Two-Body Job Searches

If you and your significant other (SO) are both going to be looking for jobs at the same time, you may face challenges not encountered in single-body job searches. If you must also consider the needs of children or other relatives, the task becomes even more complex. Of course, if you are lucky, your SO is seeking the type of job that can be found almost anywhere; maybe he is a kindergarten teacher, a physician specializing in internal medicine, or an Oracle DBA. In this article, we describe some of the complications that you may experience if you are not so lucky: you have a PhD in computer science and your SO is in a hard-to-place job category, and the two of you would like to live in the same metropolitan area. We will discuss the questions of how wide a net to cast in sending out resumes, whether to mention your two-body situation up front, timing considerations, interviewing together or separately, cancelling interviews, the negotiation stage. We will consider both academic and non-academic positions, with special attention to some of the trickier points of academic job searches. In addressing these questions, we will draw on our combined personal experience of two-body job hunts as recent as 2003 and as long ago as 1987, along with information gleaned from the two-body job searches of friends and colleagues. At the end of the article, we give references for further reading.