Chalk or slides for a job interview? Finally! I've got invited for an interview for a permanent job (in mathematics), and now I have two weeks to prepare myself. Part of the process is giving a 25 minutes talk about some exciting recent piece of research. The first half should be accessible to a 2nd year student, and the audience is the faculty members.

I was advised by one of my colleagues to take this quite seriously (not that I wouldn't). And having identified a few candidate talks, I am now torn between the obvious question:


  Chalk or beamer?


Pro-Chalk reasons:


Talks go slower, so you can be sure more people follow.
More impressive to hear a good chalk talk.


Con-Chalk reasons:


Black suit.
Cover less ground, and possibly not enough actual new research (even considering the fact this talk will have no proofs and will just serve as an overview).




Pro-Beamer reasons:


Black suit.
No need to spend times writing complicated definitions, equations, or otherwise long and mathy statements.
Helps with time management.


Con-Beamer reasons:


It's easier to gloss over some of the details that you really should focus on.
It's a lot easier for people to momentarily lose focus and lose the entire talk because of a missed slide.
It gives an illusion of help with time management.


So any advice would be helpful.
I think you lay it out just fine in your pro/con arguments. At the end, it is also a cultural thing: In pure math, for example, chalk talks are acceptable and not entirely uncommon. On the other hand, in applied math they are very uncommon and it would be rather surprising to see someone give a chalk talk -- to the point where people would wonder whether that is the person we would want to hire. I suspect that in other fields, that stigma is even stronger: Imagine someone in a business school giving a chalk talk.

So it depends a bit on the cultural norms in your field. I would think that a slide talk makes sure you're always on the right side. I will also point out that chalk talks have real issues with visuals. For example, if your hand writing is not extraordinary, some people may not be able to read what you have to say. Secondly, there is  the saying that a picture is as good as a thousand words -- but good pictures are just really hard to do on the board because (i) it is inherently 2d, and (ii) there is a limit to the complexity that you can reproduce on a board. If there is anything in your talk that could be presented in a visual way (and I would say that there is, even though I know nothing about your research area), then it's worth doing that in a visual way and that implies that you'd be better off with slides in most cases.