The goal of the job search is to convince the Search Committee at some College or University or other employer to select you as their best candidate for them. To do this, they need to know what your outstanding qualities are, and be convinced you are exactly what they need. This is the task of selling yourself! This page offers some suggestions and opinions on how you might best go about making this sale.

There are basically four methods of "marketing" yourself, which we discuss below:

1. Your Curriculum Vitae
2. Your Personal Webpage
3. Professional exposure at meetings
4. Personal Contact

Best Foot Forward - Your CV

Your Curriculum Vitae is the broadest marketing tool you have. It will be sent to every prospective employment opportunity. You will post this on MathJobs.org, mail it to schools not on MathJobs.org who have advertised somewhere else (like the EIMS), and you will give it to interviewers. It is the first representation of "who you are" that most employers will have, so you should make every effort to have it speak clearly about your talents and potential.

The section on your Curriculum Vitae later in this site address many of the key points. Take this task seriously! After you have prepared your initial version of your CV, read it again, imagining that this is what a prospective employer would think about you, if this is all the information they have. Get the opinion of others as well, who will point out aspects of the CV that you may need to edit and refine, to improve its goal of conveying who you are.

The Research and Teaching Statements are extensions of the CV, and should be thought of as the "page two" that you will find on many web pages. If the reviewer finds page one (your CV) quite interesting, they will turn to these documents for more information. Don't let them down - allow sufficient time to prepare & polish these documents also, so they convince the reviewer that you have "lots of features under the hood". You will be emailing, posting or sending these two documents to every job opportunity also, so do it right!

Your Personal Webpage

Once your application has attracted the attention of a member of a Search Committee, often the next step he or she will do, is to see if they can learn more about your professional profile (and also your personal profile!) by searching the web. That is a modern fact of life.

Your website can serve to highlight your professional strengths, and provide extensive supporting information, much more so than you can on the Curriculum Vitae. If you apply via MathJobs.org then it gives you the opportunity to provide a link to this web page, and you can expect the reviewers of your application to follow up this link if they start to get serious about your application. Thus, it is an invaluable opportunity to "make the sale".

You can describe in much more detail your research interests and work: for example, by providing links to the pdf files for papers you have written, and a link to a long form of your Research Statement if you have written one.

Your website can have an extensive section on your teaching accomplishments, so is in effect an online "Teaching Portfolio". Without having spoken to you (yet) they can be convinced that you are an excellent and vibrant teacher.

Your website can also feature any exceptional other activities relevant to the type of position you are seeking, such as conferences attended if you are seeking a research position. If you are seeking a teaching position, your web site can list and discuss any exceptional teaching activities you took part in, such as ESP or other special programs. You may have participated in some grant-supported teaching activities, or community-teaching programs which can be described in enough detail to be a real asset. If you are applying for an industry job, then you can explain in detail about professional internships you participated in.

All of the guidelines applying to what not to say on a CV apply here also: you want to make the sale, not chase the sale.

Talks at Conferences

Mathematical conferences are a mainstay of professional life in academia, as they bring people together to talk and share ideas. As a student or young postdoc, they can be great opportunities for networking, for meeting new people in the field, and for making personal impressions that just may sway the person you meet to go back to their university and "push your case".

As a young researcher, it is a difficult task to get an invitation to attend, or better still, to speak at a conference. For this, you rely on your advisor for the most assistance and guidance. However, some students simply write the conference organizers to ask if they have funds for graduate students to attend. Many conferences do these days! This is another way to start reaching out.

Meetings are organized months or possibly even a year ahead of time. Thus, the best time to plan to attend conferences in your field, is starting in the year before you are to graduate, not the year you will graduate. if you are a postdoc, then the time to start is now.

If your goal in attending a conference is to promote your work with an eye towards employment, keep in mind that you should not spend the entire meeting hanging out with friends then. You must make an effort to connect with senior researchers in the field who may be in attendance. In other words, don't be shy - some senior faculty may rebuff your efforts, but just as likely, they will recognize your efforts for what they are, and give you the respect and attention to find out "who you are". This might mean 5 or 10 minutes of their time; or, perhaps you will end up sharing a beer or dinner with a group of their colleagues. Go For It!

Employment Center at Annual Meeting

Should you take part in the Employment Center at the Joint Annual Meeting in January, this year held in San Francisco? This provides you with an opportunity to meet face-to-face with recruiters from a variety of colleges and universities. Typically, you will be meeting with faculty members who have volunteered their time to perform this exhausting task. The advantage is that it gives you face-time with someone from the schools, and allows you to show off your new tie, and even better, your new Teaching Portfolio. As such, this can lead to employment offers, as discussed by Phil Grizzard in his blog from his experiences at the Annual Meeting in 2007. The upside is that it may well lead to an invitation to visit their campus.

The down-side of participating in the Annual Meeting is that it is expensive to attend, as usually housing is very expensive unless you can make arrangements to stay somewhere that is not a hotel. Also, the Job Interview process at the Annual meeting is exhausting and perhaps depressing. After all, you and the "competition" are all going to be running around the room together taking part in interviews, wondering who amongst you will get an offer. On the up-side, you might meet some interesting fellow graduate students and young postdocs, and make some excellent new friends in the process.

If all you are looking for is a Research Postdoctoral position, then most likely an interview at the Employment Center will make no difference. These positions are typically decided strictly based on your research activities, and not by an interview process. That being said, it is also true that if you are giving a talk at a meeting, and especially the Annual Meeting, then Search Committee members may come to your talk to see if they can make a decision between you and another applicant, based on your talk. The standard joke is that the people in your talk at the Annual Meeting will consist of other speakers, and members of various Search Committees.

One intangible benefit of participating in the Annual Meeting, is that you get to feel "like you are doing something" about getting a job. And sometimes luck happens to those who make it - like meeting someone at an Annual Meeting, who turns out to influence you later research, or by even greater luck, might decide to recommend you to the Search Committee at their university. Luck happens to those who make it.