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Thoughts on the new JFP/Phil Jobs site?

Brian Leiter

One job seeker writes:

I thought you might be interested in a posting on the effects of decentralization of job advertising on both job seekers and letter writers. Personally, I hate it. I most certainly appreciate that I no longer have to pay to see ads, but in terms of being able to plan your semesters has gone completely out the window, and I am sure it is even harder on letter writers. My first deadline this year is Sept 22, followed by on on Sept 25th. Might Philjobs consider scheduling the posting of jobs?

What do others think?  As a letter writer (though the season is still early), I've not found this to be a problem, esp. because many candidates use Interfolio.  But it may still make it more complicated for the candidates to manage the varying deadlines.  Job seekers may, if they want, post without their name, but please include a real e-mail address (which will not appear).

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8 responses to “Thoughts on the new JFP/Phil Jobs site?”

  1. anon

    It's a bit of a shock, but I imagine we'll get used to it. Job applications will probably become less precisely cyclical, and people will get used to having a portfolio on hand ready to send out. Letter writers will be asked to update slightly earlier than before, and it will probably become more common to send slightly out of date letters for deadlines that are very early or very late. There are other academic disciplines where this is already the norm.

    The entire job market is becoming less centralized. I think this decentralization will be an overall benefit for applicants, at least at present. The two main benefits of centralization are saving on costs for first-round interviews (solved by Skype), and getting all of one's job offers at once (as we're in a "buyer's market", this is "solved" by most people not getting multiple offers).

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  2. Sterner

    So far the only difference I have experienced is that we lack a single comprehensive source for job postings. Since you have to pay to post on PhilJobs now, it's no longer a group exercise in aggregating postings from other sites. (Assuming I understood how it worked correctly in the past.) Meanwhile, the free Phylo listing seems to be moribund. So I like having the jobs available in a user-friendly format online, but I still have to do the legwork of checking a bunch of sites (HigherEdJobs, HERC, etc). Of course, I can't blame PhilPapers for needing some income to maintain its valuable services!

    As for the dates, I think it matters less for people applying to postdocs, which are always scattered over the fall. For better or worse, I use almost always use interfolio, so I think the change will have minimal impact on my letter writers.

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  3. Leon

    I think the scattering of dates is of little to no service to the applicants. There was a certain fairness to the old system – applicants got interviewed more or less around the same time, and they were getting first offers at around the same time. This made all sense since the jobs also start at around the same time, and it enabled people to wait to hear from other places at which they interviewed or had fly-outs. If somebody now gets an offer in December or earlier, she will have no such chance to wait. It might be that is the norm elsewhere, but that norm does not seem to me to be better.

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  4. David Chalmers

    Some desynchronization in the job market seems to be an inevitable consequence of the trend toward Skype (rather than APA) interviews and online (rather than paper) job advertisements, quite independent of the PhilJobs/JFP merger.

    That said: we're open to having some sort of recommendation about deadlines on PhilJobs: JFP, though of course we can't force advertisers to follow it. We'd be interested to hear thoughts about whether there should be such a recommendation and if so what form it should take.

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  5. Anonymous

    I agree with the initial inquirer, as well as Leon. I have deadlines stretching from Sept 20th to Dec 1st. As a first-time job seeker, I am making progress each month on the dissertation, such that the letters my committee writes in 6 weeks could be quite different from the ones they write now, but of course professors are unlikely to revise the first letter they write. Plus, the stretched out hiring schedules hurt candidates' ability to efficiently prepare: now I have to be ready with a job talk in Dec, when it used to be that a candidate finished sending out applications in Dec and had until Jan to be ready for a job talk. Plus, many departments' placement activities are oriented to the old schedule — now my dept doesn't know when to schedule mock job talks because the timing is so unpredictable. And anything that hinders a candidate's ability to consider all her offers at once is bad news for the candidate. Basically, the desynchronization has no advantages and only costs to candidates and their letter-writers. To David's point, I really hope that PhilJobs: JfP can come up with a way to address this, or at least promote something normative. The leading departments hiring this year seem to have deadlines between Nov 1 and Dec 1, so encouraging deadlines in this range seems reasonable.

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  6. Michael Kremer

    One way this negatively affects letter writers (this was already a bit of a problem but it is worse now) is that for those of us in quarter schools, the deadlines are now occurring with some frequency before the start of our term (we begin this year on Oct. 1 at the University of Chicago). This makes it harder for faculty to meet with students preparing to go on the market and so on than when we could expect almost all of the ads to appear after our quarter began and with deadlines around the end of October.

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  7. Justin Fisher

    Two quick points: First, I don't think the spreading out of deadlines has much to do with PhilJobs. Deadlines were already quite spread out back when I went on the market before PhilJobs, including the handful of jobs that were advertised in places other than the JFP. For anyone who was earnestly scouring all the listings for any plausible new jobs, there was very little predictability as to when new listings might appear, though admittedly the bulk of them did come in each new installment of the JFP.

    Second, the only plausible alternative seems to be to have PhilJobs/JFP release the listings in batches rather than as they come in. That means that there will be a longer period of time, at least for some jobs, during which PJ/JFP and a few insiders know about a job opening but ordinary run-of-the-mill applicants don't because it hasn't been batch-released yet. I really don't see how delaying the release of this information would really help ordinary applicants… (I fear I might not be fully understanding the original poster's worry.)

    Of course, another alternative that we, as a profession, might consider is having a central agency with a fairly rigid timeline and hopefully also a streamlined centralized application system, with strong peer pressure on institutions to follow this system. Perhaps law- and med-school applications could be used as a model. However, I have my doubts as to whether philosophers would be willing to be herded into something as organized as this, and of course it would be very hard to disincentive schools from defecting and running their own searches on the side. As long as it's a buyer's market, it'll be hard to put constraints on buyers.

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  8. jrs

    Sterner,
    Thanks, this is really useful; I had no idea there is a significant number of job postings that haven't appeared on philjobs. Could you, or anyone else in the know, list the rest of the job sites that your 'etc.' refers to? Thanks and good luck!

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