Listing interview talks on CVs - an ethical dilemma...

[sensaes]

...or just pointing at another elephant in the living room?

Interesting blog post from FSP:

"On CVs, it is common to include a list of invited talks given at other universities, research labs, professional organizations, or companies...Should you include interview talks? You don't have to indicate them as such of course, but should you even list

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[poldyb]

Assuming it is fine (as I do) to put 'interview talks' on your vita, do you list the fact that you may have given the same "interview talk" at several schools in a year? If so, how?

Re: Related question

[sensaes]

Tricky, isn't it? I suppose you could always resort to appending version numbers - 1.2, 2.0, etc.

Re: Related question

[tyopsqueene]

Ha! I've seen people list several conference talks with the *exact* same title on their CV, or very, very similar titles. It really did make them both look like one-trick ponies. Best to do 'selected talks' and only mention it once, IMNSHO.

Re: Related question

[poldyb]

I've wondered about how best to do it myself - for a few years after my PhD, I had several campus interviews a year. I gave one job talk two or three times each year, but a different one subsequent years. I used the "selected talks" in the past. Now I just list year, title, and the schools.

However, I disagree with most of the comments below - these "job talks" were full, 60 minute research talks. The talks I gave became articles later. I treat job talks no differently than I do for invited talks and I see no reason to exclude these talks from the CV.

More awkward, though, are "invited" talks I have delivered at Universities where I've been a part-timer.

[new_kid16]

I don't think people in my field (history) do this; at least, I have never done so, been advised to do so, or known anyone who does so (though I could well be naive about this). I mean, sure, the place is interested in your research, but because you applied for their job, which seems kind of different from them calling you up out of the blue. Besides, job talks in history are usually a different genre from other kinds of scholarly presentations (at least, at the entry level; if you're jetting around the country interviewing for full professorships, well, I don't have a whole lot of experience with that!), so it would seem weird to include them with the standard conference stuff.

I think mostly I just wouldn't want to list the places where I'd interviewed and not been hired, which is in essence what I'd be doing.

[korean_guy_01]

This. It just seems like including a reference for the sake of a reference. If I can't elaborate at length about an item on a resume or CV, then I'm not putting it on there. I don't want to give the appearance of having filler especially if it could come up during the interview.

[sensaes]

"I think mostly I just wouldn't want to list the places where I'd interviewed and not been hired..."

Bingo. If one is judging one's performance, and the overall success of a talk, failing to get a job at the end of it is as powerful a negative indicator as it's possible to envisage.

[coendou]

How is anyone to know from the CV listing whether you were given an offer or not? You may have declined.

[tyopsqueene]

Why...would you bother in the first place? Are invited talks/conferences honestly that prestigious that it's worth using job interviews to pad that section out? Surely any really prestigious talk will be flagged as such (at the blah blah exclusive conference, plenary talk at the whatever, so-and-so centenary address) so there's no point sliding in job talks just to make up the numbers. (Unless you want your CV to be some sort of 9 volume epic, I guess).

As per, I don't get it.

[max_ambiguity]

An invited talk is especially prestigious when you're so famous in your field that people will call you up out of the blue and offer to pay you money to come speak, as opposed to applying for the privilege and footing your own bill like the rest of us schlubs. I don't consider job talks in the same category as that, although the term "invited talk" certainly invites confusion.

[tyopsqueene]

I think that as the person [1] who's done most of the inviting at two different departments for the past six years I now know it's much more to do with whether some random woman saw your presentation at a conference and thought you were a half-way competent presenter
and/or whether you're her friend who she hasn't seen in a while
and/or you just happen to be working on a topic someone she's trying to suck up to is working on and she wants you all to go out to dinner on work expenses and schmooze.
than being 'so famous in the field'...

I dunno, maybe everyone else is more ethical about it ;)

[1] Oh! Hey! I'm female and competent, bring me thine admin and huddled masses.

Let it all out.

[sensaes]

That felt good, didn't it? ;o)

[helixaspersa]

I don't and never have. I can see though that there might be a short early-career phase where you have given relatively few talks and do not yet have many publications, and at that point a job talk might represent some research that has not yet made it into an article but which you want to flag up by including on your CV.

I think beyond that point it looks a bit desperate though.

[nineveh_uk]

I think beyond that point it looks a bit desperate though.

Absolutely. But I would go further and state that unless these are recorded as interview talks, it sounds potentially like misreprentation, which can get one into an awful lot of trouble.

Interviewer: So, Dr X, I see from your CV you gave an invited talk at HArvard. What context was that in?

Dr X: It was at an interview.

Interviewer: Well, I don't know why you didn't you get that job, but I know why you're not going to get this one!

[knut_hamson]

I've only given one talk as a job candidate, and have not included it. It was largely drawn from my dissertation, but tailored specifically for that interview, in an attempt to tie together my research and teaching. I did not list it on my CV, because I felt that the talk was part of the interview, and not necessarily as presentation to the larger academic community.

[aquarian_days]

I felt that the talk was part of the interview, and not necessarily as presentation to the larger academic community.

That's an excellent way of putting it. Going to a conference, publishing a paper, etc., is (ideally) meant to be a way of joining the academic conversation with other members of our respective disciplines. I have a hard time buying the argument that the job talk does the same thing. After all, it's given to a small panel of selected members of the department who may or may not have an interest in the presenter's subfield, and who are there first and foremost to judge the presenter's level of professionalism, rather than to grapple in an interested way with the presenter's topic. And not just the search committee, pretty much everyone else in attendance at the job talk is there, at least partly, to evaluate the candidate rather than learn something from the talk. So how can this really be argued to be a "presentation to the larger academic community"?

[knut_hamson]

Well, to look at it from another angle, I do know of some schools where candidate job talks are not confined to a small section of one department, but are open university events, where faculty from other departments - that is, those not part of the hiring process - may attend. That may make such talks more public, delivered to a larger academic community.

I'm looking at my one experience, where I was told to prepare a talk on my current research and how my teaching comes out of that, specifically mentioning courses on their books and courses I hoped to design.

As someone pointed out above, some conference talks are not peer reviewed, so while they may be to the larger academic community, they were not vetted, where job talks are (by means of the interview process). In this regard, why should such conference papers be listed on the CV, but not job talks?