I was asked for 5 types of documents in general:
Research Statement
Teaching Statement
Curriculum Vitae
Publication List
Cover Letter
I found particularly useful the career center at the University of Rochester, a person helped me with the grammar, how to apply to postdocs and guided me to understand how to apply for industry jobs. For now I will concentrate on the documents.
Maybe what was most useful for me was to understand that you apply to
types of jobs. I mean, I was applying to Research and Teaching jobs, so
my CV and Cover Letters were optimized for it. That helps to make the
people understand that you are interested on the job, and makes your application stronger.
Here are some recommendations:
1) Try to have the same template for every single document, that will give a nice look to your documents.
Actually my research statement does not have the same template, since I needed to make it an article (latex), but all the other including the teaching statement and the publication list have a similar template.
2) For the Cover Letter make sure to include the name of the position that you are applying to. I have heard ( happened to a friend of mine ) to end up in a different program. So make sure to have something like: "to apply for ... position" or Subject: position candidacy. Also, make sure that you have contact information on every single document of your application, that will make it easy for the job committee to contact you and your documents will not get lost.
My CV has my contact info on every page, the rest on the first page. My Cover letter is one page long ( really should not exceed this ), the length of the documents will vary depending on the type of job that you are applying to, I'm mainly interested in jobs with research with some teaching, so my Research Statement has 7 pages ( 5 without bibliography and image ), Teaching Statement has 2, CV has 3, Publication list 1 ( 1 published, 2 in progress ).
3) The Teaching statement is not philosophy, is more like a compilation of stories that you want to tell, about how you interact with the students, what you try to do in class, and what are your points of views in teaching, what are your successes and such... Please not about what is the meaning or role of teaching or a teacher.
4) Make sure that the name of the files are descriptive, for example:
Alejandro_Gomez_University_Of_Rochester_Cover_Letter_Postdoc_December_2011_Berkeley.pdf
you get the idea.
If you want to have any of my documents send me an email... I will reply with one of my applications.
I seriously recommend that a professional checks your application, I had the chance to work with Burt Nadler at the career center and it helped me a lot, here are some links that you might found useful:
http://www.rochester.edu/careercenter/
https://www.math.lsu.edu/grad/handbook/hb9
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~mgsa/w/index.php?title=Applying_for_Postdocs#Cover_letter
http://www.ams.org/profession/career-info/new-phds/emp-academic-job-search
http://blogs.ams.org/onthemarket/2011/09/23/applications-for-academic-jobs/
http://www.experience.com/entry-level-jobs/
I ended up buying a book on how to write in English, for my future articles and documents :).
