How to give a killer job talk

Step one: conceal the following post from your rivals.

Vitaly Gariev

The job talk—typically on campus, sometimes on Zoom—is the final boss of the academic job market. Don’t underestimate the challenge. You can’t just coast on the rest of your materials: unless you’re already world famous, you probably need a strong job talk. You can’t rely on the weakness of the competition, either: you have to convince people to vote for you, not just against the others, which means turning in a solid performance in your talk and Q&A.

My sense is that PhD students aren’t getting enough advice about job talks. And what advice they do get tends to come too late, which leaves them scrambling.

The good news:

1. Anyone can learn to give a killer talk.

2. Once you can do that, you’re 90% of the way to a killer job talk.

So here is my advice for (1) giving great talks, and (2) preparing a job talk in particular. This advice is mostly aimed at PhD students in philosophy, but there are also some tips about public speaking in general.

Any advice you’d give? Share it in the comments!

1. Good talks

There are two points everyone should internalize about talks.

The first is that they are a kind of communication—note the prefix—which means that they are bilateral, not “one way streets.” You have to fit your talk to your audience. What do they like? What do they already know? What, to them, would count as an interesting destination? What kinds of arguments and evidence do they find persuasive? What issues will they let you bracket? Would kind of tone would they see as appropriate?

Years ago I gave a talk on a hot-button political topic (my first), and it went pretty well. A few weeks later, I gave basically the same talk at a different department and bombed. (Seriously, it was the most awful experience of my career. No sleep that night, nightmares for weeks.) Then I reworked the talk—changing the tone to be more serious, adding in more substance, clarifying the argument, making concessions to my opponents where necessary—and soon after, with another tough audience, the talk went back to a hit. I had gotten complacent after the first talk purely because the audience had been a lucky fit. Don’t make my mistake!¹

The second key fact is that talks are not merely communication: they are also a performance. You are onstage. Yes, you are trying to convey an idea to the audience. But you are also, simultaneously, trying to show them how good you are at conveying ideas. (Think of the double-function of conversations during a first date or at a job interview.) I don’t just mean that you’re trying to convince the audience that you are oh-so-good. You’re doing the good thing. When you pull off your act in the spotlight, the audience will feel like you valued their time. It will also be a story they tell other people.

So many talks that could have been successful end up flopping because they’re not serious performances. The first words are “Um, so, um, so.” The speaker repeatedly apologizes for being unprepared. Typos mar the slides; filler desecrates the handout. Such gaffes are always worth avoiding. Even if, ultimately, they don’t interfere with your attempt to communicate, they will still detract from your performance.²

Those are the big need-to-know principles. Once you have tattooed them on your soul, you are ready to start filling up your bag of tricks. (The third principle, I suppose, is that you’ll need a trick bag.)

Here are 13 of my own tricks and tips, to help get you started.

1. If possible, have a story or example to share within the first minute. (As the creators of Breaking Bad learned with their cold opens, you have a lot of freedom in that first minute. Why waste it on pablum?)

2. Notice when you’re having to explain your examples at tedious length—or worse, apologize. Usually a sign you need better examples.

3. Don’t rush to the key question—or your answer—before the audience is ready for it. The audience needs to be able both to understand the question and appreciate its significance.

4. Don’t take forever to get to the first interesting question. If it takes you 30 minutes to prepare the audience, you may need to find a simpler or broader question to use as a lauching pad for the bulk of the talk. Once you’re in orbit, you can refuel and ask your more difficult, detailed question—the one that you would use when describing your contribution to a specialist. (You usually want to start out with something like, “Does evolution undermine objective morality?” as opposed to “Can we rebut the standard objection to the two-factor response to Street’s debunking argument against moral realism?”)

5. Plan a few goldilocks questions—not so easy as to be boring, not so difficult as to be intimidating. These can be questions that you go on to answer. Or they could be for the audience. You don’t need to be naturally charismatic to ask artful, engaging questions, but you may need to plan ahead.

6. According to legend, Gideon Rosen asks his students, “What’s the best objection to your view?” Something similar applies to talks. What’s the most fearsome question someone could ask? Expect someone to ask it.

7. You should also expect people to question your assumptions; to prepare for that, try to figure out which assumptions you can relax and which you truly need. According to almost-certainly-apocryphal legend, Gideon Rosen used to ask colloquium speakers, “What’s the weakest modal logic in which your argument is true?” Overkill in 99.9% of cases—but that’s the right kind of thing to ask yourself!

   

   “I dare you to say S5—I triple dog dare you.”

8. You should spend most of your time on your main topic. If you linger too long on peripheral topics, you’ll disorient the audience. Would you want to watch a film where the focus is constantly drifting to the background for no discernible reason? (One useful exercise is to ask yourself, for each chunk of your talk, what the focus is supposed to be. If the answer is ever “This cool idea that’s not really central but I didn’t want to cut it,” revise the talk.)

