How to Get a Job at an Academic Conference

Summer starts the beginning of job market Speed Dating in some academic fields.  It’s when all of the schools who have jobs and all the PhD students who want jobs get together at their annual job market conference and speed date.
 
If a speed date goes well, a school will call you in about two weeks and ask you out on a campus date. If that 2-day campus date goes well, you get the engagement ring and get the job.  If the 7-year engagement goes well, you get married with tenure.    
 
But this all starts with the 45-minute speed date at the conference where there’s about a 1 in 3 chance that you’ll get called back.  Two common questions:  1) How do I ace a conference interview, and 2) how do I know if I aced it? 
 
Your advisor and friends have given you a big list of “dos and don’ts” for your interviews.  Things like do act interested and do know lots about their school, and things like don’t act smarmy or arrogant and don’t dress like Spiderman or your favorite D&D character.
 
There's no perfect way to predict whether you’ll get a campus visit, but you hear lots of rules of thumb:
 
     • The best day to interview is the second morning.  
                 The next best is the first afternoon.  
    • The two best interview times are either 10:00 AM or 1:00 PM
    • The more interviewers in your room (vs. skipping),the better your chances
    • The more “fun” the interview seems, the better your chances
    • The more questions they ask about your dissertation, the better
 
When I was on the rookie job market, I thought it would be useful to know which of these was the best predictor of a call-back.  If a person knew that, they’d know when to schedule interviews with their favorite schools, whether to be serious or funny, and whether to encourage lots of dissertation questions.  A few of my friends got together, and we came up with a list of about ten things we thought would predict how well an interview went.   We all then rated each one of our interviews on these 10 things. 
 
We then pooled everything together and ran a logit regression on whether we ended up getting a campus interview date at each school. Only 1 thing was significant.  It wasn’t the timing of the interview or our subjective rating of how “fun” it was.  Instead the only predictor of whether we got a campus visit was how many questions they asked about our dissertationduring the conference interview.
 
Makes sense – except this was negatively related.  The schools that asked us lots of questions about our dissertations DIDN’T fly us out for a date.   
 
At the time, we thought maybe they realized we were doing a lot of handwaving in our theory section. Or maybe the deeper they dug, the more holes they found that we hadn’t yet plugged.  
 
I now think there is another explanation.   If we spent 35 minutes of a 45-minute interview talking about only 1 thing, the school only has 1 thing to judge us on (other than our advisor’s letter).   It’s like a speed date where the person spends 90% of it talking about their vacation to Hawaii or their doily collection.  We end up learning a lot about Hawaii or doilies, but not enough about them to want to call them back for a date.
 
A few years later, I was unexpectedly on the job market again as an assistant professor, and I did things a bit differently. Instead of spending 35 minutes droning on about a single project or two, I wanted to make sure we talked about a lot more than just Hawaii.  That way, a broader set of connections could be made, and the people who hated Hawaii might find other things they could be interested in.
 
For all of the adrenaline-pumped PhD students at their job-market conference, it’s probably not the best strategy to spend the whole time talking about only your dissertation or only about Hawaii.  The more other “good fit” connections you can make in the interview, the more likely you might be called back for a first date. 
 
At this point, no last-minute finishing touches on your dissertation rap will help you ace your interview tomorrow morning.  Instead, tonight's better spent learning more about your potential date – especially any unique overlaps you might have in common.
 
Good luck on the job market!