A Statistical Reflection on the Academic Job Hunt

People can be kind of squeamish about their experiences with the academic job market. I mean, everyone agrees that it’s bad, but when I was looking for a job I didn’t find as many gory details as I would have liked. There are a decent amount of “why I’m leaving academia” blog posts floating around online, but not so many “how I stayed in academia” posts.

In a more perfect world, this would not be the case. Just like unionization starts with talking about salary, I think any realistic discussion about graduate education or the higher ed economy needs to start with a discussion about the numbers. So I’m going to share my stats. I hope they’re helpful to at least a handful of grad students facing the market, or prospective students deciding what to do with their future.

I’ll start with the rawest stats before I go any further: I was on the market for three academic years between fall 2019 and spring 2022. In that time, I applied to 60 jobs, then got 11 screening interviews, 8 final interviews, and 4 job offers. That means I got interviews from about 18% of my applications, and job offers from just shy of 7%. I’m currently employed as a tenure-track assistant professor at a large state university, where I recently started my second year. I spent two years before this in a research-focused postdoc at a flagship state university. Although it’s been anxiety-inducing at times, the overall experience has been pretty great. I hope it continues that way!

Now here’s where I’ll make some additional notes and start breaking down the data. I finished my PhD in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers in 2020. I was an interdisciplinary student working in both Media Studies and Library/Information Science. These disciplines are institutionally linked at Rutgers, but this interdisciplinarity is the exception rather than the rule. I chose to go to Rutgers in part because i figured that straddling two disciplines would help me qualify for a wider swath of jobs. I think it worked but I see so few people sharing stats from their job searches that I’m not really sure.

Anyway, let’s get more granular with the data. In Fall 2019, I was still neck-deep in the dissertation process. Nevertheless, I sent out 26 applications, then got 4 screening interviews and 3 on-campus interviews (one of which had no prior screening interview). These were varied in nature: all told, I interviewed for 1 postdoc, 1 teaching professor gig, 1 tenure-track assistant professor job at an R1 university, and 1 tenure-track assistant professor job at a liberal arts college. In the end, I received no offers.

Spring 2020 was the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I only sent out 5 applications, because the job market cratered. In the end I still got 3 first-round interviews, 2 follow-up interviews, 1 offer based on a single interview (Visiting Assistant Professor at a public university), and 1 offer for a postdoc (which I took, at UT Austin). Not too bad considering the circumstances!

So for those keeping score at home, my year one total was 31 applications, 7 first-round interviews, 5 follow-up interviews, and 2 job offers (1 postdoc, 1 Visiting Assistant Professor). One search got suspended due to the pandemic. That’s just shy of a 23% success rate at getting to the first interview, and a 6.25% rate of getting the final offer overall. Another way of looking at it is that 28.5% of my first-round interviews eventually led to offers.

Year two was pretty bleak in terms of pandemic-related job market disruptions. There just weren’t any jobs to apply for. In Fall 2020 I sent out a grand total of two applications. I got zero interviews. Spring 2021 was not much better: 6 applications, 1 first-round interview. So the year two totals were 8 apps, 1 interview, and 0 offers. I don’t feel like I need to calculate any further on the stats for that run.

Things rebounded a bit in Year Three, the 2021-2022 school year. I think some of the “Great Resignation” finally started to hit by this time. In the fall I sent out 20 applications, then got 3 first-round interviews, 2 follow-up interviews, and 2 offers (one was my current job at SJSU, another was a different large public university). In the spring, I applied to one more job while waiting to hear from the others, but I didn’t have any interviews. So the 21-22 stats were 21 total apps, 2 screening interviews, and 2 offers. This means I had about a 14% success rate landing the initial interview, and a whopping 67% success rate at getting offers once I had my interview.

Typing this all out right now, it’s kind of interesting to see how my stats changed as time went on. My success landing a first-round interview actually declined (from 23% to 14%), but my success rate at landing an offer after I interviewed went way up (more than double, actually, from 28.5% to 67%).

To take a more zoomed-out view, during three years on the market I sent out 60 apps, then got 11 screening interviews, 7 final interviews, and 4 offers. That’s about 6.6% success from initial application to final offer and a 36% success rate moving from first interview to final offer.

Is this a good outcome, and average outcome, or a bad one? It’s hard to say because not many other scholars share this kind of information. Maybe I’m foolish for doing so and I’ll delete it down the road. In the meantime, however, please drop me a line if you find this information helpful in any way. I realize my experience will be pretty much impossible to replicate, since it was thrown into total chaos by the pandemic, but I also know that when I was facing down the academic job market I would have been eager to read this kind of reflection from someone who had faced it before me. And by the way: if you notice any errors in my math, just blame it on the fact that I did all the calculations while I was waiting for my plane to Charlottesville for Rare Book School last month! I’m actually great at arithmetic, I promise.