and challenges of your proposal

Be sure to practice any presentations with faculty mentors and peers inside and outside your field.  You can also discuss your interview preparation and practice your presentations with CAPD advisors.

For additional tips, watch a recording of a  panel on academic job interviews and offers with MIT faculty.

• Schools & departments

Prepare for an academic interview

What to expect at academic interviews and how to prepare effectively.

Most academic interviews will follow a similar format. 

What to expect

Panel interviews are most common, where you are interviewed by a number of people together, usually between two and six. The panel is likely to include at least one person from the department (possibly the head of department or research group), a representative from Human Resources, and often someone from another department outside your discipline. 

You will usually be asked to give a presentation either to the panel or to other members of the department or research group. This will commonly be on your research and could include plans for future research. You may also be asked to present on your teaching practice or give a mini-lecture. 

You may also be given the opportunity to talk informally to other departmental staff to find out more about the department and teaching and research activities. 

Preparation

Take time to develop a deeper understanding of the research group you're applying to. Use a variety of approaches to get to know the department or institution; you could ask your colleagues, explore the institution's website and read relevant papers related to their research.

Job adverts often include contact details of someone you can talk to informally about the vacancy before applying. It is a good idea to do this especially if you are not already known to the people recruiting. 

Here are some examples of the things you will want to know:

what are the research interests of other staff and how can your research complement or add to the group? 

(if it’s a teaching position) what courses are currently being taught? Where you can make a contribution? 

are there any new courses you could develop as a result of your subject expertise? 

what opportunities are there for collaborations, both intra- and inter-disciplinary? 

In preparation for your presentation you should ask for advice from, and practise with, your supervisor and any other members of your department or research group who have  knowledge of your research area. 

Find advice on presentations for academic interviews on the jobs.ac.uk website: 

jobs.ac.uk - tips for presentations  

Part of your preparation should include thinking about the questions which might come up during the interview. Academic interviewers will focus on questions about your: 

previous research, including research methodologies and skills 

ideas for future research projects and funding proposals 

track record in attracting funding 

teaching experience and style 

thoughts on how you can contribute to the teaching and research of the department 

involvement in the wider academic community through committees 

Examples of questions asked

Some examples of the type of questions asked at academic interviews are given below. 

Motivation and Knowledge 

Why are you attracted to this post? 

What do you feel are the key skills of an effective lecturer? 

Describe your working relationships? For example, tell me about your experience of collaborative projects, close working with colleagues in department, development of external relationships? 

What are the current issues around teaching, learning and assessment in Higher Education? 

What do you think are your particular strengths that would make you the ideal person for this job? 

There is considerable administration involved in running courses.  How do you think you would cope with this, as well as the teaching and research? 

How do you feel your particular research interests would allow you to contribute to and complement the research activities in this department? 

What do you see as your major research achievements? 

How can you demonstrate international excellence in research quality? 

Describe your experience of generating research income. What plans do you have to generate research funding in the future? 

What impact do you believe your research to date has made? 

How have you disseminated your research findings? 

What does “making an impact with your research” mean to you? 

Tell me about your publication record? How would you judge this achievement and what are your future plans? 

How much influence have you had on the direction of work undertaken?  Tell me about something which you have initiated. 

Tell me more about your future research plans. 

Teaching and Supervision 

How equipped do you feel to contribute to teaching within our degree programmes? 

What teaching methods have you used? 

What level of experience have you had in planning and developing teaching material for courses? 

What do you think are the main challenges facing a lecturer when teaching a large group of undergraduates? 

How would your teaching methods vary according to the size and level of groups you would be teaching – if at all? 

How do you address different learning styles in your teaching? 

What experience do you have of using e-learning systems? 

How do you evaluate your teaching effectiveness? 

Teaching is important but in your view should a department give it as much of a priority as research? 

What experience have you had of supervising research projects or students? 

Related Links 

Further support with interviews

jobs.ac.uk - interview tips  

AGCAS survey - Getting the first lecturing job  

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Academic job interviews

Preparation is key for any academic interview questions. Academic jobs are so competitive it is critical to prepare as thoroughly as possible. Follow our general advice on interviews.

Sample academic interviews questions

Interview presentations

Advance preparation.

The interview is most likely to be a panel interview with between two and  ten interviewers. Ask for their names and research them thoroughly.

