The Interview Process: What to Expect

Now that you’ve submitted your application, the waiting begins…

Many jobs will start by reaching out for a phone screening to assess whether you’re a good fit for the job. If you pass the screening, you may be invited for an in-person interview. While there is some variation by job type, graduate-level job interviews typically last 1-2 days and consist of a job talk (or teaching talk), individual interviews, and a group dinner.

In the rest of this tab, we’ll cover what to expect during the interview process, including phone screenings, the typical interview schedule, and tips on how to structure your job talk or teaching talk. We’ll also provide specific advice for individual interviews, and tips on navigating dual career situations.

Before any phone screening or interview, we recommend visiting the faculty web page and finding people with interests similar to your own, as well as looking up people who are on your schedule.

Phone Screening

In our experience, about half of institutions will reach out for a phone screening before inviting you to an in-person interview.

Most institutions will give you a list of everyone who will be on the call a few days before the interview. This will typically include a couple members of the hiring committee. If the institution doesn’t let you know who is on the call, it is totally legitimate to email and ask. Knowing who will be on the call is important because it allows you to look up their publications and committee appointments. This can help you formulate thoughtful questions and demonstrate your interest in the school. For example, if you see that one of your interviewers is a member of a center you’re interested in, you can ask:

“I was looking through your website, and I noticed that you are a member of Center X. I am interested in this center because Y. What has your experience been with….”

We recommend that you have several questions prepared before the interview. Madeline found it helpful to write her questions on a notepad on her computer, so that she could refer to them if needed.

In our experience, screenings typically last 20-40 minutes, and are conducted via video conferencing. You will often start by introducing yourself and your research (some institutions may ask you to prepare slides). Then, for the next 10-15 minutes, your interviewers will ask you questions about your career goals and research. Finally, the last 5-10 minutes are typically reserved for any questions that you have for the interviewers.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the goal of a phone screening isn’t always just to see if your research is above bar. If you’ve made it to the screening stage, the committee already likes your application! Instead, the goal is to determine how well you can articulate your research in a social setting and assess whether you would be a good fit for the department. When a university or a research lab hires a colleague, they are hiring someone that they might work with for decades; they want to ensure the person is a good fit for their team and culture.

Phone screenings are also used by institutions to gauge your genuine interest in the position and whether you would likely accept an offer if given. This is especially the case for smaller institutions that can only afford a limited number of in-person interviews or that are in less desirable locations that may struggle to attract new hires. Before your screening, do your research! Make sure you know basic information about the location, and have answers prepared regarding what excites you about the area and why you applied. You might be surprised how many candidates fail the interview at this stage. For example, Madeline was told that a candidate at UMass Amherst had not passed to the next round because they indicated that they were excited about living in Boston (Amherst is two hours west of Boston and is a small town with 30,000 people).

Interview Visit Overview

We’ll cover what you can expect during a typical multi-day interview, including the length and structure, different types of meetings embedded into the overall interview, and tips for planning and preparation.

Martin Monperrus notes that this can vary significantly for European interviews: there is “huge diversity depending on the country and univeristy. Perhaps the only common point is the formal interview (from 45 minutes to 2 hours) in front of a committee (5-10 people).” This guide discusses an average US interview.

Length and Structure of the Interview

A typical interview lasts about one to two days, depending largely on the size of the institution. Larger departments or teams mean more people to meet, which results in a longer interview.

Arrival and Initial Meeting: You will arrive near dinner time on the first day. Sometimes, someone may meet you at the airport and take you to dinner with one or two others, but this varies by institution. After dinner, you’ll head to your hotel to rest before the main interview day.

The Main Interview Day: On the main interview day, your schedule will typically include:

• Breakfast: Your day will likely start around 8 am. Someone might pick you up for breakfast, or you may head directly to the venue. Your first meeting of the day, whether at breakfast or the first interview, is usually with your host. This is typically someone currently at the intuition who has a similar research area to your own, likes your work, and is responsible for advocating your case to the committee.