9. Avoid long stretches of monotony. How long since the last time you posed a question? Are all your slides the same shape? (As in, the same format, density, etc.?) Are all your sentences, paragraphs, and quotations the same length? Is there a part that builds tension? A part that releases it?³

10. Don’t be afraid to repeat your main points. Even the most alert audience members are going to zone out for a few minutes eventually. It’s good to have short reminders every now and then, especially for things that your last audience stumbled over. Try to be intentional about this; you want the recap to be shorter and sweeter than the canonical statement, for instance.

11. Practice, practice, practice—and practice. Find as many opportunities as possible to give your talks and make a point of polishing them over time. (Polishing is itself something you get better at with practice.) Ruthlessly pick apart your past talks like a coach watching game footage—at some point, you should also literally watch footage of yourself. Take note of disappointments as well as successes. You want the process of improvement to feel rewarding. If you find it depressing, don’t just accept that as a psychological given and get discouraged. Try to change your mindset. Mix things up.

Take it from Diogenes: always be practicing. (Also: optimize lighting.)

12. On that note, beware of psyching yourself out. If you’re really stressed about a talk, ask yourself why. There’s a good chance that you’re setting some expectation on yourself that, on reflection, isn’t reasonable or necessary. For example, you might be expecting yourself to give a talk in someone else’s style. Nomy Arpaly memorizes her talks and gives them without notes. Andrew Lee’s slides look like they were made by a team of graphic designers sent back in time from the techno-future. Steve Yablo’s talks will make you (or, at least, me) cry laughing. These are all great people to learn from—but you don’t have to give talks like any of them. I remember Xinhe Wu gave a talk on logic at MIT that was in a completely different style—no jokes, no slides, just carefuly planned use of the whiteboard, with instructions in her notebook. The talk was superb.⁴

Vitaly Gariev

13. How should you answer questions? This is going to sound almost like a tautology, but I promise it’s helpful. Address the main point, and try to be brief. It’s fine if you need a moment to pause. You don’t have to say thanks after every question. If time is short and there’s a long queue, you typically don’t have to answer all parts of a multi-parter. When in doubt, focus on the main point. I also find it helpful to give the gist of the answer straightaway—you know, “Yes,” or “Mostly,” or “Only if property dualism is true.” That will buy you time and keep the audience oriented. Plus it’s a good way to remind yourself that your answers should be pointed and clear, not convoluted and aimless.

Bonus tricks for Zoom talks:

1. Make sure you have a decent microphone. Even a low-end USB microphone can be a game-changer. Test the audio. Get a feel for how the sound changes depending on your distance from the mic. You wouldn’t believe how much of a difference good mic technique can make.

   

   Here’s the RØDE NT-USB+, for example.

2. Usually, a Zoom talk should have slides.⁵ Make sure you don’t get bogged down on any particular slide—people will get bored. As Masahiro Sakurai says, the essence of presenting is speed. This goes double for Zoom. But so does the rule that you should repeat your main points!

3. By the way, have I mentioned that you should repeat your main points?

4. Use an ethernet cable to deal with choppy wifi. If the internet drops mid-talk, remain chill. You’ll be fine. Panicking never helps.

5. Put some thought into your background, camera placement, lighting, and outfit (some clothes look different on camera). As with the talk itself, you don’t need to conform to any particular style for Zooming, but you do want to develop a style that feels good to you.

6. No gigantic text blocks on slides. This is a nice rule in general, but for Zoom it’s simply non-negotiable. Some people will be watching on their phones. Other people may be looking away from the screen. You have to use your slides carefully. You don’t want to be expecting people to read the whole paper off of them. If you want to keep yourself honest, try forcing yourself to use larger font sizes. Remember that blank space is your friend.

   

   Here’s an overstuffed slide. What could you delete?

Bonus tip for polishing:

• Don’t just give yourself huge, vague goals—like make the talk better. It’s easier to improve when you have one or two specific goals in mind. When I gave my practice job talk in grad school, a lot of people told me that I was cracking too many self-deprecating jokes. (Notice this deflects attention from the talk, a common feature of nervous tics.) My friends had a great idea: the next time I gave a talk, I should try to do it without any jokes. That was a pivotal moment for me. Though I still use jokes from time to time, I broke the habit of overusing them. (What’s your worst talk habit right now? How could you break it?)

2. Job talks

Every year, people ask me for help selecting a job talk. Here is what I tell them.

Almost always, the right talk is the best talk. It’s nice to pick a talk that specifically fits the vibe of a department, but if there is a significant drop in quality from Talk A to Talk B, then the default should be to give Talk A unless there are extremely clear and compelling reasons to switch.

