I have updated this site according to my fresh experience of a recent job market candidate in various fields (mostly information systems, information science, economics,and business) across continents. I based this partially on the questions I received in a job search seminar I gave at the ICD lab. Please note that my perspective could be quite biased.

-- BenjaminChiao -- 09 Sep 2008

The ICD Lab group is maturing, and job searching is going to be an increasingly regular activity. Here is a place to share information about finding jobs.

-- JeffMacKieMason - 07 Sep 2007

When

• You should target at passing your dissertation proposal the summer right before the job search starts
• Your job packet should be ready by mid-Oct. You will start sending it out from Oct to Mar. Subscribe to job sites to receive notifications of new jobs.
• Give a few weeks for your advisers to write the first recommendation letters.
• You could start receiving calls for mass conference interviews in Nov (ASIST), Dec (ICIS, WISE), Jan (ASSA), etc.
• You may be further invited for campus visits (which could imply a hiring probability of 1/3 or so) starting Jan.
• Offers could arrive as early as Jan until...well...next year? If you don't need to go back to the job market again, most faculty deals should be sealed in Apr. However, post-doc jobs are ongoing. It can come anytime. You can still find a postdoc job that comes out in summer. But many application deadlines of postdoc jobs are in Feb or Mar and the turnaround time is shorter than faculty jobs at times.

Where

• UM subscribes to the SSRN publications. Each major area includes a job forum. Three of interest are
  • Information Systems (very underpopulated), http://www.ssrn.com/update/isn/isnjob/isn_job.html
  • Management, http://www.ssrn.com/update/mrn/mrnjob/mrn_job.html
  • Economics (not just econ depts), http://www.ssrn.com/ern/index.html
• The Chronicle of Higher Education
  • Jobs of all fields: http://chronicle.com/jobs/
• Academy of Management
  • Business Schools: http://apps.aomonline.org/placement/main.asp
• ICIS
  • Information Systems: https://www.aisnet.org/placement/view/Logon.asp
• INFORMS
  • Operations: http://www.poms.org/placement/
• AEA
  • Economics: http://www.aeaweb.org/joe/

• Job packet should include CV, 1-page teaching statement (with teaching evaluation statistics), 1-page research statement, cover letter (note, many employers throw it away without seeing it. Repeat important information in your CV), letter of references occasionally (most employers require them to be sent directly by your advisers), full papers ideally (abstracts could be fine).
• Letters database. One way is to keep a different google doc file for each letter writer (at times you will invite some advisers but not the other for various reasons, you want to have some privacy). You can keep adding things to the file while your writers can mark which letters have been sent. Keeping track of this is extremely important. Letters will be lost in the way or forgotten to be written. Create a gmail account for your letter writers if they don't have one.
• Spare a few thousand dollars. You will have to buy air tickets, extra hotel stays, postage (express mail could take hundreds of dollars), etc.

Who

• You should find 3-5 references. Most of them are likely to be your committee members. Most schools request 3 reference letters

Why

• Why apply so broadly? Because the hiring process could be quite random. You never know why you are hired or not hired. I-school is still evolving; employers might not know what it means to be an i-school graduate.
• Why go for a postdoc? Because you might not have a faculty job this year. Because many great scholars actually start with a post-doc position. Because you get essentially extra tenure clock time.

How

• Keeping track of eyeballs. You might want to add a url link to each document so you can keep track of who is visiting your online documents. Its importance should not be underestimated. You may just have a few hours to prepare before a big conference. Knowing which employers are likely to interview you (proxied by a surge of visits by a particular domain) is a great help.
• Preparing for interview.
  • Ask the list of interviewers 1 week before your visit. Usually they can only confirm it a few days before if you are lucky. Print out the introduction of the school, the cvs of your interviewers. Don't rely on assessing the Internet in your hotel room, they are not reliable.
  • Don't be too nervous. They are interviewing you as much as you are interviewing them. It is very hard to fake yourself for such long visits (sometimes the campus visits could span 2 days with sample teaching).

Notes about postdoc jobs

• Some postdoc offers could be decided by the PIs of a grant. They don't need to go through the voting process of all faculty. That said, if you have impressed a faculty in a previous meeting, he or she might offer you a job. You could approach them and keep them informed of your job search progress so they could possibly offer you a job if they think you will take it. In this case, chances are your research interests match highly with theirs as opposed to the situation in which a department might hire a person who is just smart.
• Some postdocs offers are advertised or made similar to the process of a faculty job. Look at the 5W1H above.

Question/Comments

Please add any questions below so we can update the sections above.
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