• Your Job Talk: If you are applying for Research Academia or Industrial Research, you will be asked to give a presentation on your research for 45 minutes to an hour. Your job talk might be scheduled early or late in the day. If it is later in the day you will have to include a five minute “elevator” summary of your research at each of your individual interviews. If the talk is late and the interview slots are thirty minutes, don’t expect to get anything done. If the talk is early you can use that time to discuss potential collaborations or answer questions they have (and they will have them!) about your talk.

• Your Teaching Talk: If you are interviewing for a teaching-focused position, you may be asked to give an example undergraduate lecture instead of (or sometimes in addition to) a research-focused job talk. This talk will also last 45 minutes to an hour, and can be scheduled any time during the day.

• Interview Meetings: Until around 5 pm, the rest of your day will be filled with back-to-back interviews, often lasting from 30 to 60 minutes each. You will likely meet with potential colleagues (e.g., faculty or researchers), senior personnel (e.g., a manager, department chair, or dean), and current students. It’s completely legitimate to take notes during these interviews; doing so will help you remember the conversations and the people you met.

• Lunch: There’s usually a break for lunch at a nice restaurant with two to four others.

• Dinner: If you didn’t have dinner the day before, you may have dinner with the three to five interviewers. This dinner typically starts around 6 pm, and lasts about two hours. After dinner, you’ll return to your hotel to rest.

Extended Interviews: For longer interviews (e.g., IBM Research, Georgia Tech, UMass Amherst, or large departments in general), the process may continue the next morning until lunch. If you’re staying an extra half-day, you can optionally arrange for the department to set up a visit with a real-estate agent. Even if it feels presumptuous, this is not awkward or insulting. Even if they don’t extend you an offer, getting a feel for that area will give you a broader basis for comparison when you are considering your actual offers.

The Different Types of Interview Meetings

Almost all of your time will be spent in offices talking to people individually. These interviews typically last between 30 and 60 minutes.

Meetings With Potential Colleagues: Most of your interviews will be with potential colleagues (e.g., other faculty or researchers at the institution). The goal of these meetings is to assess your fit within the department, explore potential collaborations, and discuss your research in more detail.

Below, we provide a list of questions that you may consider asking in these meetings.

Meeting with the Dean or Department Head: You will likely have a meeting (or lunch) with the dean, department head, or upper-level division manager. This meeting tends to differ from your other interviews. At many institutions, the dean will discuss exciting developments and multi-disciplinary centers. Initially, this may well sound irrelevant to you. However, such initiatives can be potential sources of collaboration and funding. You may also receive a copy of the department’s “strategic plan.”

Questions to ask the dean might include:

• Where is the department heading? Ask the dean to forecast things seven years into the future when you’ll have tenure. (invariably the department is growing and going up in the rankings unless you’re already MIT or McGill, at which point the department is working hard to maintain its number-one-in-the-country ranking)

• What changes have occurred in the last few years?

• What are the future hiring plans?

• What is the retirement plan like? This shows long term interest, and you probably don’t know anything about them yet as a grad student.

Claire met with at least three deans who had reviewed her application and had questions about her research. This was more common when the dean was a computer scientist.

Meeting with the Department Chair (or Local Hiring Manager): Typically, the last interview on your schedule is with the department chair or local hiring manager. During this meeting, the chair will likely mention that they are in the middle of the interview process and will conclude deliberations in a certain number of days. Make sure to get this timeline as firmly as you can, and write it down. The chair will also want to know what your time frame for making decisions is (e.g., when will you be done with your interviews). Ask why they are hiring. Is it to develop courses? Bring in students? Do more research? Bring in grant money? Grow the department? Ask if they expect to continue to hire in the future, and how much they have hired in the past.

Meeting with Students: When setting up your interview, arrange for a meeting with graduate students if it’s not already on the schedule. This meeting can be over lunch or in a common meeting room during one of your slots. Be wary of any institution that won’t let you to meet alone with graduate students (or undergrads if you’re at a college).

