Question on "publication List" for applying to post-doctoral jobs 1) Many Mathematics departments ask to send a "list of publications" while applying for research postdoctoral jobs. My question is: how important is it to post my papers in arXiv. I know, posting on arXiv is always good, because people might search for the arXiv -ed papers, but how much difference is publication on arXiv going to make ? What if I prepare a publication list (in .pdf) of accepted paper(s), and submitted paper(s) and paper(s) in preparation and send it to the employers ? Will that be sufficient or as good as putting them on arXiv ? (I will also send them a link to my site containing the publication list, including the downloadable links).
The situation is: I can put one of my papers in arXiv, but the others are either in collboration or deal with problems that stem from a question raised by collaborator(s) and the collaborator(s) did't agree to put on arXiv right away. Hence I am asking.
2) Also what exactly should I write in the "list of publications", the name of the paper, author(s) and its status(accepted/submitted/in preparation), that's all or or should I briefly also describe its content/abstract (to make it more informational) ?
Thank you.
 A: Answer to 2): In my experience, I think an abstract is not appropriate in a list of publications.
Answer to 1): A submitted article that nobody can see is basically a non-existing article - the committee members do not even now whether it is a deep 300-page-essay or a 2-page-note. More generally, I believe that mentioning preprints or submitted articles in an applications is only somewhat intereting if the committee members can use these pieces of information to extract a pattern about your research, otherwise is not really useful, perhaps even dangerous ("this guy has posted his paper on XYZ in the arXiv in 2009 and in 2012 it has not yet been published, uhm").

Let me add that in the last few months the policies of Elsevier and Springer about arXiv have become explicitly supportive - see their home pages. This has been enough for me to convince all my co-authors to post our manuscripts in the arXiv - even those co-authors who would have been skeptical a few years ago. Besides, virtually all publishers allow self-archiving - I would be surprised if your coauthors would object even to your posting a joint paper on your own web page.
A: While usually I don't like answering questions like this on MO, there is actually an important fact here specific to the mathematics community which would probably be missed on academia.stackexchange, or another non-mathematical site.  
The answer to your 2) is:

There is no logic behind asking for separate publication lists for postdoctoral candidates.  Job ads only ask for them because it is a default setting on MathJobs, and nobody bothers to uncheck the box. You can just copy whatever list of papers you put in your CV (and leave the list of papers in your CV) or you can add abstracts.

The question 1) is a bit more serious, and maybe better for academia.stackexchange.  However, I would say that putting a paper on the arXiv is a serious signal that you think it is complete.  To me, it means something.
A: You should put the preprints on arxiv. This allows for other researchers to find your work, and to cite it.
In extreme cases, it can take 2-3 years to get a a referee report after submission, and then perhaps another year before finally getting published.
I am not kidding - I am speaking of personal experience.
In this time-frame, you might write several follow-up papers based on this initial paper. In order to get a follow-up paper refereed, you more or less must have all works it relies on available.
