One Drink at Dinner, Don’t Set Your Sights on the Highest-Ranked Department, and Other Job-Search Advice From a Professor Who’s Been There

Chances are that if you’re a Ph.D. student in economics and gearing up to look for a faculty job soon, you’ve probably read John Cawley’s guide on what to do (or not do) on the path to joining the professoriate.

Cawley, a professor at Cornell University whose area of research is the economics of obesity, is the author of “A Guide and Advice for Economists on the U.S. Junior Academic Job Market,” a popular document for job seekers in his field that made its debut almost 20 years ago. The guide, which is updated every other year, describes what the academic job market looks like — the deadlines, average salary information, and the supply and demand for new Ph.D.s. It also offers straightforward — and sometimes humorous — advice about how to navigate the academic job search process.

The guide is a mix of the encouraging (the strong demand for economics Ph.D.s means most people land jobs they like), the practical (bring snacks to fill in for missed meals on a day packed with interviews), and the matter-of-fact (don’t expect job seekers to trade salary information).

“One funny thing I’ve heard said about it is that it’s the most read and least-cited paper in economics,” Cawley said.

Cawley will release the latest version of the guide this fall. The Chronicle spoke with him about the guide’s beginnings, the funny stories people tell him about their job searches, and leveling the playing for academic job seekers. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your guide reads like some advice you wish you’d had when you were on the market for the first time. Did you create it with your own academic job-market experience in mind?

Yes. I was a grad student at the University of Chicago in the late 1990s and was getting ready to go on the job market myself. I felt adrift because it was hard to find good information about the academic job search. The older cohorts of graduate students go through the process and then they get their jobs and leave. You’d have a meeting with people who just got jobs and they’d tell you bits and pieces, but everybody was still hungry for more information. So I started to keep notes on everything useful I heard and read. Then I took a postdoc and knew that two years later I’d be back on the market, so I kept adding things to the list.

Then I started thinking, ‘There’s got to be some way to make this available to other people in the same position.’ I contacted some people who were familiar with the economics job market. One of those people was John Siegfried, then the secretary of the American Economic Association, and he said, ‘How about I send this out to people who know a lot about the economics job market? They’ll peer review it, you can revise it, and then we can post it on the AEA’s Job Openings for Economists web page.’ I thought that was great because that way everybody could benefit from it.

What kind of feedback did you get?

Most people say thank you, I found it useful and really appreciate you doing that. Sometimes people said that they don’t agree with a rule that I’ve listed. For example, I give the pretty common-sense advice to not have more than a drink or so at dinner with faculty. One guy, a tenured faculty member, told me, “I wouldn’t have gotten the job I have if I hadn’t gotten drunk with the search committee.” Well, I’m not changing the guide because of that. I’m pretty sure that things wouldn’t usually work out for other people the way it did for him.

How do you decide what updates to make?

There’s always a need to update the data. Salaries change, and periodically there will be new studies and surveys about the market. People have emailed me studies that I’ve incorporated. I got an email from the AEA’s chair of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, who pointed out that the progress in terms of women in economics has stalled, and I should include data on that.

The sections at the end on diversity were added because there’s more information in that area that has come out over time about what you can do if you’re a member of minority group on the market. Also, dual job searches have become more important over time, and people want to know what can they do to maximize their chances for successful placement.

One of the things that has come up often when I talk to grad students is that women want to know, What do I say if I’m asked an inappropriate question? Things like, Are you married? Do you have kids? Would your husband want to move?

I talked to someone at our law school, and others, and got some guidance; you can say, “Perhaps you’re wondering about my ability to accept the position and give it the dedication it requires; I can assure you that the answer is yes.” That way you aren’t answering the inappropriate question, but you’re reassuring them about the bigger picture. Incidentally, people tend to think those questions are illegal, but it’s a little more complicated. According to the EEOC, those questions are not illegal per se, but if you’re discriminated against down the line, then you might be able to point to those questions as proof that bias existed.

What are some changes you’ve seen in how the job market operates?

I was on a committee for AEA to find ways to make the labor market for new Ph.D. economists work better. As a result, the AEA, in 2006, began using a signaling process so that job applicants can register with the AEA and credibly let employers know that they’re interested in them. You can only send two signals of interest, so that makes it meaningful; if you could send unlimited signals, everyone would send them to every employer and there would be no information in it at all. In my department, I’ve seen cases in which we get those signals, and we realize that we’re not interviewing a person who is really interested in us. We’ve reviewed the file and realized that someone who signaled is a good match, and added them to the interview list. In at least one case, that’s the person who got the job.