• Read recent papers for those closest to your research area. Read other papers that have come from the department you are applying for.
• Review their departmental website, including their staff list to get a feel for how you would fit in
• Revisit the job description and essential and desirable criteria.
• Talk to others about their experiences of academic interviews.
• Try to organise a mock interview - perhaps with job-searching contemporaries.
• Look again at the research you did into your own capabilities so that you have plenty of evidence to support your suitability for the job when answering academic interview questions.

Look at the general advice on interviews, and these tips when facing academic panel interviews:

• Dress smartly - these are formal occasions
• Shake hands with the interviewers as you are introduced and try to remember their names
• Be ready to show that you have the capability to do the job, you understand the department and institution and that you have clear ideas about how you and the job will develop in the future
• When answering questions, look primarily at the person who asked the question, but do glance along the panel from time to time to include all the members
• Think through your answers to the questions below so that you can communicate your ideas coherently in the interview.
• Don't forget to ask your questions.

Sometimes, you will also be seen informally by a number of departmental staff before or after your panel interview. This is a chance to learn more about the department and your potential future colleagues.

Sample academic interview questions.

Here are a few examples of the types of questions you may face in an academic interview. They are fairly general. In real-life interviews, they would be tailored to the relevant job criteria. We also have a more detailed set of questions .

• What were the key achievements of your research project/PhD?
• Outline the project you would undertake if you were awarded research funding
• Who are the key researchers in your area? How does your work compare with theirs?
• In this institution, we are keen to develop collaborations between departments. What opportunities for multi-disciplinary work does your research offer?
• What plans do you have for publication of your current research?
• The university is keen to serve the wider community and economy. Does your planned research have any potential in these areas?
• If your current funding application is unsuccessful, what alternatives do you have in mind? (looking for knowledge of the funding infrastructure)
• If you were starting your project again today, what would you do differently?
• Describe a research problem you have faced. What did you learn?

It is common to be asked to give a presentation, such as an outline of your recent research or a short lecture. Look at our general advice on giving  presentations .Talk to your supervisor and other academic researchers about presentations they have given at interviews.

• When preparing your presentation, keep to the brief you are given. If unsure, ask
• Anticipate your audience - try to find out as much as possible who will be present and their interests
• Have a clear structure: decide the key points you want to make
• Practise your timing - you may be cut off in mid flow otherwise. Get feedback from others on your presentation.
• Start confidentially, speak clearly to the whole audience - ensure you include everyone with regular eye contact
• Use audio-visual equipment if it enhances your presentation. Take care that any electronic files you bring are compatible and prepare good quality visuals
• Consider taking prepared handouts for the audience
• At the end, invite questions and thank your audience

Review their website, including their staff list to get a feel for how you would fit in.

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How to write a one-page cv, a presentation as part of a job interview for a teaching assistant.

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The presentation or job talk is a key part of a on-campus job interview for a faculty position. In most disciplines, candidates present a 45-minute lecture on a relevant topic, followed by a 15-minute question-and-answer period. While the primary purpose of the talk is to enable members of the hiring department to evaluate your scholarship, the talk has a second and equally important purpose.

An academic job interview presentation gives your audience a chance to see how you perform as a teacher, both in the lecture hall and the seminar room. How you handle yourself in the discussion session, and your ability to remain calm and unflustered in response to unusual questions, is a strong indicator of your teaching skills.

Presentation Format

In choosing the format of your job talk, follow the standard of your sub-discipline. An audience accustomed to papers being read aloud will find more conversational presentations disorganized and unprofessional. An audience accustomed to Power Point presentations might find a traditional lecture dry and boring. Students especially appreciate a multimedia faculty candidate presentation ppt that is lively and interactive.

If you are relying on technology, send your materials to yourself in an email, bring a copy on a memory stick, or be prepared to download a copy from the cloud. Pack hard copy handouts as a backup to cope with technical glitches gracefully. Make sure to time your talk and keep within your time limit. For a one-hour presentation, plan for 45 minutes of talking and at least 15 minutes for discussion unless you were given other instructions.

Audience Considerations

Your audience for a job talk may include faculty from all subdisciplines in the department; graduate and undergraduate students; and occasionally administrators. Unlike at a conference presentation, in which everyone present is familiar with your subdiscipline, at a job talk you can only assume general familiarity with the broader field.

Position your work within the scholarly conversation of your specialty, explaining in your introductory remarks how it makes a contribution to the subdiscipline. In your conclusion, describe what your work may imply for the broader field. Define terms that may be unfamiliar to your audience and include background information when necessary for clarity. Iowa State University suggests answering questions succinctly to avoid spending too much time on any one question, which could frustrate audience members eagerly waiting with a burning question to ask you.

