Job market and technology

I had a new experience today: receiving (multiple) real time updates on the job talk of one of my students from audience members at the talk.

Cool, but a bit odd.

Job market thoughts

I wrote six letters for graduate students on the market this year - five in economics and one in sociology. So far, two of the six have jobs and two more have offers.

It is an exciting time. I really enjoy watching my students see the payoff to their years of hard work. They enjoy having their income quintuple.

One suggestion to graduate student readers: when you take a job, send an email to your committee members .... they'd like to know.

Good interview but no flyout yet

Students on the economics job market are often puzzled by the fact that interviews that seemed to go well at the ASSA meetings do not yield a flyout invitation right away. There are a number of reasons why this might occur other than the student incorrectly perceiving how things went at the interview.

First, it is important to realize that while the top 20 departments tend to schedule all of their flyouts right away, the next 50 or so departments face a harder problem. Do they move right away with candidates they like and who did not have too many interviews at more highly-ranked departments or do they wait a bit to see if some of the candidates with better interviews do not get the corresponding flyouts (or offers conditional on flyouts) and so become available, or some combination of the two. Most departments do some combination of the two.

Keep in mind as well that in the background of the market is a flurry of email traffic in which information is transmitted from candidates' advisors to their friends at other departments. This traffic helps the market work by helping departments avoid wasting flyouts on people they cannot get, and it also helps the "that person is not going to place as high as it looked from their interview schedule" information percolate more quickly through the system.

Having said all that, a good interview may not result in a flyout because of field preferences, as when a department interviews in fields A and B knowing that it will do flyouts in B only if none of the candidates in A do well. Or it may be that while one interview went well, others went even better. Some schools do only a very small number of flyouts for budgetary reasons, and so will not fly out some candidates they quite liked.

The bottom lines are: do not jump to the conclusion that your perception of the interview was incorrect and do not assume that no flyout right away means no flyout ever.

Unintentionally humorous letters of recommendation

From a letter of recommendation for someone we interviewed at the meetings:

"I wish I could be lucky enough to have a couple of more students like [NAME] who do not take much time to supervise."

It is not often that I laugh out loud while reviewing letters of recommendation, but I did in the case of this comment, which reveals more about the letter-writer than about the candidate.

Preparing for interviews

I am printing out materials for our assistant professor interviews at the Allied Social Science Association meetings in Denver.

I have a couple of observations:

1. There is no reason to write a six (!) page letter of recommendation, but several people did. Really, all letters should be one page or less. The key information is usually all in the last paragraph, where the person writing the letter indicates where they think the student should place and also describes any non-academic features or bugs, e.g. the student provides lots of public goods or is a jerk. Sometimes there is information in the faculty member's description of the paper, but other times it just repeats the abstract.

2. I am 0-3 on checking whether job candidates cite papers I think they should cite.

3. If you are thinking about circulating a 77 page job market paper ... think again.

Should be fun.

Job market advice

Yesterday I heard what struck me as some of the worst economics job market advice ever. That advice is to not tell the faculty members on your committee what schools and organizations you have interviews with at the meetings. The idea seems to be that if your committee knows your interview list as it builds up, they may be tempted to tell some schools that have no chance of hiring you that they should not interview you, thus reducing the total number of interviews you achieve.

Here are some reasons why this is bad advice:

1. The number of interviews is not a performance measure to be compared in some sort of sad contest.

2. At some number of interviews, quality starts to decline due to exhaustion, lack of food, and inability to be on time. A reasonable number of well-matched interviews is optimal.

3. You should not want to interview at places that have no chance of hiring you. You are wasting their time and your own. Your career is a repeated game with all of the other economists you interact with. People remember things. Plus you are taking the interview slot away from someone who might be a good match to the place that you are not a good match for. That's not very nice.

4. Your committee can give you valuable advice on the people who will be interviewing you at particular departments, but they can only do this if you let them know where you are interviewing.

5. It may be that there are particular places that people on your committee think would be a good match for you. If they do not schedule you right away, it may be time to shake the tree a bit, but the tree can only be shaken if people on your committee know your interview schedule. More broadly, if your initial interviews seem to not be as good as they should be, there is a window during which faculty can try to do something about that, but only if they are informed about what is going on.

My advice is to keep your committee informed and to be completely honest with the people you are interviewing with about both interviews and flyouts. More information makes the system work better and partially informed attempts to extract some strategic gain through withholding information are at least as likely to make your worse off, in the short run or the long run or both, as to make you better off.

New developments in the economics job market

The web page for the job market candidates from Duke reveals a new development in the marketing of candidates in the economics job market: many of the Duke candidates have video clips on the web, apparently from their practice job talks. For example, I took a look at the clip for Jon James (whose name reminded me of former Washington football coach Don James).

It seems to me that these clips can potentially serve several functions:

First, they provide a lot of information about public speaking ability very quickly. If someone cannot manage two clear minutes during their practice job talk, they probably cannot give the sort of lectures that attain good teaching ratings. That is something that letters, papers and the CV just do not reveal. It will be especially useful for students with first languages other than English (or with names that suggest their first language is something other than English) who want to demonstrate that their skills with spoken English are not a concern.

Second, the videos provide information on both demographics, such as race/ethnicity, and on appearance, in an indirect way. This feature is a bit more ambiguous in its normative and positive implications.

Third, the videos provide a way to get a quick summary of the job market paper without having to read a dry abstract.

I'll be curious to see if this catches on as an equilibrium. I expect it will (but say that in full awareness of the awesome track record of economist predictions).

Economics job market

The "junior" markt of newly minted Ph.D. economists (most of whom are actually not yet fully done with their doctorates) market has begun to move. Three of the five students I wrote letters for from Michigan this year have offers in hand as does at least one of our other students on the market, out of eleven total on the market from Michigan this year. This is despite a lot of disrupted flyouts due to the Snowpocalypse in DC.

Michigan, including the economics department, the Ford School and ISR, has also started making offers of its own.

I like this exciting time - it is fun to see the hard work of our students rewarded with good jobs and it is fun to get new colleagues.

Job market advice: first, read the literature

Here is what you do not want if you are a graduate student on the market: you do not want a faculty member at a department you are applying for to open your job market paper, figure out the topic, look at the references and then immediately notice that you have not cited a recent, published paper that does what your does.

That is what happened when I opened [CANDIDATE'S] job market paper, which reminded me of [THIS PAPER] (gated) by my friend [THE ECONOMIST -TE], who is a full professor at the University of [CITY]. The job market candidate does not cite [TE'S] paper, even though it is published in a journal, [JOURNAL NAME], that is not particularly obscure, even though it was published three years ago and even though, if you happen to google, say, "[THREE OBVIOUS WORDS]" (roughly the topic of both papers) [TE'S] paper is the sixth entry on the first page.

To be clear, I am sure the omission was not deliberate, in the sense that I am sure that the candidate does not know about the paper. I suspect he just got enmeshed in the heat of research and neglected to do a thorough scouring of the literature (though, as noted, you don't have to scour very hard to find [TE'S] paper). I am also not saying that the job candidate has been scooped. His paper goes well beyond what [TE] does on several dimensions. I am just saying he was sloppy, and that is not the first impression that you want to make, especially in a year when a lot of schools are not hiring.

Addendum: someone with impeccable judgement convinced me over dinner last night that this post, though not all that very tough, was perhaps too tough, so I have anonymized it.