This article was written for the CSWEP Newsletter, which you can find here. Because of space reasons, we couldn’t put all the text, so here is a longer version with more details.
As we approach the 51st Econ “Job Market” (or 50th, AKA the Second Quarter Quell), it’s an excellent opportunity to reflect on what has been said, what resources are available, what has changed, and what may need to be updated. This article will tackle those issues. Let’s get started!
What’s already out there?
Much has been written about the job market, and I would like to highlight some links or articles you may have yet to hear of. These links may guide you to other resources the authors have found useful, eventually driving the point that a lot is written about the job market!
First, Jennifer Doleac has compiled a list of threads that people have written on Twitter on many aspects of the job market. I’ve compiled them under this link. I’ve also put all the links I think are helpful there.
Second, Chase Eck, Kelli Marquardt, and Dana Shaat have assembled a remarkable “Job Market” mental health guide that walks through the job market process starting before the summer of the job market! They also share some resources and tips they used to keep their process of the market dope!
Third, John Cawley has a fantastic guide on the market. He updated it with lots of information, which can be found here. This is the OG guide!
Fourth, I found these videos from the AEA’s Committee on the Job Market handy for people interested in non-academic jobs.
Fifth, Alex Albright has excellent resources (under the job market). She has compiled information on the job market, which you can find here. I highly recommend checking her blog post (with data graphs!) on her job market experience. It’s a great read.
Sixth, this newsletter has covered the job market in great extent! These three issues have great articles regarding the job market 2019 Issue 2, 2014 Fall, 2007 Fall
Finally, I wanted to pitch a couple of episodes from the Hidden Curriculum podcast (co-hosted by Alex Hollingsworth and me!). In one episode, we invite a couple of job market candidates to give us the pitch of their job market paper, and we have a panel of judges identifying the great things about each pitch and broad lessons for everyone crafting the pitch for their paper. Our panelists are Mary Eschelbach Hansen and Zach Bethune.
Then, this episode with Trang Hoang covers how to prepare for online interviews and presentations, and finally, this episode with John Cawley provides tips on advising students on the job market.
What has changed? The Old and new
To talk about what has changed, let’s quickly review how things were or the main setup of the Job market and highlight the changes. The market has a couple of steps:
1) Jobs are posted starting in August and continuing until late May. Most jobs are being posted between September and November. Alex sees her experience and data from Andrew Lilley to conclude that by early November, you’ve seen about 75% of all the jobs posted by January.
- Let me demystify this timing: By the end of the previous academic year or fiscal year, institutions have an idea of what type of person they want to hire, and in some cases, the money has been secured, and upper powers are on board. In these cases, once the academic year starts, a committee is formed, and the committee prepares an ad and some broad guidelines on what they are looking for and the criteria for selection. Once approved through each institution’s process, the ad will be “green light” to post. I hope you can imagine the many bottlenecks this process could delay. From money not yet approved to find a committee to department politics about “what type of person we should be hiring.” This creates a distribution of timing for ad posting.
- There are times when some “surprise” money or unexpected funding appears. Opportunities are put together quickly, which can happen as late as February, so a posting could come out in March. Alternatively, some places may wait for their primary search to turn out, and then they may change things and post an ad for different positions (say postdoc) in late March. This is why posting could continue until later in the “job market.”
- Notice that economics departments mostly know the timeline for all of these. Still, non-econ departments may be on a different timeline than econ departments, so I recommend that you check the deadlines for each ad. Some will come earlier than you expect. Similarly, don’t just look at JOE. I like this quote from Alex’s experience:
Before the market, I thought I’d have to scan all ten regularly to stay updated on jobs. However, in the end, I found that 83% of my postings were through JOE, and the remaining 17% were from LinkedIn or Twitter. Most of the jobs I saw on the other 9 non-JOE job board sites were already on JOE, so I think at some point (tired of all the extra effort for little payoff), I started only checking JOE and left behind the other 9 sites. (However, I will note that one friend mentioned to me that they regret only checking JOE because there were relevant jobs on EJM they missed.
2) Once jobs are posted, applicants get the material together and apply.
- The materials vary, but some main ones are a job market paper, cover letter, letter of reference, CV, some essays on fit, and some on diversity.
