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comment by b_b
b_b  ·  563 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: May 10, 2023

Help me out, everyone. Where do you go looking for employees in this day and age? I've recently started a small biotech firm, and I'm thinking of hiring a tech. I have the money, and don't have the time to do all the work on my own. But I can't use LinkedIn, because my firm is still kept secret from my "real" job. I was thinking of calling the local universities and just asking some profs I know if they have any recent grads with biology research experience looking for an entry level position? Reasonable? No bad ideas here.





kleinbl00  ·  563 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Get an employer account on Indeed, browse resumes that match what you're looking for, and invite them to apply. Do not bother posting the position publicly. You will gain exactly nothing by letting looky-loos waste your time.

Do not ask "some profs" because academia, universally, has a batshit insane understanding of the labor market. They will go "looks like people were paying $18 an hour for this position before the pandemic, are now paying $25 an hour, but I keep hearing people aren't happy so it should be $35, and my students are better than anyone else's so they're worth $45, so I'll tell them not to accept less than $50 an hour because they'll likely settle for $48 that way and think of me fondly." Any resume or recommendation you get from academia, therefore, will be mortally offended that you are offering them half what they're worth by proffering the going rate. "Academia" decided that my wife should give up $250/hr clinical appointments in order to teach $150k/yr grad students a 3-hour drive away for $14 an hour because since she hadn't published in two years she obviously wasn't worth that much. They were vociferously, vocally offended when she turned them down.

Online hiring has become like online dating - of the 10% who feign interest, half of a percent are actually interested and they're really only doing it to reset their internal value meter. Over our last hiring cycle we looked at 250 resumes, invited 15 interviews, had 8 people show up, offered the job to 4 people, were accepted by 3, and ghosted by all three within days. Our total cost was over $6k. The only way you can accomplish anything is by doing your own headhunting (since all the hiring sites are full of companies scraping the listings, scraping LInkedIn, collating the data, sending out invites and charging a percentage).

We have taken to throwing elbows at the local school and reminding the administration that their students probably want to be able to earn back some of the $300k in debt they're accruing by actually working for a living, and the reason they've gone from 200 applications to 13 applications to 30 applications in the space of three years is because we decided the industry couldn't function without new midwives and painstakingly explained to them that the fact that there weren't any was entirely their fault. We also now proctor exams so that we can see first-hand who is available because the students held out as exemplars of achievement by the school tend to be vainglorious attention whores who hashtag them a lot on social media.

I cannot emphasize enough what an adversarial dumpster fire hiring has become, and whatever impression you have gotten of my contempt of the academic establishment is orders of magnitude less than I actually feel. I have deep and painful personal experience with three different local colleges in five utterly disconnected industries, all of which have departments either mid- or post-collapse because of the utter disregard of the necessity of industry applicability to their curriculum. I have stood before a provost and an industry advisory board, given them the rise and run of their entangled fuckitude, been scornfully disregarded and seen the provost fired and the program dissolved. Academia has many of the same problems as the Republican Party - they're entirely banking on the whims of a bunch of disinterested boomers and letting a generation bypass them entirely.

A good friend has been sweating bullets for six months over the prospect of getting his daughter into the dental hygiene school at a wrong-side-of-the-mountains community college. She has a 4.0 from one of the best school districts in the state and is a nationally-ranked gymnast. The dental hygienist program now turns away 90% of applicants because it is one of the very few academic programs in the state with a reasonable pipeline to employment. All else is vainglorious bullshit.

Meanwhile unemployment is at an all-time low. Employers have half-empty office buildings and their hiring pool is made up entirely of people who need to be convinced to apply for a job and then constantly kept happy lest they do it again. It's ultimately going to be great for the country but right now, employers are at "the beatings will continue until morale improves", the employees are at "take this job and shove it" and academia is at "why doesn't anyone want to spend $300k getting a job that pays $45k a year it must be because we aren't inspiring them enough."

Foveaux  ·  563 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    they're entirely banking on the whims of a bunch of disinterested boomers and letting a generation bypass them entirely.

Speaking as someone working in a university, watching it crumble despite our best efforts to keep it aloft - hear, hear.

b_b  ·  563 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thanks. I'm glad I asked, because it never would have crossed my mind to check Indeed. I'm hopeful there's a med school hopeful out there who would view this job as a big time resume padder. Beats the shit out of academic research, because you actually have to care about the end product.

kleinbl00  ·  563 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah and I mean, don't advertise the position as temporary? But when you find anybody, don't play the "where do you see yourself in ten years" game. If what you have is a skilled but non-inspiring position, expect to hang onto them until they have greener pastures. We tell our prospective clients that we don't expect them to be with us forever, that we sincerely hope they'll leave with more skills and knowledge than they came with, that they'll give us at least a month's notice when they find something better and that they'll say nice things about us when they leave.