APTC: Job Fishing in the Digital Sea

So, like many of us, I’ve been on the job market in the past year. I finished my PhD at the College of William & Mary (Hark upon the Gale!) and am trying to have that take me somewhere. To facilitate such, I have cultivated a number of online tools to notify me about job openings around the country (sorry, this is a US-oriented post).

To push the SHA’s effort, I’ll start with “our” resources. The SHA maintains a job board (click here), which I check frequently. Jobs are automatically removed after 90 days, so anything on there is fairly current. As we’re historical archaeologists, these are the most relevant to our specialties. The SAA maintains one, as well (click here). Like the SHAs, it’s a fairly standard enumeration of open positions, skewing academic, but their postings stay up there for longer. Beyond the job boards, there are some other, more sophisticated things to try.

The AAA job board operates, in some ways, like the SHA and SAA counterparts, but with more features. As a job-seeker, you can construct a profile for others to review, which is nice, but I get the feeling it doesn’t get used much. More useful, however, is the ability to set up automated alerts based on certain search terms. Every time a job gets posted on the AAA board with “historical archaeology” in the description, I get an e-mail alert with a link to the posting. It’s a very helpful function, and the e-mails usually arrive in the morning, right around when I’m spoon-deep in my cereal, so it’s a nice surprise with breakfast.

Archaeologyfieldwork.com is another go-to resource. It’s particularly helpful in that it comes in so many different formats. You can go to the page and use it like a standard job board. They also have a Twitter feed and a Facebook page, both of which will pop up in your various queues. A hearty tip-of-the-hat to Jennifer Palmer for making this such a valuable resource. My favorite way to access this resource, however, is an RSS feed. I, like many, bemoaned the demise of Google Reader, as it was my go-to resource for news reading. I’ve replaced it with Feedly, and loaded the page’s RSS channel (click here) as a feed, which updates regularly. AFW carries more agency and shovel bum gigs than do the aforementioned job boards. Shovelbums also does postings on CRM jobs, but in an older interface.

Also on Twitter, keep an eye on Get Anthropology Jobs (@GetAnthropoJobs), which carries a lot of adjunct and instructor positions, the helpfully-named Archaeology Postdocs (@archpostdocs), and ArchaeoJobs (@ArchaeoJobs), which is run out of Dublin and features more European content. I don’t subscribe to them directly, but have all of these in a private archaeology jobs list, which I can call up in Twitter or maintain as a separate stream in HootSuite, which lets you view more than the one Twitter feed at a time. I use HootSuite because I maintain my own Twitter feed (@cgdrexler) as well as that of my office (@aas_sau), and HootSuite keeps me from having to log-out and log-in constantly.

Also, on Feedly, I subscribe to updates to the Academic Jobs Wiki, archaeology jobs section (click here). As the name implies, it’s focused on academic jobs, but serves two purposes. First, like the job boards, it announces positions, though rarely something that doesn’t appear on the other boards. Well, belay that. It does carry more international postings than the US-oriented job boards already mentioned. What is, perhaps, more helpful is that, as it’s a wiki, people can anonymously post information on it about the progress of the search. Did the University of South Mumblesticks ask for phone interviews? They did? OK, I didn’t get a request, so that’s probably off the table for me. It lets the job-seeker start to mentally move on, and can provide some closure in an age when a lot of places don’t actually send out rejection letters.

On that last front, a friend of mine, Linda Ziegenbein, put together an Academic Job Rejection Letter Generator to provide full closure for those who are still waiting to hear from a lost cause. Lamentably, after a story appeared about it, the Generator received 10,000 hits in three days… wow.

OK, we have to wind up on a more positive note…

I know, I’ll highlight that the Arkansas Archeological Survey currently has three positions open. Two are for station assistants (one in Monticello, one in Arkadelphia), and one for a station archaeologist (in Magnolia). Check them out!

What resources and tools do you use as part of your job hunt? Leave us a comment below with your favorite resources, tips, and tricks!