For related content, please see my post about cover letters for U.S.-style academic job applications.

I’ve served on hiring committees for academic positions in political science and international relations at U.S.-style institutions over the course of a decade. I’ve noticed that many people on the job market are extremely poorly coached about what applying to academic jobs entails. In particular, they do not recognize what it takes to be competitive for desirable positions nor do they understand the standard forms and expectations for communicating their qualifications.

Poorly mentored graduate students and early career scholars may believe that hiring committees give equal attention to all applicants. This is false. In reality, assessment proceeds in stages, with early stages being faster and considering larger number of applicants more briefly and later stages being slower and considering increasingly small numbers of applicants in greater detail. The applicant’s task is to make sure that their materials are clear enough to be persuasive even at a glance–and if one is applying to a U.S.-style university that means writing a competent and clear curriculum vitae according to North American norms.

(I will note here that other higher ed systems have their own norms, and you need to research the prevailing norms of those systems when you apply.)

Context: Why You Need to Get the CV Right.

Let’s assume that there are 200 applicants for an assistant professor position at a competitive university, one at which teaching competence is valued but research success will ultimately make or break an application.

The first round of cuts will be ruthless and swift. In round numbers, about 20 to 30 percent of the pool will be culled because they clearly do not qualify according to the criteria listed in the job ad. That could include, for instance, someone who does not have the required Ph.D. (or Ph.D. in hand by time of appointment).

You should know that a job advertisement contains elements that are optional and some that are binding. The more clear-cut an ad's provisions are, the less likely the committee can be flexible. Black-and-white provisions like "has Ph.D. (or will have by time of appointment)" are ones that a committee will have little latitude to overrule. Indeed, it is possible that admin staff will make a pre-deliberation round of cuts on the basis of these provisions. If you do not meet these minimum requirements, you are very unlikely (< 0.1% chance) to be considered.

A further 20 to 30 percent of applicants will be clearly uncompetitive. If you are applying to a post at a research-intensive university after receiving your doctorate five (or even three) years ago, and all you have to show are non-peer reviewed publications or a couple of book chapters, your file will be dismissed rapidly.

How rapidly? About forty-five seconds.

From the applicant side of the process, this may seem harsh or heartless. It is not. The hiring committee’s job is not to provide career counseling (and legal and institutional considerations may preclude feedback). It is, instead, to select a candidate who is qualified, who will answer institutional and departmental needs, and who is likely to achieve tenure at the institution. There is no point in spending time wading through an applicant’s file if they appear less able to meet those criteria than the top 30 percent of applications. You can tell whether someone will be competitive in that pool with an exceptionally high degree of certainty from the bare facts of their career trajectory. Trimming 70 percent of an applicant pool rapidly allows for more careful and considered review of the remaining applicants. (In subsequent rounds, the consideration of files becomes much more detailed.)

This first filter is the most Glengarry Glen Ross of all of them. You meet the educational criteria or you don't. You've demonstrated publication potential or you haven't. You've shown you can teach acceptably well or you haven't. First prize is consideration for this job. Second prize is a set of steak knives. 

This level involves the most objective set of criteria in any part of the hiring process--and that is why it is the fastest. Ultimately, judging whether you have met these minimum standards for competitiveness or not is easy. I know this makes some people uncomfortable but there really is no other way to handle ratios of 200 or 300 to 1. 

To paraphrase Baldwin (or Mamet) again, "You think that the hiring process is too hard?  You think this is unfair? If you can't take this, how can you get tenure?" I am being intentionally blunt here because I have seen many candidates who are weak convince themselves that they are strong. It is better to be impolitely clear in this context than cruelly polite.

Is it possible that someone who might be qualified or even competitive could slip through the cracks in the first round? Sure. The risks are less than they may appear, however. Most files will be reviewed by more than one committee member, so any howling errors are unlikely to make it through. What’s more important is that the harms to the hiring committee are pretty minimal. Whether an applicant can present their profile in a way that it can be quickly understood correlates really well with overall socialization into the discipline, and that, in turn, is a pretty good predictor of professional success. (Yes, there are exceptions, but they are really, really rare.)

Remember: the committee’s job is to find a great set of candidates rather than ensuring each applicant is perfectly evaluated. (The relevant criteria for judging the committee’s process have to do with fairness, not precision.) Service on a hiring committee can be, all told, a 60 to 80 hour commitment minimum. Spending an hour or more on each application in the first stages would be a wild misuse of time that would treble or quadruple the overall burden of hiring committees to almost zero increases in hiring quality. It is more efficient to focus on qualified candidates.

But. It matters a great deal to an individual candidate if they get past the filters. Failure at any stage precludes success. Even if an applicant might have succeeded if their file were considered in detail, if their materials are impenetrable they are at risk for being weeded out early on. And although adding more publications is not exactly a choice variable, ensuring that they are communicating their strengths well is under their control.

I find that some people get very defensive about the following point, but it is absolutely correct: it is the responsibility of the applicant to communicate their profile rather than the responsibility of the committee to find diamonds hidden in the rough. Yes, sometimes Cinderella stories do happen, but the odds are far greater that the committee will have more than enough polished diamonds to consider to fulfill their task successfully.

