After consulting with your mentors, you have decided to go on the job market this year [1,2,3]. Congratulations! This is a huge milestone. One that you have worked hard for since starting your scientific career. Now, you are probably asking the following: How do I go about it? This commentary aims to provide guidance for approaching the academic job search process and offer resources to help candidates start on the path towards obtaining their dream job. Importantly, we want to emphasize that the job search process is one of the most important scientific endeavors a candidate can undertake. As such, the process requires a significant commitment of time and effort [4].

The job search process can be divided broadly into four stages: 1. Preparing, searching, and applying for positions; 2. Pre-interviews; 3. Interviews; and 4. Post-interview processes. In Table 1, we provide candidates with a breakdown of each stage of the job search process. We include short descriptions, the estimated timeline, recommendations drawn from our experiences on the 2020–2021 job market, and resources we found to be helpful. In the era of COVID-19, a vast majority of institutions turned to virtual formats to conduct interviews. While virtual interviews offer some benefits (e.g., no travel), challenges can also arise [5]. Therefore, in Table 1, we also provide additional considerations for the “virtual” job search. Note that the advice and resources cited in Table 1 are not exhaustive but should serve as a solid foundation to get candidates started. In addition, we focus on searching for a position at an R1 institution. Approaches will vary for small liberal arts colleges, which place more weight on teaching and conducting research with undergraduates (For more information, see Table 1 “Different types of academic jobs” resource).

Table 1 Summary of the academic job search process, including descriptions, timeline, advice, and resources for each stage.
Full size table

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