The job talk—typically on campus, sometimes on Zoom—is the final boss of the academic job market. Don’t underestimate the challenge. You can’t just coast on the rest of your materials: unless you’re already world famous, you probably need a strong job talk. You can’t rely on the weakness of the competition, either: you have to convince people to vote for you, not just against the others, which means turning in a solid performance in your talk and Q&A. My sense is that PhD students aren’t getting enough advice about job talks. And what advice they do get tends to come too late, which leaves them scrambling. The good news:

  • Anyone can learn to give a killer talk.
  • Once you can do that, you’re 90% of the way to a killer job talk. So here is my advice for (1) giving great talks, and (2) preparing a job talk in particular. This advice is mostly aimed at PhD students in philosophy, but there are also some tips about public speaking in general. Any advice you’d give? Share it in the comments!
  1. Good talks There are two points everyone should internalize about talks. The first is that they are a kind of communication—note the prefix—which means that they are bilateral, not “one way streets.” You have to fit your talk to your audience. What do they like? What do they already know? What, to them, would count as an interesting destination? What kinds of arguments and evidence do they find persuasive? What issues will they let you bracket? Would kind of tone would they see as appropriate? Years ago I gave a talk on a hot-button political topic (my first), and it went pretty well. A few weeks later, I gave basically the same talk at a different department and bombed. (Seriously, it was the most awful experience of my career. No sleep that night, nightmares for weeks.) Then I reworked the talk—changing the tone to be more serious, adding in more substance, clarifying the argument, making concessions to my opponents where necessary—and soon after, with another tough audience,...