What’s Happened With Academic Job Market Vitas?

            What is up with the CVs that academic job market candidates are circulating this year?  Something seems seriously off the rails, and I hope folks will take note and consider fixing it for the future.

            This year’s job market CVs are a weird mash-up in which job market candidates are shoving to the front anything that seems to them relevant to an academic job, and then pushing down below a variety of other information including most of a person’s professional career.  Work experience, publications, presentations, all are broken into strange, small, and often unfathomable categories.

            Although the intention seems to be to put one’s qualifications for an academic job up top, the real effect is to make it extremely difficult (and in some cases impossible) to piece together the candidate’s professional career.

            Take note:  I’m not the only person thinking this is bizarre.  Our entire hiring committee is scratching its head, and I’ve yet to talk with any hiring committee member who believes it makes any sense.  (I’m confident a contrarian will surface here in the comments, blogging being what it is, but still, market candidates, take note.)

            I’m not sure who started this trend, or who is promoting it as the right thing to do.  But here’s a pro tip:  it is not helping you, and folks should stop it.  Indeed, my free legal advice is to think about getting to schools that are seeing you an old-fashioned vita, the kind that actually tells people how your career has proceeded.

            That’s what a CV is.  A summary of your professional life.  It’s designed to let readers know what you have done. It is fine to rework the CV to emphasize aspects of your career that favor the particular job for which you are applying.  But it is quite another thing to design it in a way that hides essential information.

            Schools want to know what you have done professionally.  They want to be able to make logical sense of your career and education to date.  They very much want to know if you have professional experience, including practicing law.  Indeed, I do not know one school where having actually worked in some practice setting is a negative.  It is almost always a positive.  It is true that we are hiring PhDs without this experience.  (And we are even hiring non-PhDs without this experience, though I for one am dubious of candidates who neither have PhDs nor some serious practice experience, even if only for a couple of years.)

            When I look at a CV I want to know about someone’s education, about their professional positions, and about their publications.  Divided into those three categories and those three alone, not subdivided into tiny pieces, so that I can make sense of it.  I don’t want clerkhips in one place, practice in another, and random teaching gigs yet somewhere else.  I want publications to all fall in one place on the CV.   And sure, I’m happy to learn about presentations – though I don’t care that much – or about other things that may be worthy of mention.  But if I can’t get the basics, I’m frustrated and not likely to be impressed.

            And, again, I don’t think I’m alone in this.

            So I’d suggest we let go of the latest trend, and go back to the old-fashioned way with CVs.  I’m all for innovation, but not when it is a step backward.