Junior Candidates

Junior candidates typically present dissertation chapters at job talks. Choose the chapter most relevant to the specific requirements of the job. Preface your presentation of the chapter with remarks that contextualize it within the broader argument of your dissertation.

Minimize the literature review when creating an assistant professor interview presentation ppt. Consider putting relevant data, main ideas or statistics on a handout. As some members of the audience will not be on the search committee, briefly discuss how much of your dissertation has been published as articles and whether you intend to disseminate the final version as a monograph or as a series of articles.

Senior Candidates

Choose work that is relatively well advanced, such as a forthcoming article or major research project, so that you can talk about discoveries that you have made rather than merely areas you intend to research. Indicate clearly how your work fits into the discipline as a whole and the research focus of the department interviewing you, suggests the University of Texas at El Paso, or UTEP .

Especially at the associate and full levels, committees look for field-changing work. Candidates more than three years out of graduate school should not use material related to their dissertation topics for job talks. Search committees are looking for your next project and your ability to be original and productive independent of doctoral supervision.

• University of Texas at El Paso: The Academic Job Talk
• Iowa State University Engineering: Presenting an Effective Interview Seminar

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• CAREER COLUMN
• 08 April 2024

How we landed job interviews for professorships straight out of our PhD programmes

• Violeta Rodriguez 0 &
• Qimin Liu 1

Violeta Rodriguez is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Qimin Liu is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University in Massachusetts.

By staying organized in their job hunt, both authors received several job offers. Credit: Getty

We met during the last year of our PhD training, after securing placements at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Department of Psychiatry for our predoctoral internships — the final step of our clinical doctoral programmes. V. R. came from the University of Georgia in Athens and was pursuing a PhD in clinical psychology, and Q. L. came from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and was working towards a PhD in clinical science and quantitative methods. It was amid the academic rigour and personal stress of the last year of our programmes that we became friends. We bonded over being immigrants and not speaking English as our first language while navigating the complexities of academia. We both wanted to forgo postdoctoral training and instead immediately become junior professors. Now, we’re assistant professors: V. R. is at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Q. L. is at Boston University in Massachusetts.

The odds we faced in the academic job market had seemed insurmountable, particularly to immigrants, and we had been cautioned by mentors and even junior faculty members about the challenge ahead. But we succeeded: we received a combined total of 27 in-person interviews, leading to 15 tenure-track assistant-professor offers across departments of psychology, paediatrics or psychiatry, schools of education and academic medical centres. (You can check out our hints for nailing job interviews in our other article .)

How to move labs

Despite the positive outcome, the process was stressful, fast and unpredictable. Our friendship became a sanctuary: amid the daunting job market and our own self-doubt, we understood and encouraged each other. We want to offer what our friendship provided us — understanding, support and encouragement — to researchers hoping to stay in academia after earning a PhD, so we are sharing our reflections and insights.

We must first make clear: no amount of job-search tips and tricks can substitute for good science and a strong publication record. To gauge our readiness, we looked up the CV of the most recent hire in each department that we applied to. We also made sure we had backup offers of postdoctoral positions. While navigating this process, we learnt that institutions were interested in candidates who planned to pursue external funding.

Qimin Liu is now an assistant professor. Credit: Qimin Liu

We had both obtained federal and private funding before — making us more competitive. We urge aspiring professors to prioritize their research contributions, external fellowship and grant applications and academic achievements above all.

To readers who’ve successfully navigated this process, many of our reflections and insights could seem obvious. However, this kind of advice can be the hardest to follow during a fast-moving job hunt, with several moving pieces involved and new considerations and job offers or advertisements emerging unexpectedly. Treat this as a checklist before beginning to fill out job applications.

Tips and tricks

Start your search early. Allow ample time to prepare for the job hunt; research potential options, such as jobs in academic medical centres, standard department positions or tenure-track jobs in related fields; and submit applications. Plan to reply to job ads long before the first deadline. Starting early gives you time to collect and incorporate feedback from mentors and colleagues.

Training: Free course on peer review

Prepare your networks. The academic job market can be unpredictable, with opportunities emerging unexpectedly. It is important to think about who can write letters for you — sometimes at short notice. Most of our applications required three letters of recommendation from all applicants. Others requested letters from only shortlisted candidates.

