1) Department has a high tenure bar. Junior faculty is disposable. Some work out, some don't. To make this work, department also has to be attractive enough that high performers want to stay. Harvard, Stanford, a few others can make this work. Advantages: you get the best of the best and you don't have to go after them later in their career after they've already put down roots somewhere else.

2) Department is good at spotting talent early, before the publication record or early in the publication record. Some departments are very good at this, and have built impressive faculties by bringing stars in before they are stars, and then hoping they put down enough roots that they stay in spite of the inevitable offers that come in. Helps to be in a place people want to live. These schools don't have the deep budgets and wouldn't be able to hire the stars once they are stars, so their only way of getting stars is to spot them before anyone else does, and then make them happy enough to stay. Only works if you can read the pipeline. If you screw up, and the tenure bar is also low, you end up with a bunch of duds.

OP's argument falls short, however, because OP fails to realize that universities have other goals in mind in hiring aside from just producing good research. Many universities are constrained to hiring a specific demographic (female faculty, for instance) because donors have given money with that requirement. Other universities care about teaching, and maybe the worse researcher is the better teacher. There are many other factors at play in hiring aside from just hiring the best researcher.

Think Hobbes. the jobs go to the people who are nastiest, brutish, and shortest.

I know someone who's nasty, brutish, and short, and he's had a pretty tough time with the job market.

If you have, then you would know that people know that what he describes is how our world works-- it's that way at my middling R1 now, and was that way at the middling private R2 where I used to work. Every year, I have friends at SLACs call me to ask if I know of good women in my field.

The only question is whether the gender issue is explicitly discussed or discussed with winks and coded language, and whether the practice itself is treated with irony or earnestness.

Think Hobbes. the jobs go to the people who are nastiest, brutish, and shortest.

You got to claw your way in. "record" and "pedigree" dont mean NOTHIN

If it means sleeping with the search committee, or getting someone high, or even blackMaleing someone,

you gots to do what you gots to do.

If you want to become a part of the promised land, you got to promise you will do anyting to get to that land.

So, do it, good people.

A solo-authored APSR is, in fact, "virtually something." If you have one as a grad student, then you have a very significant head start on your way to a tenurable record.

and yes, if a person has a solo APSR and bombs the job talk, there are still good arguments for hiring the person. But a bombed job talk + acting like an ahole + terrible one on ones == may add up to not hiring that person.

if you think shite doesn't get through AJPS and APSR, you are hopelessly naive.

For such a candidate, I would argue that the job talk has the danger of being a distraction for hiring departments, as it adds noise to the equation by giving faculty who want to derail the candidate an opportunity to look for subjective reasons to discount the objective evidence (Harvard PhD and the top journal article).

Tenure is evaluated on the ability to write interesting work. Committees and departments should read the work, whether in JOP or unpublished. If a candidate has a solo JOP or solo APSR, then that should count even if the talk is a bomb. No one evaluates talks when they receive someone's tenure file.

Now using the talk to find a**holes or to learn that someone doesn't know much about their co-authored work is a different story.

Go on, try to name a single example from the past ten years. Just a single one.

The fact is that it's extremely rare for a grad student to have a solo APSR or AJPS, and when it happens, it's a very, very strong signal that the person will publish at that level again in the future. It's a much stronger signal than any recommendation letter from any pestigious adviser, or any dissertation awards, or a PhD in hand from any top department.

Go on, name name.

Why should the job talk matter? Failing a job talk suggests many different things: candidate could be too arrogant to put the time into developing a good talk. Who wants that kind of arrogance around? Even more worrying, paper may not reflect work of student but of advisor. Paper may be fluke, etc. Point: even with a solo APSR paper (which is a strong signal), it may be difficult to evalute quality.

When you're evaluating new PhDs/ABDs, there isn't much of a paper trail to look at.

Seems like OP's point is that there is a difference on paper between Candidate #3 with a JOP and Candidate #1/2 with nothing. And I agree, provided that the JOP wasn't co-authored with the advisor (which is a far murkier situation).

Two points:

1. This often happens at the department level. Committees come up with the short list and may issue a hiring recommendation, but the vote to hire is typically at the department level. Most department faculty outside the committee don't read the files, so the job talk is what they have to go on.

2. When you're evaluating new PhDs/ABDs, there isn't much of a paper trail to look at. Dissertations can be misleading insofar as there can be a lot of hand-holding by the committee, the candidate may just be doing a spin-off of the adviser's research, etc. And not to mention whether the candidate can actually teach. The job talk provides evidence of whether the candidate really can explain and defend their research, whether they can communicate effectively, etc. It's a different situation when evaluating advanced assistants and senior candidates, but then they should be beyond bombing a job talk, no?

The fact is committess put too much stock in talks and not enough in the research itself. A good talk + filling some perceived regional need in a department can often get someone hired when it doesn't make sense from the outside.

The "issues with the job market paper" comment is a fairly subjective commentary.

There's more to the hiring process than just your pub record, including whether you blow a job talk.

Now, stop bashing people and get back to work.