Strategic issues of the French academic job market

Contrary to most countries, the recruitment of assistant professors in France is centralized: recruitment committees submit a ranking of candidates to the Ministry of Education, the candidates submit their own ranking over the faculties that rank them and the Ministry compute the final match accordingly to these lists. The strategic issues of this procedure are not well known in France. We show that the procedure satisfies desirable properties of stability and optimality. To do so, we identify the matching rule used by the Ministry using the information available to the candidates. The structure of the algorithm that produces the final match is also analyzed. Finally, we discuss the existence of ranking quotas, new features of the next campaign of recruitment and their relationships with job mobility.