Its great to know that there are ever increasing opportunities like the EAA Talent Workshop for accounting rookies to get themselves known to potential employers. Close to home for me, Downunder, we have the fledgling AFAANZ Rookie Camp on 22-23 November, 2018.
So, if you are an accounting rookie what is my advice about “selling” your job market paper?
My first simple message is – don’t think that the brilliance of your job market paper will sell itself! Maybe it will, or maybe (and most likely) it won’t!
My second message is: (lack of) TIME is your biggest enemy! The Recruiters have limited time to look at all the material on offer – and they have very limited time to look at your job market paper. You need to be able to “hook” them in 5-10 minutes – then you can “buy” yourself more of their time. Your abstract and Introduction will be a big target – but oftentimes our inability to convey clear thoughts in writing, mean that these parts of our paper will … NOT do the job. One reason is that we all write in different ways: we give different elements different written emphasis and it is easy to omit something in our writing, because we know it “too well” in our heads. So, with such variety of writing styles on offer, even reading through a relatively short (“free form”) Introduction section, can be a frustrating “search” exercise for the university recruiter.
So, my THIRD and main message is: why not offer up an “executive summary” of your paper – like a logical, structured extended abstract that captures all the things one might want to know about your job market paper? Maximum 1,000 words, that an expert in the field can read and understand in 10 minutes! JOB DONE!
OH, but I can here you say “… gee, thanks for the great advice, but what structure do you have in mind exactly? AND, what are the essential elements that will comprehensively “sell” my job market paper to an academic expert? If you can tell me that secret, then it would be a real help! …”
WELL: for the first time last year, in its 2017 Talent Workshop, EAA trialled a new initiative that offered such a structured framework – to help improve the communication of the key messages of job market papers to the recruiters: the “job market paper pitch“. This was a voluntary exercise. Workshop invitees were asked to aim for a pitch that is a maximum of 1,000 words – following the motto, “less is more”. Using the pitching research framework it was even better: “structured less is even more”. You can even watch a 9-minute YouTube video animation that explains the “reverse engineering” pitching research method:
To guide you in completing your job market “pitch”, as trialled by EAA last year, please see the attached file. The WORD file contains 2 parts:
(1) it begins with a cued version of a job market pitch template – the template provides brief suggestions on what you should include in your worked pitch.
(2) and then offers an accounting example (based on a recent TAR paper).
This blog post builds on my previous one available at: https://bit.ly/2NqpKTR
Additionally, you can access a large library of worked pitches (several of which are accounting based) at the following web page:
https://www.business.uq.edu.au/supplementary-material-pitching-research