Another innovation is that the AEA has introduced is the “scramble.” The problem used to be that after people did fly-outs to campus and offers were made, some people would fall through the cracks. So the scramble lets employers who haven’t filled their positions and candidates who haven’t accepted a job find each other. It’s just a way to allow people to see what chairs are left late in the game of musical chairs.

When the guide first came out, you would have to send 90 or 100 packets through the mail to apply for jobs. Now it’s all electronic. It’s become so cheap to apply that every search committee is inundated with hundreds of applications, and in some cases they’re from people who aren’t at all a good match. So there are some downsides to applications becoming very cheap to submit.

You make it very clear that the goal of a person’s search shouldn’t be to get a job in the highest-ranked department, but at a place where their work is understood and appreciated, and that they find enjoyable and can grow and improve. Why give that advice when it seems to be the opposite of what I’m sure some economics Ph.D.s hear from their advisers?

That’s something I feel strongly about. There is often a misconception about getting a job at a “top 5" department, or at a university that will impress your parents or other people, without regard for how good a match it is for you. The problem with doing that is that your growth as a scholar depends on the quality of match, especially for that first job.

If you went to a department where there are no senior people in your field, no natural mentors, and people don’t respect your methods, you’re not going to get better. Whatever prestige benefits you think you’re getting are not going to make up for having a stalled career.

If somebody turns down a job that’s a really good match for them because somebody else offered them an extra $5,000 a year, that can be a terrible mistake. Good mentors, good collaborators, good students, appropriate research seminars and resources, all of that far outweighs the extra few thousand in salary.

When people start getting job offers, there’s an initial euphoria, and it can be hard to think straight. You need time to calm down and think, ‘What’s important to me and what’s best for my long-term career?’ It’s really easy in the euphoric stage to be too aggressive in negotiating and to string employers along. If you know with certainty that you’re not going to accept an offer, because it’s dominated by another one, let that employer know as soon as possible so they can move to the next person on their list. If you hold on to the offer an extra two weeks, the second person on their list might be gone, and maybe they don’t succeed in filling the position at all. A lot of employers have seen first hand cases in which job candidates who have received offers have not been professional, and sometimes won’t even respond to emails. Some people have acted in a way that’s very entitled and very demanding, and you can’t help but remember that, even many years later. That’s something all job candidates should be careful about during the negotiation phase.

Your guide includes a good number of examples of the human behavior that job candidates can expect during the hiring process. For instance one of my favorites is how you tell people that when they’re doing their job talk, sometimes people in the audience will lean over and whisper to each other, and they might even laugh. And then you basically write, Don’t freak out about it. Why do you include those kinds of insights?

It’s stuff that’s happened to me, or other people I know, or that I’ve seen happen to others. One friend of mine was giving a job talk, and a married couple in the audience talked and whispered and wrote notes to each other throughout. It’s not that the speaker was doing anything wrong, that couple was just caught up in their own world. Even though to you as a job candidate this is the most important day of your life, to other people in the room it’s just another day. What they’re doing might be unprofessional, but you just have to divorce it from your mind and stay focused on doing your best.

People volunteer their crazy stories to me, which is pretty entertaining. I once met someone who was on the way to give her job talk, and she dropped the USB drive that had her presentation on it down the crack of the elevator where the doors close. This was the only copy of her presentation that she had. It wasn’t on the cloud or Dropbox, she hadn’t emailed it to herself, there was no back up. There was a room full of people sitting and waiting for her to give her talk while the custodian dug through the refuse at the bottom of the elevator shaft. He found it, so she was able to give her talk, although a bit late. You don’t want to be that person. Always email your presentation to yourself.

When does the clock run out for you on this guide? How long do you plan to keep it up?

I think I’ll always do it in some capacity. It’s enjoyable and it’s something I’m interested in, and people seem to appreciate it. The market for economists is really fascinating, and as somebody who has students regularly going on the market, I end up keeping an eye on the market anyway.

Also, I do feel it’s important to make sure there’s a level playing field and that everybody has a fair shot. How well you do on the job market shouldn’t depend on things like whether your department was organized enough to put together a placement committee, or whether your main adviser has kept up to date on the changes in the job market. By sharing the basic information widely, it hopefully promotes fairness and meritocracy.

Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.