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paul garrett
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In addition to other useful remarks:

The first filter is your "pedigree", which is PhD school and/or post-doc institution, advisor, and letter-writers.

The length of your research (and teaching) statement(s) can be whatever you want... however, in those statements you are "selling yourself" in the face of competition from many other roughly comparable applicants. The point is that a boring or tedious or too-technical research statement will "put off" hiring-committee people in other fields, so they won't read to the end, or even past the first page. Thus, the research statement has to "sell" you both to specialists and to non-specialists, since, after all, there's probably just one or two people on the hiring committee who could appreciate the nuances of your work. Even though it typically happens only marginally, thinking in terms of "broader appeal" can be very helpful. Thus, in effect, the first_page of your research statement should have optimized visual impact, and be an artful combination of info-for-experts, and of overview-and-broader-significance for non-experts.

On similar principles, there should be an immediately-visible version of publication list that lets both specialists and disinterested-non-specialists see "numbers" and "journals" at a glance. Including abstracts and further information is fine, on subsequent pages, but bear in mind that many people will not look past the first page, so that's your chance to make an impact.

Also, grants, fellowships, honors have an impact on "disinterested non-specialists", since these are intelligible. Get that on the first page of CV.

And, disagreeing with some other remarks, and agreeing with some: avoid lukewarm letters at all costs. Hiring committees do not "average" the letters. Rather, even if you have two glowing letters, a single negative or even ambivalent letter can be fatal. The reason is that, in effect, there are so many applicants that there is some incentive to find a reason to eliminate as many candidates as possible, before looking at the pluses of the remaining ones. Thus, a "blemish" can be a target for hiring committee members in other fields, who might be happier to hire someone with interests closer to theirs anyway.

Post Made Community Wiki by paul garrett