3) Committees review applications and send out interview invites, sometimes called “first-round interviews.”
- They are called “first-round” because there is another “interview” stage.
4) Interviews happen
- These things happened in person during the ASSA meeting in January, which is why that meeting was called “The job market”; you used to see people seeking employment running from hotel room to hotel room.
- However, nowadays, all of the first-round interviews occur online. This has changed from previous years. This episode with Trang Hoang offers tips on online interviews.
5) Committees have some scoring and select their candidates for flyouts or “second-round.”
6) People get invited for flyouts, and flyouts happen
- The main event here is the presentation of your job market paper and the one-on-one meetings with people from the institution.
7) After all flyouts, the committee gathers and suggests a candidate to make an offer. The faculty and committee suggest a strategy and decide to give an offer.
What’s happening behind the curtain?
When I was in the job market, I found it helpful to read several articles about it and talk to people who had just been in the market. It helps me clarify things and understand what to do. The year after the market, I had a lot of tips and tricks to give. However, once I started forming part of hiring committees, I started understanding a bit about “how the sausage” was made; this made me shift my overall advice to job-seekers, which is to focus on things you can control and try to excel at those, the rest is up to chance.
I want to discuss some examples that illustrate this point. Still, before I start, the usual caveat applies: this comes from my experience and the experience of my peers in other institutions. Many others may disagree with my views, so please consume this information at your own risk and disposal.
The importance of fit
There are two types of fit, one is “is this the right job for you?” and I recommend reading Cecilia’s Conrad article on “Finding the Right Match” on this. In addition, the introduction of this article by Misty Heggeness has a good framework for thinking about the non-academic job market. The other fit is, do employers think you are the right person from the job?
I learned that before a job gets posted, personal preferences exist in the institution regarding the type of person they want to bring in (preferences about fields, approaches, etc.). When these preferences align broadly, an ad clearly states something specific: “An advanced junior in health economics” or “Person who works on sanitation topics in developing countries.” In other cases, there is either a preference for having a broader search “work in public economics” or sometimes a lack of consensus or multiple interests drives to have searches of the flavor “We strongly encourage applicants that work in political economics and econometrics to apply.”
Does this mean you shouldn’t apply to these positions if you are not the right fit? I think since the marginal application cost is not as much, I sense that most people would say that one should apply, as long as there is some broad overlap of what you do and what they are looking. For example, I don’t think I would ever venture to apply for a position looking for monetary policy (I’ve worked primarily on public and health).
Does fit matter?
The answer is yes and no. If you are the type of candidate they are looking for, and they give you an offer and you accept, then that’s great, fit mattered and you were able to take advantage of that. However, during the hiring process, it turns out that the preferences of faculty members or the institutions may change. This could be because priors were updated, new information has entered the process, or they saw you had a profile they didn’t initially look for but liked enough to hire. Hence, the fit is non-trivial but not deterministic of the search, and therefore, you should still consider applying even if you are not the best fit. To put this in perspective, I recall seeing a candidate who came out of the PhD with more than one publication - an impressive achievement - but ultimately, we didn’t offer them a flyout because of fit. Similarly, peers have told me that they initially wanted to hire in field “x” but ended up hiring in “y” because a given candidate was very persuasive to them.
Do my submission documents matter?
There will be lots of takes here from “No, they don’t, only your JMP matters” or “only your presentations matters” to “yes, it matters”. All of these takes come from a place of experience, that is, they have experience in their search that it matters or not. What does that mean? Both can be true, that in some places cover letters don’t matter, and in others they do. That sensible diversity statement matters; other institutions may not even require it. What does that mean for the applicant? Instead of figuring out which institutions care about “Document X,” I would encourage applicants to put their best foot forward in all application materials. You may change materials slightly for each institution, but you should aim for a baseline of great-quality materials. For example, I had a “main” set of documents and a version for health policy schools, government jobs, private sector jobs, etc, which included some edits for each type of job. For some that may be overkill, for others that may be under performance. That’s the balance I pick of effort. So, in short, documents can matter; they won’t always do
What about letters? I don’t control those. Do they matter?
Similarly to the broad advice, it depends. Even within a committee, there are differences in how people read letters. Some people think everyone is “overselling” their candidates, so they discount most letters, while others take them more at face value. I think they are helpful in articulating arguments “pro” a candidate. A given committee member may say that they know author X and use the letter writer’s argument in promoting that candidate for the next round.
