Dear Mathforum,

I am giving a job talk in the next couple of weeks and I am still struggling to come up with a suitable talk.
I graduated in september of 2010 and so I have been a post doc for a year and a bit. I am giving the talk at a "private, nonsectarian research university" which has roughly 25-30 faculty. I have between 5 and 10 papers on roughly 3 topics.

I was told the talk will be a colloquim style talk and not a specialized analysis and pde talk which is my area. Also I will not be giving a seperate specialized talk.

I am really struggling with what is the correct format I should use for my talk. In any case I will be using Beamer.

My question is should I:

1. pick one of my topic areas and then go through some background and then list my results (maybe giving a word or two about why they are not totally trivial)

or

2. Should I pick one small result and try and give a somewhat detailed account

or ??? (I have seen both done in the colloquim portion of a job talk).

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks David