TaxProf Blog op-ed:  The Legal Academic Job Market: 5 Tips for Screening Interview and Job-Talk Prep, by Nyamagaga Gondwe (Wisconsin; Google Scholar): 

Hello candidate. Congratulations on going on the market! This is a stressful process. I hope I can shed some light on some of its nuances to help you along the way.

Background
I went on the legal academic job market in 2021 (and began a tenure-track appointment at the University of Wisconsin in Fall 2022). The hiring process was transformed by COVID—you’ll hear some people who were hired before 2019 talk about “the meat market” a weekend-long spate of screening interviews at a DC hotel where entry level candidates screened with a handful of schools who might call them back for a second round following that process. By 2021, most schools conducted screening interviews over Zoom, which increased: (1) the number of initial interviews hiring committees could offer; (2) the time-span over which those interviews could take place; and (3) the number of screening interviews candidates might take.

When I was on the market, I did more than 30 screening interviews. The schools I interviewed with were all over the U.S. (I didn’t express any geographical limitations in my application). I was in NY at the time and only two were in person (in NYC). Out of those I was invited to do 15 callback interviews. It was a lot(!) but I learned a lot about this process along the way. I’ve taken calls from classmates who were going on the market in the past. This year, I thought I’d do my part to even the playing field as candidates prepare their applications to go on the market.

5 Tips for Candidates (in no particular order)
As you finalize your FAR form and wait for invitations to interview with schools, here are a few things to consider

1. your screening interview could touch on any of the materials you submitted (but probably won’t go through all of them)
Some screeners will feel like a mini job talk, when you will be peppered with questions about your job-talk paper for 20min; others will include a broader range of questions about your teaching philosophy, research agenda, why that school, etc. Be prepared by knowing all of the materials you submit. Also be very honest about your geographic limitations as you apply.

2. practice multiple versions of your job talk
The term “job talk” is a bit deceptive – the hour-long job talk during a callback interview is more like a workshop: you present the major arguments of a work in progress and the interviewing faculty asks questions.

The important part of the job talk is letting the faculty ask questions. During the callback interview, you should absolutely not speak for the entire hour. This means you should develop and practice your presentation.

You will be asked about your job talk paper over and over again during the interview process, so it is a good idea to practice how you respond to “tell me about your job talk paper” in a short 20-min screening interview AND presenting the hour-long job talk during the callback interview.

• Content
  • my thesis is…
  • I argue…
  • This work adds to/challenges/etc. the discourse in [subject area] by…
  • ultimately, i conclude..
•  Timing
  • the elevator pitch (1-2 min):
    Whenever you talk about your job-talk paper you should be able to describe it clearly to somebody who is not an expert in your sub/field of law. At the screening interview stage, you can expect that the hiring committee have all read the piece. If the interview doesn’t focus on the job talk paper, you might still have to give a brief synopsis of it and answer some questions about it. In this case, it pays to be very, very brief so that the entire 30min interview isn’t swallowed up with a lengthy description of your project. If you follow the model under “content” above (or one like it) you can easily draft multiple, varying-length descriptions of your job-talk paper by adding increasing amounts of detail.
  • 5-min short presentation
    some screening interviews are dominated by discussion of your jobtalk paper, which means there will be fewer questions about other materials you provide the hiring committee (though this line of questions could delve into your research agenda). This version of the presentation can include more detail about your work than the 1-2min elevator pitch, but should still be able to hit on major points within 5min to maximize time for interviewers to ask you questions.
  • full talk (15-20 min MAX)
    The full talk is the version you give to the entire faculty when(!) your invited for a callback interview. You will typically have an hour allotted over lunch to maximize attendance. The actual content of your job talk should not take up the whole hour. Advice about maximum length varies, but I typically heard (from mentors and hiring chairs) that the talk should be ~20 minutes from start to finish (15 minutes might be too short, 25 minutes is pushing it). Also note: You don’t have to memorize your talk. It’s like a planned lecture, you can bring typed notes or notecards with you.

3. mooting
You may have heard about the idea of “mooting” in law school or practice — usually in the context of moot court. Mooting an argument for court is simply practicing your argument in the context you will have to make it. It’s like a dress rehearsal but with people subbing in for the roles of opposing counsel and judge before the live performance.

Mooting your job talk (and screening interview responses, but definitely the job talk) is important long before you receive an invitation for a callback interview. When you discuss your job talk paper with the hiring committee, you can be 99% certain they have all read it, so even committee members who are not subject-matter experts in your field will likely draw questions from the text of your work. The live job talk is a very different ballgame. You should be able to present your work to:

• Experts and Novices
  Experts may draw questions from beyond the text of your Article, but within the discourse generally. These are people you may have cited in your literature review. Know who they are going in and be prepared for them to test the bounds of your subject-matter expertise.

  Novices are people whose area of expertise is totally outside the bounds of your work. (For example, as a tax teacher and scholar, I would consider myself a novice in any discussion about federal Indian law.) Questions from novices will likely concentrate on the information in your paper and/or talk (more on this in a second). So if your paper is still in development, make sure the talk is crystal clear to anybody whose expertise falls outside the bounds of yours.

• Readers and Non-Readers
  Readers are faculty members who have read the job talk paper and are listening to your presentation with it in mind. Write your job-talk presentation as if every faculty member has read your paper. That way, you can focus on a narrow scope of it without worrying about covering every minute argument of your Article. [Note: The job talk presentation shouldn’t be a point-by-point summary of your Article. It doesn’t have to be if you assume the reader has read your paper and you treat the job-talk like a workshop for a particular part of your work.] Readers will have more content to refer to when they formulate questions (the talk and the paper) and they may refer to parts of the text of your paper that you do not raise in your presentation, which broadens the scope of the discussion.

  Non-Readers include faculty who maybe…haven’t read the paper in advance of the talk. That’s ok, it just means that everything they know about your paper will come from what you tell them! Their questions will come from things you say. On the bright side, this means you have a lot of control over how they understand your work. On the down-side, a non-reader may fixate on a minute thing you mention once in your talk that is not central to your written argument. It’s a tricky balance to walk, but since you will draft and practice your job talk with literally everybody (including non-lawyers if they are feeling especially friendly), you should be prepared for the kinds of questions they ask.

• Skeptics and Believers
  This one is fairly straightforward: in every job talk there will be skeptics who are wary of the premise of your argument, your method, your conclusion, or all three. It’s not your job to turn these people into believers, just to make sure the talk remains squarely within the bounds of your argument and you can hold your own using your work as your steering wheel. (e.g., If your job talk paper is about tort reform in the 1980s and a skeptic raises a question about the McDonald’s Coffee Case (1994), you can say “I’m not an expert on that case but I believe it was informed by a movement that I mention in Part II of my Article…” Thus, you use the work you’ve done to politely regain control of the conversation).

  Believers can come in a variety of forms. These people are on board with your work (and likely advocates for you on the faculty). But beware-believers may not be the “friendliest” person in the room during the talk (maybe during small group sessions or dinner, but not in the Q&A part of the job talk). For example, you might have someone who is squarely in your camp who hounds you with questions about minutiae of your subject matter or argument. Don’t get flustered—that person is showing off how much you know and showing that you handle pressure well. Don’t see negative intent if someone approaches you with more intense questioning during the Q&A session, they may just be your biggest advocate. A believer might also be someone who redirects other faculty on your behalf. This is rarer (in my experience even intense job talks were super polite).

• The possibilities are endless.
  Faculty you interview with will fall on a spectrum of each of the typologies I laid out. You might have a novice who read your Article and some of the work you cited and is skeptical of everything you wrote. You might have an expert who hasn’t read your work and asks you questions way out in left field that are kind of relevant but not really. The only way to really prepare is to vary the make-up of the groups of people you moot your job-talk with.
  Bottom line, moot until you start to be able to anticipate questions from any of these kinds of people.

4. choosing references
The advice I got when I went on the market was have 3-5 academic references (former law profs or colleagues from fellowships/academic appointments). You can also add professional references (law firm partners, clerkship judges, government agency bosses, etc.), but they shouldn’t be your primary references.

5. put your references to work!
The hiring process can be very stressful. You will first wonder whether you’ll get initial interviews, then whether you‘ll get a callback, then whether you’ll get an offer. It’s natural to feel stressed about all of this—a future you’ve been dreaming about and planning for feels so close, but so very out of your control.

One way you can leverage your primary academic references is to tell them where you’d like to interview. This is a little bit like communicating your college interest list to your high school counselor. You should communicate closely with the references who do outreach for you behind the scenes.

Provide answers to questions like: what geographic limitations, if any, do you have; what courses are you most interested in teaching; and what courses are you willing to teach even if they’re not your top choice? If you give them a sense of schools you’re interested in (and the names of the hiring chairs at those schools (which will be in the August FAR bulletin) they can call colleagues at those schools so they know about you as their hiring committee begins their search.

There are no guarantees in this process but your chances improve if hiring committees know to look out for you because they heard about you from one of their academic peers.

Description:This image depicts a (very crude) scatter-plot I drew up to show the spectrum of faculty you might encounter during your job talk. The best way to prepare is to practice as many times as possible! (I couldn’t add the skeptic/believer axis without making it a 3D mess, so just imagine that attendees could include any combination of these types, anywhere along each spectrum!)

Conclusion
I’m excited for you to embark on this process! If you take only two things from this post let them be: (1) moot your job talk until you can give it in your sleep and (2) keep an open line of communication with your references.