In this week's C&EN, a variety of interesting articles, including:
- From ACS Careers, 5 tricks to expand your job search.
- From Lisa Jarvis, an analysis of 4th quarter results from Big Pharma. (Pfizer's revenue is up to $58 billion a year -- is that crazy, or what!?! You could fund the NIH with that amount of money, and have cash left over.)
- Celia Arnaud has a pretty comprehensive writeup of the recent ACS report on graduate chemical education.
Enjoy!
"CRAIGSLIST. Small companies are increasingly posting job openings on Craigslist.org and often don’t post those ads anywhere else."
ReplyDeleteI find this pretty hard (impossible) to believe. Has anyone ever gotten a biotech job via Craigslist?
Though I have not managed to land a job via craigslist (yet), I have gotten interviews from job postings on craigslist. They do tend to be smaller companies, but you have a much higher chance of your reply actually going to a real person. This is in the Bay Area.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who is "in between" jobs and open to relocation, I've checked the craigslist biotech jobs section for several cities over the past six months. I would say it's highly regionalized. The Bay Area, San Diego, and Boston have lots of legitimate postings, as you might expect where there is more biotech. Raleigh/Durham has some as well, though I would say more contract positions. I would probably also include Baltimore / DC with a decent signal:noise ratio. Most other cities' biotech sections (e.g. Indianapolis, St. Louis, Austin) are prefaced with a craiglist scam alert (probably due to low volume) and tend to be more of the "become a science teacher" and "pipette calibration specialist" variety.
JMB pretty much hit the nail on the head.
ReplyDeleteI got a few interviews and one job offer through Craigslist ads. As JMB said, they're always from smaller companies. That doesn't necessarily mean the companies don't have a money, sometimes they're just cheap/stingy. This was the case with the one offer that I did get. I came to understand that company didn't advertise in C&EN or other routes because the CEO was a cheapass and skimped on everything, especially salaries. Nothing about the place sat well with me and I turned tail and ran as fast as I could away. I did get an offer on the spot, but thank god I decided to be patient and decline that offer.
Conversely, I interviewed with a nice (but small) government lab for a postdoc and got to the final interview stage with a tiny startup that actually sounded interested in training me in new chemistry and career development. I declined both because I secured a full-time position elsewhere.
Very interesting. I would assume a company advertising through Craig's List is looking for someone local who they don't have to pay to relocate. It sounds like JMB might have hit on a good strategy of checking CL for cities that they might be interested in living.
ReplyDelete