The importance and influence of "top" journal publications in philosophy hiring processes is a terrible idea.

Giving an advantage to people who have had the luxury of being able to wait 9-12 months for a tiny chance of a top publication seems unfair.

Are you selecting the best people? Kind of. You're selecting from among those who can write a good enough paper. But: you're selecting people who lucked out on getting a long postdoc with no or few publications and who then further were lucky enough to get reasonable referees.

This just doesn't seem like a good way to run things. I mean, there's an overabundance of good young philosophers, so it's not like being selective in this way will make it hard to find good enough candidates.

But it also seems like the cachet these journals have and their value to job applicants contributes to the huge number of submissions they get which shrinks their acceptance rates further and makes long review times more likely.

So not a good system all round.