The US tenure-track CV: how search committees read, and what to leave off

A guide to the American academic CV for faculty applications: reading order, compliance omissions, and the difference between a record and a research programme.

Two minutes, three hundred files

A tenure-track opening at a US research university routinely draws two or three hundred applications. The search committee's first pass is fast and structured: research record, then pipeline, then funding, then teaching. Your CV should be built in that order for a research institution, because a committee reading against the clock will not go hunting. For a teaching-centred college, invert it and lead with teaching. Read the department before you order the document.

What must not appear

US hiring operates under federal and state discrimination law, and committees are trained to avoid information about protected characteristics. Leave off the photograph, date of birth, marital status, children, nationality and religion. This is the sharpest difference from CVs elsewhere; a headshot that would pass unremarked in parts of Europe can get an application set aside in the US, because the committee cannot be seen to have considered it. Contact details mean name, institutional address, phone, email and website. Nothing else about your person belongs on page one.

Education and the dissertation

Degrees in reverse order, with institutions and dates. Name your dissertation and your committee, chair first; the committee names carry signal in a way UK supervisors' names often do not, because American academia runs on advisor networks. GPA and Latin honors (Summa or Magna Cum Laude) are worth listing while you are close to the degree, and quietly droppable a few years after it.

Publications and the pipeline

Divide the section by type and by status: peer-reviewed articles, chapters, manuscripts under review, manuscripts in preparation. The last category is accepted in the US in a way it is not everywhere, and it exists for a reason. A committee is buying your next six years, so it wants the pipeline as well as the record. Use "in preparation" honestly, for work that exists as a draft, and be ready to discuss any line of it at interview.

Bold your name in author lists, keep one citation style throughout, and never inflate. Committees include people who will look up your papers before the campus visit.

Funding is a tenure question

The committee is asking whether you will earn tenure, and at most research universities that means external funding. List every competitive award with funder, mechanism, amount and dates, including graduate fellowships and internal seed grants. If you contributed to a larger grant without being the named investigator, say what you did: wrote the methods section, ran the funded study. A candidate who understands money is a safer bet, and the CV is where you show it.

Conference activity, invited talks and service

Separate invited talks from conference presentations; the distinction is read as a measure of standing. List service that shows citizenship, such as reviewing for journals, organising panels, or departmental committees. Keep it brief. Service fills a paragraph of the story, never the spine.

Teaching, with evidence

Name the courses, your role, and the enrolment. Where you designed a syllabus, say so. If your evaluations are strong, give a number and its scale rather than an adjective. The teaching statement elsewhere in the application carries the philosophy; the CV carries the facts that make the philosophy believable.

References work differently

Unlike the UK convention, US applications usually collect letters of recommendation through the portal, so the CV itself often ends without a referee section. Follow the advert. If it asks for names, give three to five with titles and emails; if it asks for letters, your job is to brief the writers well and early. Letter culture in the US is effusive, and a merely polite letter can hurt, so choose people who know your work closely and will say so at length.

Format for the tired reader

US Letter paper, not A4. Generous margins, a restrained typeface, dates in a clean right-hand column, and page numbers with your surname on each sheet, because printed committee packets get shuffled. No colour, no design flourishes. A CV that looks like a document rather than a poster tells the committee you know the genre.

The document is a programme, not a list

The strongest tenure-track CVs read as an argument: this person has a research programme with momentum, money follows them, students learn from them, and the next six years are already visible. Order the sections for your reader, cut what does not serve the argument, and tailor for every application. The committee spends two minutes; spend the half hour that shapes what those minutes find.