In short, similarly to the broad advice, it depends. Anne E. Winkler wrote a great piece on this issue of the CSWEP newsletter.
What about interviews? Can I hack those?
Interviews are done by committees, committees are form by people. People can have many different reactions to your performance in an interview. That is, you may say an answer that “everyone loves” or give an answer that some people love and others hate. You can’t control how others will take your performance. Sitting in committees, I’ve seen a range of reactions for the same answer, so I think it’s hard to predict “nailing.” What I think is easier to think about is how not to do badly or what the main things most people don’t like or respond well to are. The resources I’ve compiled have information on this. I like Alex’s recommendation of Natalia Emaniel’s thread, but I’ll mention a couple of broad tips:
- Prepare for interviews: John Cawley’s guide has several questions your peers can ask you in a mock interview. Ask past peers in the market to give you a mock interview. At my sister’s PhD (Yale), they made her fill out a set of questions she could ask about her paper during the interview. It was a way of “pre-thinking” a question. Natalia’s thread fits under this approach to preparing for interviews.
- You can’t prepare for all questions, so be ready to listen. Many, many times, we’ve asked questions to a candidate who gave us a canned answer to a similar question but not the exact question. So prepare for interviews to feel confident, but do not use these to answer questions you are not getting asked. Listening is important.
- Take your time (if needed). We value being quick on your feet in this profession, and many of my peers are. I’m not, so I choose to take my time to understand the question and then answer it.
- Balance being concise with having a natural conversation. Sometimes, I’ve seen candidates aware of the time constraints and provide short, direct answers to the questions given. I appreciate the concise nature of some of the responses; make sure to balance them to make them feel natural. Similarly, long answers that take a while to get to the point may not be ideal.
- For the industry market prep, check out this article by Evan Buntrock
Flyouts
Flyouts are an interesting beast; they are, in part, for the broader faculty to get to know you and for you to get information about the place. Both purposes are important. In the end, institutions have a process on how to evaluate candidates. A typical process I’ve seen is that people who attended the talk or met with the candidates will write blurbs on their takes on the candidate to the committee. Some institutions may ask precise questions, and others ask for “overall” feedback.
This means that people provide their takes on you based on criteria each person believes are important which means they are evaluating you in so many margins. Some are also influenced by the sequentially of things, and others are not. For example, some people wait to see all candidates before they provide their opinions, while others give their takes as they see them.
Some institutions may not even solicit opinions and just a ranking on their preference. Again, these preferences can be constructed based on many things. Finally, committees may weigh feedback from specific people differently than others (they may not say so formally, but this happens).
What does this mean for you? It means something similar to the interview lesson: it may be hard to find out how to nail each particular flyout, so a good strategy is to avoid a lousy performance. Follow the tips on the resources I’ve posted for more on this.
Main takeaways
Hopefully, you may notice a couple of themes from the process behind the curtains. There is a lot of variance, and it’s driven by preference that could change across institutions, within institutions across people, and even within people across time. This is why people say there is a lot of “randomness” in the process, which leads us to the adage: focus on the things you can control and put your best foot forward in each step.
Now, let’s think about the equilibrium: If many candidates do this, then you have a number of candidates that look great, and it’s tough to create distinctions from each other. This happens! I have sat in many searches where most candidates were fantastic, and it was hard to decide. One thing that happens because of that is people start focusing on smaller margins to decide how to move forward. This may seem “nitpicky,” and it can be, but I think this is something I see happening. Again, this introduces randomness and why some advisors may say that everything should be super polished to minimize giving reasons to people to find some faults. This is a bit troublesome, I imagine for some people hearing that is stressful and in some sense, the uncertainty of the market and the process is stressful and I won’t hide that. I hope that knowing what to expect and knowing that sometimes you may make mistakes is ok because others will as well, and more importantly, there is so much randomness that even if you made what could be considered as a “number of mistakes” there are other things about the process (for example you are a great fit) that can still make you very likely to get you an offer. I won’t end with a “relax and have fun” but a “practice and put your best foot forward that your context allows you to have,” I hope you can be at peace with that.