Plan ahead. The final drafts of materials took, on average, one to two months in total to prepare and polish. The initial drafts took about 8 hours, and the research statement required a total of 16 hours. (The research statement summarizes your research programme, the work you’ve done so far and what you plan to pursue in future. It can also highlight why a particular institution is well-suited to support your work.) Preparing drafted statements in advance made it easier to adapt them to different positions later — tweaking materials for specific positions took 30–60 minutes per application.

Research potential job opportunities. Don’t just rely on word-of-mouth or googling specific positions to find things you’re interested in applying to. Use online job boards (such as HigherEdJobs or Nature Careers ), and tap into your professional network by sending e-mails or LinkedIn messages to your mentors and colleagues, letting them know you’re on the job market. Scour social media and department websites to find available positions. We both posted on X (formerly Twitter) that we were job hunting, and several people reached out with opportunities.

Develop job application ‘templates’. Create a set of well-crafted templates for your application materials, such as cover letters and statements, on which you can easily fill in your name, relevant details and where you’ve previously worked. Having adaptable documents allowed us to respond quickly to new postings.

Tailor your application materials. Templates can take you only so far. Take the time to customize your application materials, including your CV, cover letter (each of ours was one page long) and research statement, to highlight your relevant skills, experiences and research contributions. Tailoring your materials to each position demonstrates genuine interest and increases your chances of standing out to hiring committees. Generic applications are easy for hiring managers to reject. Mentioning centres or institutes that align with your research; available resources, such as early-career programmes, that you want to take advantage of; and the names of people whom you are interested in working with can help to personalize your application materials.

Stay organized. Maintain a well-organized system to track application deadlines, requirements and submission statuses. Be ready to remind your letter writers to submit their recommendations. Keep a calendar or spreadsheet to ensure that all required materials are submitted on time and to track when to follow up. An example spreadsheet is provided below.

Practise for interviews and job talks. Run mock interviews with your peers or mentors. Practise answering common interview questions and develop concise, compelling responses that highlight your expertise, teaching abilities and fit. Treat these seriously — you’re likely to be nervous in the real interview, so try to recreate that while rehearsing, perhaps by inviting a relatively unknown colleague or professor to join the practice runs. V. R. recorded her job talk on Zoom and sent it to others for feedback.

Practising your job talk — a presentation of your academic research that is often a spoken version of your research statement — until you know it backwards and forwards will prepare you for the unexpected. In addition, rehearsing how you plan to respond to different questions, and practising saying that you want people to hold their questions until the end, can be helpful.

Prepare a start-up budget to get your lab running. Many academic positions include a start-up fund for incoming faculty members. It is typically used for summer salary and staffing or research costs. You might be asked for an estimated budget before, during or after the interview stage — so you should have one ready in advance. When preparing your budget, keep in mind the spending norms at the institution and for your discipline. Ask for more than you think you need, because this amount will often be reduced during negotiations.

As we look back on our job-hunting experiences, we are reminded of how much we grew in this process, in ways that are not related to just our jobs — and this growth continued in our interviews .

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01044-1

This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged .

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Academic Job Interviews

Academic job interviews can take a variety of forms, and I’ve experienced a few different kinds of job interview – both from the perspective of a candidate, as well as from the perspective of a member of the interview panel. As with any public speaking engagement, preparation is essential and managing your nerves on the day is a challenge. I found that the interviews I attended after I’d started teaching in a full-time position were much less nerve-wracking, so if you’ve already had teaching experience and got over the initial horror of having to stand in a lecture theatre or classroom in front of students and adapt your prepared material according to their questions or how much time you have left in a lecture/seminar, you’ve already experienced the kind of spontaneous skills required in an interview presentation.

Many traditional interviews ask you to be available throughout the day and you will have a scheduled time to deliver your presentation in the morning, followed by some waiting around whilst other candidates deliver their presentations. Then you will typically be invited to a buffet lunch with members of the department, before the interviews get underway in the afternoon. The hardest part of these kinds of interview are holding your nerve in front of other candidates, being polite and friendly with everyone, and managing to eat buffet food whilst trying to ask intelligent questions of the academics at the department. As with conferences, it’s up to you to make sure you approach the people you would like to talk with, or who you felt connected with your presentation well, and use the opportunity to let them know a little more about you and your achievements (without seeming pushy in any way) as well as asking them further questions about their own research and teaching at the university (without appearing as though you haven’t done your research in advance of the interview). Other forms of interviews might only invite you for a presentation followed by an interview. In this case you wouldn’t meet other candidates so the experience can be more intimate and less unnerving.