In these meetings, you might get anywhere from 3-4 students to up to 10-15. Larger groups can be more challenging to manage as you will have to lead the discussion.

Sometimes the students will have seen your talk and will have (often very good) questions. Claire’s toughest grilling during her interviews by far was at the hands of graduate students. However, much of the time the students will be young (first or second year) and often won’t really have anything to say.

Occasionally, students will ask tough questions like:

• “what will you bring to this department that we don’t already have?”
• “how does your research influence your teaching?”
• “what courses will you offer when you first arrive?”
• “how will you choose your grad students?”.

You should have answers to all of these – don’t be like Wes and get surprised by them in real-time.

You should take time to ask a bunch of questions, such as about their research, the program requirements, their background, and so on. Claire tried to think of issues that mattered to her as a graduate student and ask about them, such as if they felt the faculty was responsive to their concerns or how much their input on this particular meeting mattered in the hiring process. See below for more ideas about what you might ask.

Navigating the Interview Dinner: The interview dinner can be long, especially when you’re already tired. You might need to navigate social situations, such as deciding whether to drink alcohol, dealing with someone dominating the conversation, etc.

We recommend that you plan in advance for potentially stressful social situations. For example, both Claire and Madeline made it a rule to have at most one glass of red wine, and only if someone else ordered alcohol first.

Claire’s “silver rule” (after only drinking if the host is drinking) is “never say anything mean about anyone, especially not your current institution or other institutions at which you are interviewing”. She notes that this rule applies even if your current institution is legitimately dysfunctional.

Martin Monperrus elaborates that for European interviews, “the informal dinner/lunch is a classic, and — cultural difference :) — it might happen in a good restaurant. My recurring advice to my students is to train to have a great academic conversation at a restaurant”.

Following Up: We recommending sending “thank you” emails, at least to your host. We also recommend following up with schools in which you’re interested, especially if you have deadlines from other schools.

Wes notes that during an interview you may receive invitations from individual faculty to move toward collaboration on a future or paper or grant proposal. If you do not receive an offer from that school, it is understood that those invitations to feel out a collaboration are entirely optional. There are many good people at many good institutions you might work with, and there is no expectation that you form a working relationship with each one. Phrased another way, being nice to people and looking for potential collaborations does not hurt you (instead, it helps you).

Personal Considerations

Dress Comfortably: It really doesn’t matter what you wear, so wear what makes you the most comfortable. No one will remember if you wore coordinated separates instead of a full suit. They might remember if you were obviously uncomfortable in your clothes or if you couldn’t walk because of your shoes. If you are comfortable in a suit and have one that fits you and you want to wear it, go ahead. If you are purchasing your first suit since high school to interview, abort. Claire, Wes, and Madeline pulled their interview outfits from their existing wardrobes. If you do want to wear a suit of some kind, practice giving talks and sitting around in it before your interviews.

Prepare for Exhaustion: It is basically impossible to communicate in advance how tiring the interview process is, especially since interview season is also prime get-stuck-because-of-snow season. Flying every other day (especially from coast to coast) is exhausting (East Coasters have a real advantage in terms of jet lag). With time zone shifts you’ll never really be able to get a good meal in transit (except for the ones they take you to), so pack some snacks!

Beyond transit, being “on” for a day and a half can be extremely draining. Aside from these interviews it’s rare to spend nine hours (!) consecutively talking to people about complicated topics, knowing that your future employment is on the line. You must smile and be friendly and in a good humor the whole time. It’s not difficult, but it does take more energy than you think. Talking to professors you don’t know for a nine hours is not like talking to your friends for nine hours. Claire always travels with ear plugs, an eye mask, melatonin, and a kindle/book to help sleep, as well as a bathing suit and workout clothing to take advantage of hotel gyms when available. Take care of yourself physically. You do yourself no favors if you are so tired and strung out that your are no longer at your mental best.