What kinds of reasons might there be? Here are three big ones.

1. It’s a bad look to give your writing sample as a job talk.

2. If the job is in a certain subfield, your job talk should be, too.

3. Don’t pick a talk if credible sources tell you it’s a terrible fit for the department.

The upshot is that, before you go on the market, you want to have multiple potential job talks, plus lots of time to polish them. That way you can see which projects work best as talks. The ideal is to practice your potential talks in front of a variety of audiences before you start submitting applications. (This is why I said some advice about job talks comes too late. It’s best if you start submiting to conferences and volunteering for WIPs a year or so before job talk season—though a late start isn’t the end of the world.)

There are other, lesser principles worth knowing about. It’s good if the job talk develops a substantial original thesis, rather than focusing on existing scholarship. You want non-experts to be able to engage in Q&A. Ideally, the talk will point intriguingly towards the path of your future research. The talk should sit comfortably within the realm of your expertise.

Bottom line: if you have a strong, original talk that’s in the right area—and it’s not the same as your writing sample—you’re probably going to nail it.

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In closing, let me lament that nailing your job talk isn’t sufficient for getting a job. There are all kinds of inscrutable, arbitrary reasons why you might not get a certain academic job for which you’re qualified. It bears remembering:

• Most departments vote together on whom to hire, which leads to all sorts of collective action problems and path dependency.

• Hiring is a commitment (esp. on the tenure track), and there are tons of qualified fish in the academic sea; departments are therefore often willing to kick the can down the road and into the next academic year.

• Rarely do departments agree on what they want: tastes tend to diverge wildly, there may be factional logrolls (e.g. last year the epistemologists got their favorite candidate, so now it’s the historians’ turn)—and much of this is impossible for anyone outside the department to predict, or even to discern ex post, especially if the university’s administration also has a hand in the process.

Among many other factors.

My last piece of advice is not to put too much pressure on yourself in the moment. Find something you enjoy about giving talks—yes, even job talks—or think about the satisfaction you get from becoming a better presenter by your own lights.

In sum: rather than dwelling on the stakes and the glory, try to relax, focus on the stuff that’s under your control, and be grateful for the chance to practice one of the oldest human pastimes in front of what is almost certainly a very intelligent audience. It takes guts to stand up in front of a room and talk about your research—doubly so when the audience is full of objection-loving academics. To those about to give their first job talk, or really any talk, I salute you.

And if this advice ends up coming in handy (or, you know, dooms your career), please do send me an email (or, you know, exact your righteous vengeance). Good luck out there.

Further Resources:

• Paul Bloom on how to give an above-average talk

• Victor Kumar on how not to give a talk

• Patrick Winston on how to speak

• [Your suggestions here]

1. Also, while my younger self was highly accomplished in beating himself up, I don’t recommend doing the same. Like so many things in life, self-criticism has diminishing returns!

2. Al Hájek once told me to pay attention to the first words of talks and count the “ums.” Try it sometime.

3. I once saw an APA talk by Keshav Singh full of detailed, analytical arguments about the recent history of ethics, and Keshav concluded with a long passage from Peter Railton to illustrate his point. Reading the passage took maybe five minutes. This was a very unusual move, definitely risky. But it was a huge success, in part because it broke up the monotony not only of the session but the entire conference.

One more memory. I once saw Alan Garfinkel give a talk about structural explanation that included an astonishing variety of examples. He told stories about slime mold researchers, showed pictures of cardiac scans, and even played a video of Japanese traffic jam simulations. Those examples were so fresh and varied. Even nine years later, I still think about them.

(Shout out to Sally Haslanger for bringing Alan out of philosophy retirement.)

4. Corollary: it’s not a bad idea to explore different genres of talks, especially if you’re feeling restless. Years after Xinhe’s talk, I tried giving a talk in her style (except I snuck in a few jokes). That ended up being the second-best talk I ever gave. (The best talk was inspired by Andrew Lee’s style, and the third-best by Nomy’s. I quickly learned that I can’t do Nomy-style talks unless I obsessively think about the script for days on end—so I never do that anymore, except on the rare occasions when I’m asked to give very short talks, e.g. at a high school, in which case the prep is more manageable.)

5. You could alternatively use a handout—but I have too many thoughts about handouts to fit into this post. The main thing: don’t make the handout too long. It’s indulgent. Personally, I prefer one page, front and back, but others like to go a little longer (especially if they have references, images, etc.).

Whatever the exact page count, the general point is this. You’re better off if you force yourself to distill your main ideas. If you need a script, just write a script—don’t clog the handout with flourishes and asides. Save something for the actual talk!