Here are 26 tips on giving a successful job talk. You can use this list as a guide when working on creating your research presentation for an academic position or research-based role.

1. Good to have pretty pictures on the title slide.
2. A “quick orientation” slide quickly provides information to the audience on what to expect. It has helped me to deliver my talks. Here, you give basic info on you and your project immediately after the title slide.
3. It is very important to show knowledge of the field as a whole and acknowledge other work. Do this for your research early on in the talk.
4. In a “background slide,” you can expect questions where understanding what is being asked is critical. Get clarification on the question. 
5. It is important to tell the audience why they should care early on so that you can keep their attention throughout the talk. 
6. Break down confusing things into bite-sized chunks.
7. Spend enough time explaining everything in a heavy slide. If there is quite a lot going on you could lose your audience.
8. When explaining a very critical concept limit to only one concept per slide ideally with a cartoon or picture to help visualize. 
9. When appropriate, connect things to real life. Like a picture of people in front of your experiment. 
10. Include pretty pics whenever possible to give the audience a break from consuming heavy topics. 
11. I use cartoons to explain our process of detection. 
12. The more obvious you can make the things that are most important for the audience to understand the better off your talk will be.
13. Remember that you represent the field at large, not just the part you have contributed. Act like a leader of the field and give the audience a status of what is going on in that world. A postdoc is about becoming a world leader in your field of specialization, not just a student. 
14. A divider slide gives the audience a mental break and orients them in the right direction. 
15. Don’t assume your results will be obvious to the audience. Make the takeaways clear and tell them exactly what they need to focus on or what important things came out of the analysis.
16. Important results should be highlighted and delivered as one important thing per slide.
17. Show results before methods. Before telling the audience how you got the results, just tell them the results. Don’t make them wait till after the methods slides. Show results first and keep methods to a minimum. This highlights your impact.
18. Work that is of interest to the audience, even if ongoing, should be addressed or at least mentioned in your talk. This makes you current.
19. Break down difficult concepts to be as accessible as possible.
20. Show pictures that capture your research experience and associated travel to demonstrate that you are a well-rounded scientist.
21. Don’t only show the finished products. Always show something ongoing because research never ends. Show your current, unfinished work, and be excited about it. If a researcher is not excited about their work, they cannot expect to be funded for the same.
22. I talked about my hardware work towards the end because more people care about analysis. Not that I agree with that.
23. Before showing hardware improvements I talked about why these upgrades were needed. Always motivate everything before showing content on that topic. No-one cares otherwise. Talk about what big problem you were trying to solve and tell it like a story. 
24. I introduce the solution after talking about the problem for a few slides so that it is clear that this is an important contribution.
25. In the last science slide, I show another project in progress, something exciting to end the talk with. This drives home the point that I am an active researcher who is working on problems I care about.
26. You can leave summary and conclusions up as you take questions.

Hope this helps you create a successful job talk! Good luck and let me know any questions. Check out the book covering this topic.