Let me second other comments about dress. In my experience it doesn’t matter as long as you stick within a certain range, not too elegant but not shabby. Dress as others in your field do when they give conference papers. The comment about the short skirt reminds me of a sunk candidacy at my own institution. The talk and the rest of the visit were superb but some of the senior women were outraged. Why take the risk?

as for clothes, it always blows me away how much people stress about clothing. But more than that what my colleagues and the internets say about people’s clothing and my own experience mentoring working class students for whom all of this is new, make me more sensitive to the stories of mocking, humiliation, and disqualification that do go on. (But like I say in my tongue-in-cheek posts about the issue, clothes cannot get you a job or, in most cases, prevent you from getting one; and I don’t think most of us care as long as you do well on the job talk.)

I attribute this to the fact that, contrary to what you might expect, people in the sciences get much better training in oral communication. In physics, we would never consider hiring somebody who hadn’t already given at least a dozen talks at conferences, as colloquia, etc. On the other hand, I’ve spoken to interviewees in philosophy who haven’t given a single other talk in the last 2-3 years. And the people with little experience tend to be the ones giving the bad talks. In other words, the best practice for a job talk is giving other talks. Indeed, if you have to put your job talk together from scratch, you are already at a disadvantage. I put together my job talk with material from two earlier talks I done, which covered the same material but at different levels.

And this brings me to one of my points of advice. Job talks should not be geared either to a general audience or aimed solely at specialists. Rather, it would be best to include some material at each level. You want to appeal to interested people in the department, who have enough knowledge that they can understand why your conclusions are important but won’t be able to follow the detailed arguments. Half or more of the talk should be pitched at them. However, you should take some time to wow the specialists with the intricacies of your work. Otherwise, they just have to take your word for it that your results are really as meaningful as you say.

On the subject of graphics, I cannot recommend them strongly enough. Doing presentations electronically makes it easy to incorporate graphical elements. I studied design as well as physics, and one crucial principle is that people remember information they are presented with much better if any text is broken up with some graphical elements. The graphics don’t need to be of any deep significance. When I talk about high energy astrophysics, I include pretty pictures of nebulae and quasars. (Historians can substitute photographs or maps of the places they are talking about.) There is no need to talk about these graphics for more than a sentence each, if they are not particularly informative, but there mere presence will liven up a presentation and make it more memorable.

I would add to the need of practicing (and practicing a lot) the need to practice in front of people who know nothing about your research or your field. Your dissertation committee and friends likely know your dissertation project well enough that they will unconsciously fill in gaps in your presentation. Somebody totally outside your field, however, will have a fresh perspective.

Finally, if you are interviewing at a university in a small town, don’t, for the love of GayProf, talk about how terrible and boring it was to go to grad school in a small town.

You could say this about a lot of good places: “Seriously–if you’ve been invited to campus, then the vast, vast majority of people you’ll meet will want you to knock it out of the park. We want to be impressed and bowled over.” But in some contentious depts. there may already be a fight brewing and someone may be looking to take down the person supporting your candidacy. You shouldn’t worry too much about what’s going on behind the scenes, but also be ready for different types of visits. One of my friends was practically hazed at an Ivy League campus visit, but then when the first two choices turned down the offers, my friend got the job. (And was then bullied for a few years, but that’s another post.)