Preparing the CV

So what should a competent CV for a position in political science and international relations positions look like? If you are applying for a U.S.-style job, there are some basic style points:

• It should not include color or intense formatting. Restrained (black and white, a maximum of two fonts) is best.
  • My own CV is based on Jason Blevin’s LaTeX template; I know it’s a common choice because a lot of people used it.
  • Kieran Healy’s CV LaTeX template stretches my guidelines but works.
  • Geoff Boeing’s LaTeX CV template is similarly attractive and readable.
  • NYU has a fine, if perhaps dull, template for Word.
• A CV is not a resume. Resumes should be one or two pages. CVs should be long enough to convey academic qualifications. CVs emphasize academic work–they show, literally, the course of life (that’s “curriculum vitae”‘s meaning!) for an academic’s scholarly development. That’s why most resume templates are terrible–they are not designed for what you should include. (I discuss this below.)
• Don’t include a “Positions sought” or “Personal Background” or “Personal Information” section.
• Don’t include GPAs or equivalents.
• A CV should clearly identify your name, including both government (official) names if you are using that for your application (for instance, a first name you do not often use) and the name you prefer to be addressed by professionally (for instance, a middle or other name you use in the workplace).
• Include a variety of contact information coordinates.
  • One rule I have heard is that committees should only evaluate what is in the packet … but including a Web site in your CV is enough to count as being “in the packet”. (Opinions differ on this and I’ve also heard enough stories to refrain from offering generalizations about hiring committees’ norms on this point.)
  • Make sure to add country codes. (This is directed at you, Americans.)
  • Have a professional email! Something like “irguy2025@aol.com” is embarrassing.
• Don’t include a photo. (This is directed at you, Europeans.)
• No smaller than 12-point font (11-point if need be).
• Don’t overuse typography (boldface and underlining, italics and boldface). The standard reference for tasteful composition is https://practicaltypography.com/.

Violating those norms won’t necessarily sink your applications but I’ve never seen anyone who violated them progress farther than the third stage. It’s a good sign of fit and understanding of North American professional standards. (The name thing is also just a convenience for making sure that everyone knows how to address you.)

So what sections should you have? In order:

• Education. This should include your doctoral and undergraduate degrees, as well as any other formal education at the post-secondary level. (Do not include anything from high school or earlier.) Include the city and country or state of your doctoral institution
• Professional Employment. (Might be better termed “Academic Employment”.)
  • Include here if you have relevant professional employment at the level of a predoc/postdoc or higher (including visiting positions but not adjunct positions). If not (that is, if you have “only” been a grad student or an adjunct in academia), move this to another section (e.g. teaching).
  • Research assistant and teaching assistant gigs attached to being a grad student can be addressed in the Research and Teaching sections.
  • Make sure to include start and ending dates–month and year is sufficient.
• Research. This can be subdivided into smaller bits, such as “Publications”, “Grants”, “Presentations”, etc.
  • Peer-reviewed publications should go first, absolutely first. Books should be listed separately before articles.
    • If you do not have any, reconsider whether it is time to go on the market (or refocus your efforts on non-research positions).
    • List these in reverse-chronological order.
    • Specify whether these are solo or multiple-authored works.
    • Do not include non-peer reviewed publications in the same list as peer-reviewed publications. This is a red flag.
    • Do not include R&Rs or submissions. Those may be included in a subsection for “Work in Progress” or “Working Papers”.
    • Do include accepted or forthcoming articles.
  • Lists of Works in Progress or Working Papers should be finished enough that they are already on preprints, in your job market packet, or available on demand (like, you just have to attach the file to the email you send in response to a request for these). Don’t fluff these–no vaporware.
  • Chapters in books should go in a section after peer-reviewed publications.
  • Non-peer reviewed but still academic publications should be included in a different subsection. They should be clearly distinguished from public commentary and peer-reviewed materials.
    • Book reviews for academic journals and outlets should be in their own section if there are many of them, but they can also be included in this section if you have comparatively few. Clearly indicate that they are reviews.
  • Public commentary should go in its own section, clearly distinguished from academic-facing work.
    • Including this is optional and you should consider whether it is a plus or a negative for each position. It is not always to your advantage to display this.
  • Grants may be included in this broad category; they should follow publications but precede public commentary.
    • I had a section for “Fellowships, Grants, and Awards” to cover all of these, but you could break these up if you had multiple of each category.
• Presentations in conferences, workshops, etc may follow this section. Junior scholars may include relatively more of these to show research promise and activity.
  • Note the conference or workshop title, any affiliated institution, the dates and locations, and the title of papers presented. Do not indicate paper/poster.
  • I err on not including job talks in my list of invited presentations.
• Teaching experience should follow.
  • Identify the institution, the course title ( and a translation if the course content is standard but the title was not), and the semester(s) offered.
  • Give some indication of the level of the course (introductory, advanced) if it is not obvious.
  • If you have been a TA or TF, note these courses but make sure you make clear you have been a TA. I did not include my teaching experience beyond solo-led courses after a couple of years of teaching, but there is an argument to do so: TAing a course means you can likely adapt it for a new institution, and if you’ve TA’d intro or methods courses you will likely be able to address the unstated goal of every job ad (“who’s going to teach intro”)
• Service should follow. This may include service as a manuscript observer, conference discussant or organizer, etc.
• Other Professional Experience but only if relevant. We don’t need a full work history–only items relevant to your scholarly profile and potential.
• Software Skills Sure, put on Microsoft Office, but I’m really reading this to see if you can teach data analytics or other methods courses. If you don’t have this and you claim to be able to teach those courses, I’m going to be skeptical.

Note that if you follow this then a committee will be able to tell if you are qualified or not by the end of the first page of the CV (or second if you have had a lot of jobs). This should be a moment of honesty for yourself.