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The JFP/Phil Jobs Merger

Brian Leiter

A young philosopher on the job market writes, regarding the recently announced merger:

I worry that, since PhilJobs is already pretty much perfect, the joint venture can only make it worse.  First, since they're going to charge for ads, some jobs that would otherwise be posted to PhilJobs will probably not be. Second, one of the worst things about JFP is that job ads vanish after 30 days if departments don't shell out extra. Sometimes they vanish even before the deadline, which creates obvious problems. But sometimes it's helpful to be able to look up job ads months after the application if, say, one unexpectedly gets an interview.

I suspect a number of your readers (anyone on the job market) might have similar worries.

 I have no information, but hopefully knowledgeable individuals will respond!

UPDATE:  David Chalmers, who is co-director of the PhilPapers Foundation (which hosts PhilJobs) writes:

I'm glad your correspondent thinks so well of PhilJobs!  The new service will use the PhilJobs software and so will keep most of the old service's virtues.  We certainly expect to keep ads available until deadline and at least for a while after deadline.  It's true that because we'll be charging advertisers where the old PhilJobs was free, we may lose some ads.  But we'll make a proactive effort to reach out to such advertisers in these cases to ensure that the service is as comprehensive as possible.  In any case, it was inevitable that PhilJobs would have charged advertisers eventually in order to survive, so the merger shouldn't be blamed for this development.  The new service will be more comprehensive than either JFP or PhilJobs on their own would have been.

If one compares the new service to the situation just a couple of years ago, we think the new arrangement is great for all parties.  For the APA, it provides a much better job service with which to serve the profession.  For the PhilPapers Foundation, it provides desperately needed income that will support many new services to the profession.

For job seekers, it provides a definitive high-tech job service that is now free to job seekers around the world, with features that are far beyond the old JFP already, and with many new features to come in future years.  We're grateful to the APA for being forward-looking enough to help make all this possible.

 

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4 responses to “The JFP/Phil Jobs Merger”

  1. Michael

    Disappearing job ads is a concern. During last year's job season, I started out using all three of the job boards (Philjobs, JfP, and the Phylo wiki), but I found myself using PhilJobs dominantly for a few reasons. While archiving was one of those reasons, I also copied ads into my Google calendar entries for application deadlines for later reference. I imagine others must have done similar.

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  2. Roman

    Archiving is one of the most helpful features of PhilJobs. When I am contacted for an interview, I immediately look up the ad on PhilJobs, and the ability to do this four months after the application is very helpful. Of course I can save every ad I apply to into a Word doc, but the result is unwieldy and not nearly as convenient. Is there a way PhilJobs could keep the ads up for, say, six months after the deadline passes?

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  3. John Fischer

    I commend the APA for this new collaboration, which will surely improve service to members in important ways. Yes, the APA has struggled for awhile, but when it does important things to improve service for its members, as it is doing under the strong leadership of Michael Bratman, we should all be grateful. It will take awhile to earn people's (especially younger philosophers') respect, but I have been impressed with the many positive developments this year. If I may, I'd like to say that Amy Ferrer is doing an outstanding job. Things are not perfect yet (are they ever?), but they are moving in the right direction.

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  4. Justin Fisher

    Here's a possible compromise: give job-seekers an option to "favorite" various ads, and make those ads continue to be visible to those who favorited them even after the hirer stopped paying, but not to anyone new. This would give hirers an incentive to keep paying as long as they're accepting applications, while also making it easy for job-seekers to hold onto the information they'd been using without the hassle of copy-and-pasting.

    [When I was on the market though, I made great use of copy-and-paste, highlighting which aspects of each job description I wanted to touch on in the cover letter, adding further notes, and the like. I had one color of highlighting for any red flags that made me doubt I'd really want a job. M$Word's outline view was great for this, as it makes it easy to collapse down and hide away all the extraneous information when you don't need it. Maybe someday PhilJobs will offer multi-colored highlighting and notetaking?]

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