PREPARING FOR THE INTERVIEW

Prepare thoroughly and know the department’s course structure , which modules you could teach (be aware of whether these are core modules at first and second-year level, or specialist option modules at third-year level which you may not be required to teach since they are tailored to individual members of staff’s specialist research). Think about how your proposed new modules would complement existing modules. This shows not only that you have understood the department’s overall strengths in teaching and research but have also “thought yourself into the job”, as they say, i.e. you’ve considered how you and your own strengths could work within the team and how your research and teaching could offer something different as well as helping to consolidate the department’s current provision and expertise.

Read up on the department’s research strengths and strategic aims . Read their REF report (available online), and look up their postgraduate researchers. Remember that the people in front of you are only human and usually enjoy being flattered (but not in a creepy way). They do not want to be told that their department is weak or lacking in any way and that you would be the person to fix this. If you really think that of the department and the university you shouldn’t be wasting their time in attending the interview.

Practice with a willing friend or family member. Put on the clothes you will wear for the interview and rehearse delivering your 10-15 minute presentation. This will be invaluable in terms of putting you at ease on the day, helping you to refine some of the things you will say off script or without notes (really important that you do this), as well as give you a sense of timing and just how much you can realistically deliver in the given time frame.

INTERVIEW DAY

If this is your first interview tell yourself that it’s fantastic experience no matter what. This is really hard when you’re unemployed or in a difficult financial situation but you have to take the pressure off yourself and try to relax. It’s rare for people to be offered the first job they’re interviewed for, so think of each interview as gaining experience and improving on your last performance – as well as being a really useful way of finding out your own unique strengths and qualities, and how you come across to people in an interview.

If you are fresh out of a PhD (or still completing one), or are an early-career researcher, it is crucial that you understand the value of your own potential and project this accordingly. This might sound completely counter-intuitive, but the potential of a promising ECR in my experience counts for more than an older colleague who perhaps hasn’t achieved that much for their career stage. I found this a helpful way to approach large interviews where I met other candidates who were much older and more experienced than me and whose CVs, publications and experience would have otherwise been very intimidating.

Remember to come across as a human being . Try to find a way to incorporate anecdotes (where appropriate) which show that you are flexible and easy to work with, enthusiastic and down to earth. This will make a big difference. Having sat on the interview panel side for senior appointments I’ve seen big names not be appointed because they seemed aloof or arrogant. Remember that they are hiring a future colleague and you could become the person in the office across the corridor from them, so they will want to establish whether they would enjoy working with you.

It is crucial that you are extremely friendly with everyone you meet on the day, from the HR contact, to the front desk security people, to the department administrator, to the undergraduate or postgraduate students you might be introduced to. Remember that you are being watched even when you’re not doing your presentation or interview (particularly at the buffet lunch). I’ve heard a department discuss how they didn’t appoint the candidate who didn’t bother talking to the junior secretary or office member.

Try to enjoy yourself ! The worst part is the travelling to the department via an often unfamiliar train route (usually on the day), managing nerves and lack of sleep etc. I always tried to get to the interview location at least one hour early so I could have a coffee, eat something and read through my notes .

THE PRESENTATION

The presentation will usually be in a classroom in front of a panel of anything from 5-15 members of the department (and sometimes also academics from other disciplines, so watch the disciplinary jargon). You will likely have been asked one week earlier to prepare a 10-15 minute presentation in response to a specific question or two – often something like: “Outline your research for the next 5 years and describe a module that you would teach here.” Usually the room is arranged with the panel sitting in a horseshoe of tables and you have a table at the front of the classroom with a chair, and a projector screen and computer behind you. Some key tips:

Always stand up for the presentation (if you are able to). Sitting at the front desk really doesn’t look good (from my perspective having been on presentation panels). You can then sit down to receive questions after you have delivered the presentation.

Make sure you are wearing clothes that you are comfortable in. (I favour trousers with pockets so that during the more awkward parts of the day e.g. at the buffet lunch you can feel more at ease).

Don’t use a script (as I tried to do in my first ever job interview presentation) and whatever you do, don’t deliver a conference paper.

Make sure you stick to your allocated time. If you run over you might be asked to stop and it doesn’t bode well for your timekeeping skills in lectures.

