The Best Time to Search for Academic Jobs

It’s common knowledge that academic job announcements are seasonal. In general, hiring committees are formed in the fall; they announce positions, wait a month or two for applications, then spend weeks interviewing candidates before making a decision in March or April for positions that will begin the following September. I found some data to prove it, and to possibly guide those engaged in an academic job search.

I was playing with Indeed.com’s job trends feature, when I realized that you could search not only for particular skills and specializations, but for job categories. A search for “professor” reveals some nice peaks right around mid-October.

While a search for “postdoc” isn’t quite so periodic.

I can only guess that this can possibly be attributed to trends in funding for postdoctoral positions. It would be interesting to see if there is a correlation with NSF funding for science research.

We know it’s good to look for professorships in October, but does this hold true across all fields? Searching by a generic field name (”physics”, for example) doesn’t do much good, as it picks up all of the job posts that are looking for majors in that area. But we can look for specializations. For example, the graph for “superconductivity”, we see:

Which shows that the majority of positions are announced between October and January, and that the summer is the worst time to find one.

I tried to think up specializations in the humanities, to see if the pattern held. A search for “egyptology” gives us this graph:

I’ll allow you to draw your own conclusions.