Advisable
Over at Yellow Dog, an exasperated observation about that phenomenon (it's that time of year) known as advice to job-hunters:
...Narratives of experience are highly useful for navigating various situations. The ability to generalize from such narratives to other situations is where things can get tricky. Where one blog may be debating the ethics of Assistant Professors going back on the market, my experience says: I’ve done it many times as an Assistant. Where one blogger says X school wants X things, I may counter, I’ve worked at that type of school. We didn’t want those things when I was on a search committee. When another blogger lists a checklist of the job market, I can easily counter the four bulleted items.
This dissatisfaction with the MLA Self-Help Narrative (as I've just dubbed it) meshes nicely with complaints about that other well-known genre, the CoHE First Person Narrative of Self-Congratulation or High Dudgeon. Anecdotes about personal experience can be enlightening, exciting, encouraging, or just plain exasperating. But, while it's tempting to turn personal experience into some sort of representative map to success or failure, these academic mini-autobiographies can never take into account the overwhelming diversity of professional opportunities, roadblocks, politics, communities, and the like. There is no such thing as the ur-academic.
One of the frustrating, unspoken truths about giving advice to job-hunters is: no advice will be 100% effective. Take blogging. Will blogging kill you on the job market? That depends on whether or not the committee a) knows what a blog is, b) takes the time to read your blog, c) cares if you blog, d) finds your blog interesting, e) is likely to find the blog offensive, f) some combination of the above. In other words: goodness knows. Similarly, some committees will be turned off by theoretical jargon in your cover letter; others will expect it; still others might even be impressed by it. Some committees will form the wrong conclusions about the politics of your research; others will actually understand what you're talking about. Some committees will expect the teaching paragraph in your cover letter to come before the research paragraph; others vice-versa. It is possible to do absolutely everything right (to the extent that it is possible to know what "right" is...) and yet not get hired--or, if hired, not get tenured. The Yellow Brick Road of MLA interviews does not always lead to the Emerald City of Random Research I.
In Ian McEwan's Atonement, Briony Tallis learns the hard way about the existence of subjectivities other than her own. Academics, including academics supposedly attuned to "difference," frequently suffer from the same problem. When giving advice--positive and negative--it's tempting to represent one's own experience as not just normative, but also universal. Moreover, for the jobseeker (or tenure-seeker), it's equally tempting to read autobiographical narratives of academic success or failure as normative or universal, even when no such claim has been made. And given the exigencies of the current job market, such longing for the One True Path of Academic Success probably doesn't need much explanation.