It’s really important that in your presentation you come across as well-prepared but also lively, engaging, fun and enthusiastic. This is the department’s chance to assess what you might be like in front of students lecturing , or taking a seminar.

This sounds hard but do try to enjoy yourself ! It’s always nice to talk about the subject that you’re passionate about, that you devote all of your time to, that makes you jump out of bed in the morning. In my experience no one at interview panels or presentations is ever there to try to catch you out, and they just want to see whether they could work with you and what sort of colleague you’d be like.

THE INTERVIEW

As with the presentation, this is your chance to showcase your own achievements as well as to connect with, and try to win over, the panel. Some panels are more friendly than others and I’ve experienced panels where they deliberately tried to avoid much eye contact whilst writing copious notes. Body language is also important in this context, so try to be open in your gestures and relaxed in the way that you are sitting.

The interview questions will usually address 4 main areas required by the job (although these may vary depending on the specific requirements of the job and may be different, for example, for a teaching-only position):

– Research publications and REF outputs – Teaching provision – your experience and what modules you could teach – External activities and grant income potential – Administrative experience

The first question will almost always be “Why would you like to work at this university?”, so make sure you have a strong response which demonstrates that you have done your homework and that you value this particular department (rather than giving off the impression that any job will do, or any job in that particular part of the country).

The following are the kinds of questions you may be asked (and you can find more examples in Nadine’s posts on her first academic job interview ):

– What are your 4 potential REF submissions? – Are you a team player? Can you give examples of collaborative projects? – Where do you see yourself in 5 years’ time? – What can you do in terms of quality assurance and your teaching? – What can you do to encourage student participation in seminars? – What would you do to attract PG students? – Have you convened a team-taught module? What challenges would there be? How would you handle these? – How do you conceive of the relationship between research and teaching? – How comfortable are you teaching outside your research specialism? – What opportunities would you see for bidding for collaborative research grants? – What do you feel is the major contribution of your research? – What do you feel appropriate learning outcomes would be for a Level 3 module? – What is your approach to teaching? What pedagogical methods do you use? – How do you enthuse students who are disinterested or disengaged? – Studying for a Ph.D. can be quite a solitary activity. What experience do you have of working in a team?

Remember also that you’re interviewing them (this is hard to get your head around when unemployment is the alternative, I know). You will always be asked if you have any questions at the end of the interview, so make sure you have a prepared question or two.

AFTER THE INTERVIEW

From my own experiences and those of my friends and colleagues a number of different things can happen after the interview . You can reasonably expect to hear back from the department within one week. This almost always takes the form of a phone call from the person who chaired the interview panel, who will offer you feedback on your performance and the decision-making process. If you hear back on the same or next day it either means you’re going to be offered the job or you’re out of the running. If you have to wait longer this can be because the department and HR process is slow (remember that weekends and bank holidays will extend this waiting time, as will colleagues taking annual leave), or it could mean that the department have made a job offer to another candidate but are waiting to see if it is accepted and have you in mind as a second choice. Job application procedures are not always perfectly organised, and sometimes a certain amount of negotiating is taking place behind closed doors.

If you don’t get offered the job, don’t despair. Make sure you ask for feedback if it isn’t forthcoming (which it really should be). It doesn’t necessarily reflect badly on your research or performance. A common reason for not hiring a strong candidate can be that their particular research area is already well covered in the department and a different gap needs to be filled in terms of teaching (this can be the case with completely open job applications where no particular research field or period is specified). Having sat on both sides of various interview panels I can reveal that panels often disagree and in some cases a certain amount of wrangling can take place between different academics’ preferred candidates. Sometimes there are financial considerations which mean that a department can hire more than one of the candidates they interviewed if they can make the case for both being equally outstanding; similarly, they may not hire at all from the round of applicants they interviewed, and can decide to readvertise the post at a later date.

Don’t forget that the right job will be the job that you are offered . I know this sounds self-explanatory, but there’s only so many things you can do in terms of self-fashioning to make yourself the candidate you think a department wishes to meet or hire. Beyond this, your own personality as an individual and as a researcher come into play and you wouldn’t want to change who you are, or enter into a department that didn’t value your specific area of research. You are always going to connect more with some academics than with others, and this goes for your research profile too.