Individual Meeting Questions

As mentioned above, the majority of your interview will consist of one-on-one sessions with senior researchers or faculty members you’ve likely never met before. Expect the worst-case scenario: you will have to fill the entire 30-60 minutes yourself by asking questions. To help, here are some questions (and follow-ups) that at least one of us has asked during interviews, along with typical responses you might encounter:

Questions you can ask:

Generally, try to have a set of questions lined up. For two days, people will repeatedly ask you if you have questions for them. Claire just repeated hers when necessary.

• What’s the funding situation like here? Have you had good luck with grants recently? When you were a new faculty member, did you get much help with grant-writing? Do you know of senior faculty collaborating with junior faculty, for example?

• What’s your least favorite part about working here? Everyone has only great things to say about this place.

• What can you tell me about the quality of the graduate students here? How did you go about picking your first few grad students? I’ve heard rumors that a bad grad student can be a significant drain on a new professor—how do you avoid that?
  • Answer at schools outside the top 15:

    The average graduate student here isn’t as good as the average graduate student at Berkeley, so you can’t always just take one from the pool and be assured of getting a winner. However, the best grad students here are just as good as the best ones anywhere else—it’s just that the tail of the distribution is longer.

  • Answer at schools from 5-15:

    The students here are great, but we lose our best candidates to Berkeley/MIT/CMU.

  • Answer at schools in the top 5:

    The students here are stellar.

• How important is technology transfer or working with the product divisions? What’s the funding model here? What happens if I pick something to work on and no one in development seems to like it? How do I make contacts with developers? How much academic freedom is there?

• What’s the tenure process like here? Can I suggest my own letter-writers? Are there mid-point reviews? Is there a “magic formula”? How many people have failed to get tenure in the last 10 to 15 years?
  • Common Research Academia Answer:

    There’s no magic formula. Teaching, research and service are all important. Officially, you must excel at two of the three and be adequate in the third. However, you can’t really pick research (or teaching) as the one to be bad at. Teaching can hurt you—if your teaching evaluations are below a certain threshold, you may fail to get tenure. Otherwise, we largely ignore teaching. The amount of grant money you bring in might be a factor, but we care more about paper and venue quality than quantity. One or two journal papers help. Before going up for tenure, you should teach at least one undergraduate class.

• Friends of mine who are professors at other universities have had to hide their teaching awards when they went up for tenure. The subtext was that if you had that much time to be spending on teaching you should have spent it on research. What are things like here?

• What’s the teaching load? Does it change after you get tenure? Can you “buy out” of a class? What does that cost? Who decides what you teach?

• What’s it like being a new single/married faculty member here? How did you make friends when you first came to the area? Was it easy to find things to do?

• Are the faculty young or old? Is the university structured and hierarchical? Do decisions come down from on high? How much power do young faculty members have? How much do young faculty shoulder the service/teaching load?

• What’s it like to live here? How long is your commute?

• What’s the worst example of office politics you’ve run into here? What do people fight over?
  • Common Answer:

    We’re very collegial. We don’t really have office politics. No one gets mad at anyone else. We sometimes squabble over space.

• What’s the general view on (your research area) here? Is it a second-class citizen? Is theory emphasized? Practice? Building big systems? Is the department planning to grow the area beyond this hire?

Questions they may ask you:

You should also be prepared to answer questions that interviewers might ask you during these individual meetings. Here are some examples:

• Tell me how your interests are aligned with some of the faculty here. Who could you work with?
  • This was by far the most common question. We encourage you to write down in an obvious place (e.g., at the top of your notebook) the name of anyone you think you could collaborate with so that you can answer this question intelligently.
• Are you married? Do you have a two-body problem?
  • See below on the two-body problem.

• What will your CAREER proposal be about?

• What will your first student’s Ph.D. topic be? How many students do you plan to have?

• What courses would you be willing to teach? Are you interested in creating new courses?

• How will you divide your time between research, teaching and service?

• Where will you get most of your funding? The NSF? Other government agencies? Corporate funding?

