Your record is not your strategy.

Profile versus performance

At a research school, your file sets the range. At a teaching school, what you do in the room can still change the result.

Here is the mistake. You get nervous about the market, so you start adding things. One more workshop. One more line on the CV. One more paragraph explaining that you can teach the core, the elective, the methods course, and whatever appeared on the department homepage last night.

Stop.

That is not strategy. That is desperation wearing office clothes.

For a research-intensive business school, the committee is buying a research profile. It wants to know what problem you own, what your job-market paper proves you can do, how the next papers connect, and whether the whole program can survive after the dissertation is finished. By the time applications open, most of that evidence already exists. Your conference delivery will not turn three unrelated projects into a coherent agenda. Your charm at dinner will not create a pipeline.

Do not respond by exaggerating. Do not call every working paper “groundbreaking.” Do not turn a modest extension into a new field. Bragging does not make a thin record thicker. It makes the committee inspect the record more closely.

Your task is positioning. Give the committee one clean sentence for your scholarly identity. Make the job-market paper the strongest proof of that identity. Show where paper two and paper three go next. If a project does not help the committee understand the program, do not force it into the first five minutes.

Teaching-focused searches work differently. There, the process produces new evidence. A clear teaching demonstration can move you up. A muddled one can end the candidacy before lunch. The committee watches whether you define the problem, check for understanding, use an example that students can follow, and recover when nobody answers your first question.

Do not deliver a compressed research seminar and call it teaching. Do not paste a “Think–Pair–Share” slide into the deck like a decorative fern. Teach something.

For a research-school interview, lead with a precise identity: “I study how organizations respond when new technology disrupts established work.” Then show how the papers build that claim. For a teaching-school demonstration, choose one difficult idea—say, why incentives can backfire—give a concrete business decision, ask students to make the wrong inference, and use their answer to teach the correction.

These are not absolute categories. Research schools care about teaching. Teaching schools care about scholarship. Spare us the false binary. The point is weight. Ask which evidence can still move the decision, then spend your preparation time there.

You cannot rehearse your way into a research record you do not have. You can absolutely talk your way out of a teaching job you were qualified to get.