21 Comments on “Academic Job Interviews”

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One of the best I have read so far on the internet, many thanks for posting. As you said in your post, I had an interview on Tuesday last week and it’s Sunday today, haven’t heard from them. More importantly, I have another one coming this Wednesday, praying I get them both so I can choose. Sounds selfish doesn’t it? Thanks again Nadine!!!

Thanks Nadine. A very helpful tool indeed. I am preparing my interview for the associate lecturer position but I am not sure if I can still use your guide . Is there anything specific you can help me with in connection with the associate lecturer position interview?

Thanks for your time to look at my post.

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Thanks this was a great post and really helped me prepare for my interviews. I was successful last week and offered a post over the phone. However it’s 10 days on now and i’ve heard nothing formal or received a contract. Is this a usual time scale for HR departments or should I start to worry?

I wouldn’t worry, Ben! They may be getting in touch with your referees, and it can take a while to get a contract through, so don’t panic. Do you have a confirmed start date? I would simply make sure you’re in touch with your line manager and that arrangement are being made that mean you know what you’ll be doing once your contract starts. You can always email HR, but for now don’t worry. And of course: congratulations! 🙂

Thanks so much for this very helpful post. It really helped me to prepare and also to ease my nerves for a recent interview. I found your advice was spot on. As with your experience, the panel that interviewed me were very nice and fair. The questions that you listed were almost verbatim what I was asked. The only advice I would add for others is consider the unique duties of the post. The position I applied for involved partnership with a non-HE organisation, so some questions were obviously directed towards that. Also, don’t make the mistake I did and assume that your presentation audience will include the full interview panel, always ask in advance exactly who you will be presenting to.

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Excellent Post! Breaking the application process up into sections really helps you understand the stages and if your not successful at a particular stage, this makes it easier to find your faults, before picking yourself back up and getting back out there!

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Good post, but it says nothing about age discrimination….. I am an ex-academic, having spent over 10 years in a permanent research & teaching post at a top UK university. I moved into the commercial sector for about 1.5 years and then decided to get back into academia. I can’t even begin to describe how hard it is to get interviews. And when I get one they give the job to someone who is 15 years my junior! Universities tend to choose the most inexperienced candidates for junior positions (e.g., lecturerships) because they can easily put him/her on the lowest pay scale. Nobody talks about it, but I’ve seen it happen several times. It’s absolutely disgusting.

Hi , so I have a question, I am totally new to being interviewed in UK and I made it to the final round. On that same day I got a very late call from the chair saying that the second round had 6 applicants and it was down to me and another candidate but the other provided much better details about his funding so we decided to go with him. I clarified more on my funding sources..etc and wished them all good luck. My question now is: if that’s actually the case, shouldn’t they have waited until the other candidate signs the contract before they got back to me?

Great post! It seems that it is typical to interview multiple candidates on the same day in the UK. I will be going to the UK for an interview soon. But the invitation letter I received does not indicate whether there will be other candidates. Is it typical not to tell candidates that there will be multiple candidates present? Thanks!

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I came across this post while looking for general waiting times to hear back after an interview. I had an interview last Wed for a lecturer position and still haven’t heard… A bit hard not to go crazy checking my email all the time! From the sounds of your post though it seems I probably didn’t get it.

Excellent piece. Just a couple of comments: not all HEIs foreground research as is implied here, so make sure you have plenty to say about teaching. Be enthusiastic about teaching. We have declined to offer posts to people with excellent research profiles who appeared uninterested in teaching. It’s what you’ll spend most of your time doing at many HEIs, after all.

You may also find yourself giving a presentation to students as well as staff, so prepare for that eventuality. It goes down very well indeed if you can include any students present – ask for their views, for example, and encourage them to ask questions.

Thanks Caroline for an excellent piece. Some good tips in here. I would echo Srila’s point about feedback, though. I’m sure it’s because the panel are busy and it’s a difficult skill to give helpful feedback, but it’s very hard to get anything useful Useful, in my experience = negative. While it cushions the blow to hear that you were terribly good and they wish they could have given the job to everyone, this gives you nothing to work on for next time.

Great post with valuable tips. Agree with everything. The only thing to add is what happens before the interview itself: the application particularly the cover letter. I’ve read some horrendous cover letters in my time- long, unclear and generally poorly written. This makes a very bad first impression. Even well-written letters that are overlong don’t fare well since the hiring committee has to read hundreds sometimes. A good resource for letter-writing is the US Chronicle of Higher Education even as it caters to the US job market. It offers great tips including sample letters for different disciplines.