• What sort of research will you be doing in the future?
  • This is also a very common question. Nominally your job talk will have addressed this, but they may ask again in a more general sense—do you think you’ll be in (your research area) forever, or do you see yourself shifting to (another area)? Take this opportunity to distance yourself from your advisor—you want to argue that you can pursue your own work for tenure. In Claire’s experience, the more prestigious the institution, the more emphasis they give to this sort of question, sometimes phrased explicitly as “What do you envision your tenure case looking like?”

Several of these questions are secretly trying to determine if you know how a faculty job works, especially regarding the aspects to which graduate students are not always exposed. For example, “have you considered funding sources for your work?” is mostly an attempt to determine if you have have any idea how the grant system works.

Wes typically used up almost all of the time asking questions of the other person. Remember, you are there to interview them as well. Moreover, there are candidates who can’t keep a conversation going after the first five minutes, which is the kiss of (awkward) death (Claire heard this from people interviewing her in several departments). You want to convince your potential colleagues that you are someone they wouldn’t mind working with or sharing a hallway with. Being able to hold a reasonable conversation for 30 minutes is a good start.

Preparing Your Job Talk

If you are applying for Research Academia or Industrial Research positions, you will likely be asked to give a presentation on your research for around 50 minutes.

Structuring Your Job Talk: The general structure and content of a job talk can be easily found through a quick Google search (e.g., “academic job talk, computer science, structure”).

If you are lucky enough to be at a department that hires regularly, attend all the talks in the year before you go on the market, especially the ones outside your field. Take notes on how much introductory material, related work, detailed material, and future work are presented. Then, forget about it for nine months until you have to craft your own. In general, your job talk will discuss two to three papers that you worked on in grad school, connected into an overall narrative. You’ll also want to include a future work section.

Although the average time is “fifty minutes for the talk and ten minutes for questions”, different places will have different time requirements. At one stop, Wes was asked to fit the entire thing into 50 minutes. At another, he had 75 minutes. Claire found a similar spread. Prepare your talk in a modular manner so that you can add or remove sections. Bonus points if you can do this on the fly—frequent interruptions are common and can consume a lot of time. Try to avoid giving lengthy answers to questions posed in the middle of your talk (answer the question, but be succinct). At one venue, Wes actually had audio-visual difficulties that delayed (and thus shortened) his talk by ten minutes (!). Claire recommends traveling with your own laptop and VGA/HDMI/USB-C adapter to defend against such hassles. The exception is the FFRDCs (like Lincoln Labs), where defense department rules will require you to email your slides as PDFs ahead of time.

Claire changed her talk modestly between interviews. Moving things around a bit between presentations helped keep the talk fresh. After you’ve done it a few times, the jokes become very unfunny to you. Do what you can to avoid boring yourself.

Practice, Practice, Practice! Make sure that you schedule a practice job talk of some sort, even if only with your local research group. Everyone there will be able to give you advice on it. Make sure that people who are not in your field or office come to your practice talk. During your actual job talks, at most one or two other people will be from your field. The rest of the room will be made up of people from other domains within computer science. Besides, the people in your subfield are probably the reason you’re being interviewed; people outside your subfield need to be convinced. The exception to this is industry. In large industrial research labs, you will basically only present to people in your general area.

If possible, also try to do a dry run at a school to which you’re not applying. For example, Claire gave a colloquium talk at Virginia Tech about three months before submitting her applications. It wasn’t nearly so intense as a real interview, and it was nice to practice the talk with an unfamiliar audience before doing it for real.

The “One-Third Rule”: A common piece of advice suggests that one-third of your talk should be understood by everyone in the room, one-third should be understood by people in your general area (e.g., graphics, programming languages, systems) and one-third should be understood “only by you”. However, this advice is a bit controversial.

