Dave Jensen over at ScienceCareers published a nice article this week in his Tooling Up series. The article is entitled The Slightly Irreverent, Shake 'Em Up Job Search, and it's definitely worth a read. The title turns me off because it sounds like he's trying to be cool, but his larger point is that sometimes you have to bend the rules a bit to get past the inhumanity of online job searching.
Scientists aren't generally the most outgoing, personable lot, so online job applications hold a lot of appeal. I'd so much rather email someone than talk on the phone or (yikes!) just go knock on their door and say hello. But only 3-5% of job seekers actually find employment through online ads. So it's probably not a surprise that the 40 or so resumes I submitted electronically during my job search yielded nothing.
Despite not being very fruitful, I think that online job ads are really useful, particularly if you're looking for a way to leave academia. Even just a few hours of online job hunting gave me a sense of what was out there, what sorts of jobs I should be applying for, and what sorts of things employers value (communication skills and demonstrated experience seem to trump all else, including your doctorate).
The problem is that any old schmuck can apply for a job online, and someone has to sort through all of those resumes. Jensen's point is that you have to worm your way in an any way you can in order to make yourself a real person in the eyes of that HR person sorting through applications. His number one suggestion is to call the company, but *don't* call the HR department. Start talking to people in the company -- anyone in the company. Don't even mention that you're applying for a job, as they'll likely just forward you to the HR department.
I think this advice is solid. It's unfortunately hard to swallow, at least for me. I'd like my resume to stand for itself. And I'd like to believe that my experience and qualifications make my resume glow like a beacon of light in that huge stack of resumes. But perhaps the best way to show off your communications skills isn't with a bullet point on your resume but by, well, communicating.
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2 comments:
I left academia for "industry" several years ago. The biggest shock to me is how much harder it is to tell whether a candidate is an idiot or not, let alone well qualified, from an industry resume.
Reviewing resumes for an assistant professor position was easy. The list of publications, post-doc institution, and Ph.D. institution were enough to guarantee a pretty accurate measure of competence.
I also usually knew the research groups/labs, if not the references, personally. It was easy to judge whether to believe a letter of reference. A quick phone call would get a straight answer, if there were any questions.
In industry, there is no standard employment track, and no credentials are "refereed" like papers.
For example, I interviewed a candidate, who had previously been a CTO at well-known company. His resume read like God's gift to technology, and perfect for our open position.
He actually knew nothing about technology, and could not reason his way out of a paper bag. Time spent interviewing him was a waste of a day. Discovering this level of incompetence never required an in-person interview in academia, but regularly does in industry.
Note this difference: in academia, I would call up a candidate's current employer, and expect to get a straight assessment. This *never* happens in industry; calling a current employer is a way to get a candidate fired. A current/former employer is rarely candid anyway, because of fear of lawsuits.
The result is that networking is the only low-cost yet effective filter for basic competence a potential employer can use. At my current company, nearly everyone we have hired has been recommended by someone we knew.
While it is possible to find a good candidate via an online posting, or from a head hunter, it is much, much, more time consuming and expensive.
While you feel your resume stands on its own, for the employer, it is very difficult to tell your resume of actually abilities from someone else's wishful thinking.
along these lines there is a Q-n-A story in the nytimes at
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/business/yourmoney/01career.html
about the ease and difficulty of online job searching.
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