As research for my Professor Is In book update (due out in 2026!), I have been perusing academic Reddit. No, before you freak out, it’s actually mostly a great, and very positive place for advice, information, and commiseration! I encourage you to check out the r/academia community.

Of course needless to say it’s also a site of very justified collective anger and grief about the wretched state of the academic job market and the miseries of the search. As I was reading through, I saw one post that I can’t stop thinking about. It read something along the lines of (from memory):

“Dear Search Committee, WTF? I checked ALL the boxes of your ad. Every. Single. One. So what possible justification can you have for rejecting me. Explain it to me.”

This post made me sad.

Because I completely get the fury and sense of helplessness that comes from appearing to be the perfect candidate for a job, and not getting the job. It happened to me at a Very Fancy School decades ago, and honestly I’m not sure I’m over it yet.

But this comment also betrays an entire misunderstanding of the nature of job searches. The misunderstanding I’ve spent my entire Professor Is In career trying to address. A misunderstanding which impacts ALL job searches, in academia and out.

Which is, that ticking boxes is NOT what gets you a job.

And if you think ticking boxes gets you a job, you are pretty much guaranteeing that you will not get a job.

Because the boxes are just generic guidelines. Loose priorities. Guardrails, if you will.  More to the point, in the current market, there will be 25 or 15 or 10 candidates who ALL–every single one of them–tick the boxes just as well. So ticking boxes is nothing but the lowest common denominator of job searching. It may get you to the initial interview, although no guarantees of that either. It definitely won’t get you to the campus visit or the offer.

Why?

Because bridging the gap between a) what you do/how you do it and b) what the department wants and needs requires TREMENDOUS amounts of careful, methodical, targeted, deeply researched, scrupulously chosen communication – in the written form first, and the spoken form second. Take these two paragraphs:

My dissertation looked at certain kinds of discourses that I heard in conversations with young Japanese women in Tokyo when I was doing fieldwork, about living in the United States for example, or studying English, and what they were trying to accomplish through the different ways they talked about the West vs the ways they saw Japan.

My current research is an examination of the narratives of internationalization articulated by young professional Japanese women in Tokyo – based on 2 years of fieldwork as well as discourse analysis of published work and popular media – which focuses on their articulation of the West as a site of gendered self-actualization and a racially coded location of resistance to what they consider the repressive norms of Japanese patriarchy.

They both describe the same work (my long-ago dissertation).  They cover the same ground. If I were applying for a job in Japan anthropology with a focus on gender for example, they would putatively “tick the box” of a legitimate dissertation.  But the first is entirely unusable as either written or spoken description. It says almost nothing. It stays at the vaguest of generalities. It does not sound academic. It is not the way academics write or speak. And if you want to be an academic — ie a tenure line faculty member – you have to sound like one.

There is nothing nefarious about this. There is nothing unethical about expecting job candidates to articulate the content you require in ways that are both effective and match the norms of your professional world.

Academia is neither unique in this requirement, nor is it some special magical place that exists outside this requirement. It is a realm of work, like any other realm of work, with professional norms and expectations and styles of communication, inhabited by people who are overworked, stressed, and able to devote very little time to parsing obscure verbiage.

The first example gives the search committee almost nothing to work with. The second gives them everything–topic, methods, theoretical orientation, and conclusion. All in nearly the same amount of words.

If you think that the first example is not something any PhD would write or say, you are so, so wrong.

So wrong.

Probably 50% of my editing and coaching revolves around getting my PhD clients to recognize that they are doing version 1, and showing them how to do version 2.

Just 10 minutes ago I ended an Interview Intervention zoom call with a client who articulated her research EXACTLY like sentence 1 above. (That was actually the motivation for writing this post.)

She works (loose and anonymized description) on migrant literature in contexts of climate crisis, and how that differs from what is represented in mainstream western media discourses. But I only figured that out after 30 minutes of prodding:

• What poets are you talking about?
• What “narratives” do you mean?
• What specific media are you talking about??
• How were the two sets of discourses different?
• What is the contrast you are trying to draw?
• WHAT ARE YOU ARGUING??
• Why did you mention “migrants” as a focus of your work in the first sentence, but then never mention them again as you described the work??

Reader, it was rough. But she got there!

Want to do an Interview Intervention with me?  Click here!

It was the first time that anyone had listened carefully to her research descriptions, and identified the problem that she relied entirely on the vaguest generalizations. Generalizations which were not wrong, but also not even remotely right.

And moreover, pushed her to see that to make her research “work” for this PARTICULAR job ad required we go beyond just her description alone, but actually study both the ad and the department website and faculty bios, to see how she can mold that language to match their priorities.

On a related note, I now routinely devote part of our Intervention time to pulling up course listings, to identify oh so common unintentional but deadly mismatches between how a client is describing a course, and what the department has stated it wants the course to cover. This is 5 minutes of effort, and so easily rectified, but the failure to do it can ruin an interview.

I can see how prior to working with me, she could come out of an interview saying angrily that she ticked all the boxes of a job search in ecocritical literature, and was unfairly rejected. But if she relied entirely on verbiage like the first example (and remember that this habit recurs, meaning that if it shows up in the research description it will ALSO INEVITABLY be doing equal harm to the teaching and tailoring verbiage as well), it’s not actually unfair at all. Because she didn’t give the search committee any of the substance they need–ACTUALLY NEED – to be able to make an evaluation.

I am in no way saying the academic job search is a meritocracy. Academics just love extremist black and white thinking and many are pretty intensely invested in victimstancing, and some folks on the angry, anti-Karen Kelsky reddit threads (of which there are plenty!) will claim that I am blaming victims, or requiring job seekers to “play games,” or demanding they capitulate to neoliberal corporate logic, or some such.

Come on.

All that is, is the anger of fantasies being destroyed. Specifically the fantasy that academia is a special magic place where ideas float free from material constraints (of say writing or speaking) and are (or should be ) always judged entirely on some intrinsic merit that exists separately from their means of expression.

In the words of the 2024 election, that is just weird.

There is better and worse writing. And the rubrics of that judgment change depending on the communicative frame. Writing for a conference paper is different than writing of a job cover letter. They have different requirements, because they have different purposes.

So if you really actually want an academic job the way you say you do, then write and speak like it. It absolutely does not guarantee you’ll get one. But it does guarantee that you have given it your all, left everything on the field, and moved far past “ticking boxes” to performing the full range of communicative competencies required by the professional world in which you (say you want to) work.