Wednesday, August 13, 2014

ACS San Francisco Career Fair numbers: 94 positions, 651 job seekers

Reported to the ACS Council today:
Onsite employers: 38
Onsite seekers: 651
Onsite jobs: 94 
Virtual employers: 11
Virtual registered seekers: 720
Virtual jobs: 36
That's a jobseeker-to-onsite positions ratio of ~7:1, which is slightly better than the 8:1 reported for the 2014 ACS Dallas Career Fair. Please note, registered seekers for the Virtual Career Fair are not representative of actual attendance. 

11 comments:

  1. @CJ: Think there will be a fancy digital version of the infamous dry-erase board at the fair? After all, ACS is going to be in SF ;-)

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    1. Believe it or not, the white board has been eliminated, or at least it was not there in SF.

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  2. This is pathetic.

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  3. STEM SHORTAGE! STEM SHORTAGE STEM SHORTAGE!
    oh, wait....

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    1. Shortage of STEM jobs in chemical industry

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  4. I was at the VCF and noticed that a large number of the applicants actually should not be included among the "Virtual registered seekers" in the first place. They needed H1-B visas in the first place.......

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  5. Adding onto what Generic Chemist said, I saw good and bad at the virtual career fair from both employers and job seekers.

    I thought the format of the virtual fair was a bit annoying, but I get that they were trying to make it seem like a real career fair. The employer booths were handy if they were attended. I did manage to have some productive conversations with people at a couple of different companies. Many of the booths were completely deserted the entire time, including CAS.

    Job seekers, as always, were a very mixed bag. I found most of the chats within the virtual booths to be very embarrassing. There were a lot of people who decided to use the "throw shit to the wall and see what sticks" approach (you see this on LinkedIn as well). For example, there was one company with a single job opening for a PhD organic chemist. Pretty much everyone just decided to tout their credentials and hope for a callback. 5 people were actually properly credentialed organic chemists. 12 others were in utterly unrelated fields ranging from pharmacy to protein biochemistry.

    Overall, I took positives away from it, but I used it in a different way than most of the people there. I may need to change my pseudonym if this works out!

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    1. I thought this was a helpful comment. Thanks, Skeptic!

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    2. I hope I wasn't one of the folks you thought was throwing stuff at the wall. I am an organic chemist - I had three interviews. One of them was even a case of me being contacted by the company instead of applying myself. I'm hoping that's a good sign.

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    3. If you went into every virtual booth and gave the same pitch about your organic chemistry skills, including for jobs that were meant for biochemists, then yes, I'm talking about you. Based on your success, it sounds like you did the right thing and focused your search on jobs that you actually were a good fit for.

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  6. There are exactly 20 fake job seekers for every fake job! Oh, wait - what do they mean by "virtual"?

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20