The other thing to add is that once you’ve got that coveted job and you are on the other side, hiring yourself then please please do push your department/colleagues to offer feedback to ‘rejected’ candidates. Very few places do, even on request. And its invariably nothing more than a platitude like ‘your teaching was not diverse enough’ or ‘you were too good’ (yes, this has been said!).

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Preparing for the tenure-track interview

Here’s what the big day has in store for you.

Congratulations! Thanks to a combination of factors – luck, hard work, persistence, a well-worded cover letter – you have been invited to interview with a selection committee for a tenure-track position. Your carefully crafted application stood out from the pile and passed the scrutiny of designated faculty. Maybe you’ve even successfully cleared a preliminary phone or video-conference interview hurdle. Now you must prep for the big day on campus.

You likely will be picked up at your hotel by a member of the search committee. Most candidates wear a suit or at least a collared shirt. Ensure you have fresh breath for the ride to campus. A full day will be scheduled for you, most likely consisting of:

1. A job talk

You’ll give a 45-minute (or so) research presentation using PowerPoint or Prezi. The audience may consist of a few search committee members, or  you may find a lecture hall filled with faculty, university staff and students. Begin your presentation with some personal background, mentioning what you can bring to the position and to the university. You cannot be over-prepared. Rehearse several times beforehand. Make a video of yourself rehearsing and watch it. The audience may be answering questionnaires about your talk for the search committee, commenting on your strengths and weaknesses, comparing you with other candidates and stating whether they recommend you for hire.

2. Sample teaching

You may be asked to teach a class, usually with faculty members and university students invited to watch. Often, the committee is interested to see how you engage with students. The audience may be evaluating your performance and completing a similar questionnaire about your lesson. Again, you cannot be too prepared.

3. A sit-down interview

These are likely the top interview questions you will be asked. Plan your answers to these and many other questions on cue cards:

• Why are you interested in this position?
• Which of our courses do you want to teach?
• On conflict: Discuss a time when you had a conflict with a supervisor. With a colleague?
• How do your knowledge and experience prepare you for this position?
• Talk a bit about the theory that guides your practice and authors who influence your work.
• Do you have any questions for us?

Memorize your key points. Convey your collegiality; that you’ve done your homework about the position and institution; the potential contributions you can make based on your unique knowledge, skills and experience; and your ability to secure grant funding.

4. Lunch, campus tour, other meetings

Treat the in-betweens like informal interviews. Do your research so that you can make informed small talk. Read key publications of hiring committee members. Scour the university and faculty websites for their vision, mission, traditions and long-range plans. Google news stories about the university. Be ready to say how you can help achieve the goals of the faculty and university.

What they won’t tell you It’s exhausting. If traveling a long distance, aim to arrive hours or a full day ahead to adjust. The interview day is packed and can last up to 14 hours if they take you to dinner. Some interviews are scheduled over two days. If the night before is a sleepless one, the process will be brutal. Bring a sleep aid and ear plugs, request a wakeup call from the front desk and set an additional alarm.

Keep all your receipts so they can reimburse you. Some schools will pay for all your travel expenses and meals, others just for the flight. Find out beforehand so you can plan accordingly.

Search committee members are not supposed to ask you personal questions, but other staff may do a little fishing. You may be asked casually about your significant other and whether you have kids or others who would need to move with you to your new city.

After the interview, send a thank-you email to everyone you met. Wait six weeks before inquiring about the status of the position; the committee may have other candidates to interview before making a decision. If they extend a job offer, the call will come from the dean. This process can take time, so be patient after your interview. Spend the days productively, reading up on how to negotiate faculty job offers and apply for newly posted positions, just in case.

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Very nice advice, revealing various hidden aspects of an academic job interview. Thank you so much for posting, Ms. Katherine Becker and Ms. Libbi Miller.

Thanks a lot for this valuable information.

Regards GS Dhillon

Why the need for all this gamesmanship? If someone is qualified, then give him/her the job. No wonder some universities strive and others are on the wane.

Sure, this is a good short list of tips. To add to this, you will have to keep a game face on for anything from 1-4 days, depending on the interview. You will probably meet with a Dean. You will probably asked to outline your first grant.

I would recommend interviewees to remember that they are interviewing the university too. Talk to grad students/postdocs (if you can) to get a pulse on how collegial the department actually is, how well students are supported, and whether it is easy to attract students to the school. Ask to see lab or workspace (you’ll be surprised how this gets evaded, even when requested).