Insights and Tips for Navigating Academic Job Interviews Successfully (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: With an academic job, obviously the advert goes out and then all the papers come in. And once the interviewing panel has been selected, then all of the people on the panel will get usually a sort of file from Human Resources, which gives them the CV, the cover letter and the references of the candidates. So everybody independently on the panel reads through all of those and then each of them independently will decide how to rank the candidates. At that point they then reduce it to however many they think they can interview comfortably in a day, which is probably five or six. I think it's really, really, really important to find out as much as you possibly can about the institution. If you've got a mole, a friend of a friend, who knows the department, well it's certainly useful to talk to them.

Speaker 2: I talked to as many people as I could about, who'd had academic job interviews, because I hadn't had one before, about what kind of questions they would ask. And also I talked to people generally about interviews because I knew there were going to be a panel, I don't think I knew how many people there were going to be, but I knew there were going to be quite a lot of people.

Speaker 1: I think it's very important to try and find out who's interviewing you. I mean in all these cases, it's true of everything, including the Viva and the job interview as well, you need to try and put yourself in this, you need to empathise with the enemy as it were. Work out what the other person wants from you and see how you can give them what they want within the limits of who you are. So yes, certainly find out who's interviewing you, because it might indicate what the institution is after.

Speaker 3: The sequence of questions is going to be reasonably predictable. You'll be asked about your research and then you'll be asked about your teaching. Research will be where you are now and where you'd like to develop, and teaching will be similarly, what have you done until now and how would you like to develop your teaching, either in the light of teaching practice itself or in the light of your research.

Speaker 4: There were four or five people on the interview panel spending quite a bit of time on different aspects. One was asking me questions about teaching, one was asking me questions about more the admin and the personal tutoring side of the role, one was probing a lot more about the research and my research activity and where it would lead.

Speaker 5: The most impressive candidates I've seen are those who have thought a little about how they would teach a course. If they're asked if you would teach a course on such and such a subject and they say they come up with a book that they would use as a textbook or a collection of readings or how they would approach the course and that they've shown they've actually thought about it, that can be very impressive and I think it's definitely worth preparing something like that.

Speaker 1: So, if you can keep it short and clear, give them examples, again the summary of your thesis which you developed for your viva could come in really useful here.