The trick here is that your job talk must serve many purposes. It must convince them that you are a good lecturer (i.e., the talk must be engaging and speak to your teaching abilities). It will also be their first exposure to your work (as above, many people will be reading you resume at the beginning of your interview – unless you’re at a small department, don’t expect anyone beyond your host to know anything about you or your work unless you say it to them) and must help to convince them that your research has substance. This point is actually somewhat tricky, because if they asked you for an interview they probably already believe your work is good enough (based on you resume, letters, and the local evaluation of the department members closest to your subfield).

It is our personal opinion that basically the entire talk should be understandable to everyone in the room. Motivation is key. Remind people of why your research area is worth considering. As a random example, a tenured AI professor may well think that “compilers are a solved problem”. It won’t hurt to remind such a person that your work is exciting. Claire often used the phrase:

“This is really exciting because…”

to help her audience roadmap key contributions. Keeping everyone interested will help to convince them of you teaching potential. In addition, if people cannot understand your talk they have no way to spot potential collaborations.

Most of us designed our job talks to be easily understood by everyone (heavy on motivation, context, analogies and pictures). Claire, Wes, and Madeline all received comments about how understandable they were, and we also got quite a few offers for collaboration based on them (e.g., graphics and database people were able to see possible fits, not just PL/SE people). The exception here is for industrial research (e.g., Microsoft, IBM): if your audience is be more closely aligned to your research area, you can sometimes skimp on motivation. However, including it anyways probably won’t count against you (because they explicitly mention that they realize that no one prepares two job talks, and that they know that the intro is appropriate in academia) but you can possibly earn bonus points by tailoring your talk to those audiences.

Wes specifically asked people after his talk if the lack of “Greek letters” or “complicated-looking material” hurt his case. Typical responses included “it wasn’t a problem because were able to see how intelligently you handled yourself when answering the questions” or “it was fine because we already know how good your work is” or “no, not at all.” However, Claire was advised of the 1/3-1/3-1/3 rule many times throughout her job search. Thus we cannot give you a blanket guarantee that following our approach won’t hurt your employability. We were willing to take that risk to stand up for something we believed in. We encourage you to consider it carefully.

Preparing Your Teaching Talk

If you are interviewing for a teaching-focused position, you will likely be asked to give an example undergraduate lecture instead of (or sometimes in addition to) a research-focused job talk.

Unlike with a Research Job Talk, the topic and time limit of a teaching talk can vary widely between schools. Some might ask for a lecture on a specific topic, while others leave it up to you. You may not be able to use the same lecture topic at all of your interviews.

While most common for teaching-focused positions, even for a research faculty position, some schools will ask you to prepare either a short commentary on your teaching style (in 2013, Iowa State requested 10 minutes of the job talk be dedicated to teaching), or an actual teaching demo (Waterloo requested a 20-30 minute example lecture, given separately from the job talk). Claire advises you to not skimp on teaching demo preparation. It can make a big difference in helping you stand out from the crowd, the rest of which probably did skimp.

Dual-Career Couples

In this section, we talk about strategies for dual-career couples, and if you should disclose your partnered status. The advice in this section applies to both regular dual-career couples and those facing the actual academic two-body problem.

For context, Wes and Kevin Angstadt were single when they were on the market; Claire and Hammad had partners who were planning to move with them and find a job in the software industry; Kevin Leach and Yu were partners seeking academic positions together in the same department (the traditional two-body problem); Madeline had a partner who wanted to be in a location where they could pursue their career in the arts. Wes, Kevin Leach, and Yu mentioned their relationship statuses in their cover letters; Claire, Madeline and Hammad did not.

You may be asked about your marital or relationship status during your interviews, though Claire never was, and believes that interviewers have become more attuned to this issue in general (especially with candidates who present as female). Regardless, the question is illegal.

One final note on partners and jobs: emigrating to Canada with a partner appears to be pretty trivial, based on Claire’s (serious) conversations with Waterloo on the subject. The Canadian immigration system remains straightforward, at least compared to the US, and their HR departments are practiced in providing support for the process.

Now that you’ve finished your interviews, it’s time to make a decision and accept an offer.