To: All Interviewees
From: Professor Zero
Re: How To Keep Me From Voting “No” Outright
Date: Forever
1. Keep your hands away from your face when you are speaking. I have seen as many as 80% of candidates per day cover their mouths, cradle their heads in one arm so that half the audience cannot see their face, and rub their noses. These behaviors are very distracting. They make me think immediately of the students, who will have to sit through your classes far more often than I will have to sit through meetings with you.
2. When asked about research projects or theoretical approaches, mention and explain specific issues, authors and texts. Do not be vague. This is not an after hours discussion with your cuates, it is an interview. There are people present who do not know your field well, and who are not in a position to simply pick up on your vibe. Be concrete.
3. When asked about teaching, mention and explain specific issues, authors, and texts. Keep in mind that when you teach as a professor, you must make decisions about which books to order for each class, and what issues and themes you want to discuss. Responses such as “I am open to a variety of points of view” are highly inadequate.
Postscript to Colleagues: It is wonderful to see how supportive you are of your students, and I understand that you fear grievances and lawsuits. Nevertheless, letters of recommendation which inflate the expertise of the candidate more than one hundred percent, seriously undermine your future credibility with me.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I have to do one of those “how to apply for a job” sessions. May I quote you?
Certainly! If it is a question of applying for jobs, I can say more:
1. Do not apply for jobs randomly. If you do not fit the job description in any salient way, your application will be disregarded. Save trees and stamps.
2. Line up margins on your vita, and be sure it is laid out and typed in a readable way. You would be surprised to know how many people do not do this, and how bad it makes them look.
3. Write your cover letter in clear and grammatical English. Proofread for capitalization and punctuation as well as run-on sentences and sentence fragments. Again, you would be surprised to know how many people do not do this, and how bad it makes them look.
4. It is said that it is terribly difficult to land an academic job, but I have reason to doubt this. Every time I go through a pile of dossiers, I reduce it by about 75% simply by eliminating the out-of-field applications, the applications from people who do not know how to write a vita, and those from people who write only semi-literate cover letters. I am not kidding.
5. Of the 25% of applications still standing, 5% then disappear because someone else dislikes them for some mechanical reason. Then we are left with the “real” 20%. You can be in that 20% simply by choosing where to apply in a realistic way, and then seriously proofing your vita and cover letter.
6. After that, a lot of people eliminate themselves by speaking into their hands at interviews, or by refusing to give a straight answer to a straight question. At this point only 10% of the original applicants are left standing. *All* of those people then get multiple job offers, even if not all offers are from “good” schools. The question of how many publications you have, and so on, really only matters for the very most coveted jobs … otherwise, if you can avoid the pitfalls described above, you can be a professor.
7. I am not kidding or exagerrating, although I am of course only speaking from my own observations and experience. I believe it is trickier in disciplines such as English and History, where the ratio of new Ph.D.’s to job openings is higher than it is in my disciplines, but I’ll bet these guidelines will be helpful to candidates in those fields as well.
Good stuff! But it should also be added that funds being cut so radically these days can mean that people who dot their i’s and cross their t’s might also have problems. Still, it’s infinitely better to lose a position for want of funds than because you don’t know how to portray yourself professionally (one situation is a temporary difficulty, the other a permanent handicap).