Friend of the blog KT recently had an interesting experience hiring, and he’d like to share it:
My company is small, so I have much more freedom to run the process my way than a big-company hiring manager would. My boss gave me a lot of freedom to write and place the ad and select the candidates.
Right now, I’ve got a few young scientists under me (new bachelors grads hired one year ago), and we want to add a technician both to do some of the repetitive lab work and to have a bench of talent in case one of the young guys leaves. I took the ad my predecessor used last year and made some tweaks, including adding “or related experience” to the degree requirement. I’m strongly opposed to degree requirements; I think most of the time it’s a legal way of saying “we want a nice white suburban kid who’s like us.” It’s been my experience that older journeyman technicians with high school diplomas were often really valuable employees, while young BS grads being forced to start at the technician level see the job as a stepping-stone, leave if a scientist position doesn’t open up soon, and are often bored with repetitive work.
My boss didn’t want to put the salary range in the ad because he feared that every candidate would ask for the top of the range, but I argued back that we risked wasting time on candidates already making more than we can offer. The range is 35-40K, low for a lab technician in my moderately high COL area [redacted East Coast city], and I would rather get a smaller candidate pool of people who won’t ultimately refuse the offer because they’re already making 55 as a lab tech somewhere else. My boss and I discussed whether to pay hourly or salary, and I didn’t want the hassle of getting a time clock and punch cards for one person. I also remember how I was hourly in my first job as a QC chemist, and I always felt it was a not-so-subtle reminder that I wasn't really considered a professional at that company.
I posted the ad on Indeed and LinkedIn using the free option. I also tried a site called Handshake that posts the ad to local colleges, and got exactly zero applications from it. Other sites, or preferred placement on the ones I used, would have cost money. Indeed and LinkedIn were pretty user-friendly and yielded good candidates. Handshake seemed to have excessive gatekeeping, with each local college I targeted needing to approve an ad (very slowly or never) before it would be posted, and yielded exactly zero applications. One university even wanted me to dig up a bunch of information such as my company’s federal tax ID number, and I refuse to spend a lot of time to do them a favor.
I could definitely see how the job market has changed. In 2017, I helped my boss at the time go through resumes for a QC tech position. I remember seeing a huge stack of resumes for a low-level job that basically involved doing a simple test and writing down the number. In many cases, someone had a BS or MS followed by 5 years of awful Yoh/Aerotek/Kelly/Joule temp gigs doing low-level lab work. In 2021, I got a relatively small pool, and rather than lots of unemployed people with experience, I saw a lot of people trying to move up from somewhere like Quest Diagnostics to a real lab.
I immediately eliminated all non-local applicants. I got a boatload of applications from India, and several from across America, and there’s no reason to sponsor a visa or pay relo for a low-level position that isn’t very specialized. This left roughly 20 local applicants, a much lower number than what would have been typical in the past. I also got a few from personal connections. I gave each one a 15-minute phone screen (after emailing first and setting up a time so I wasn’t ambushing anyone), and several weak-looking candidates turned out to be strong after I talked to them on the phone.
I ended up with several good finalists, mostly non-traditional candidates. I tried to target people who would be willing to do technician-level work for as long as business needs dictate, but will also be promotable in the future. A person with a master’s 3 years ago followed by menial jobs turned out to be a great candidate, and would have gotten thrown out of any big company’s ATS. A person with about 20 years in hospital labs looking to change fields turned out to be another great candidate that anyone else would have overlooked. A young man with a high school education came with stellar references from another company he had been a lab tech for, and would have been booted from any ATS. I also found a few bright, underemployed people whose foreign university degrees were looked down on by American companies.
When it came to interviewing, I did my best to make the candidates comfortable and refrained from the kinds of interview questions that are designed to get someone flustered. Unless you’re interviewing someone to work in an ER, the candidate who can think clearest under pressure might not be the best fit overall. I was a pretty easy interviewer because I wanted to give everyone a chance to shine, not pick the one with the best nerves. You can get someone to reveal more when you don’t make it feel like an interrogation.
This is why I have zero sympathy for all those companies crying about a lack of applicants. They’re still doing the same things they did when they had to whittle down a huge stack of resumes quickly, and whining that they aren’t getting candidates. I believe we ended up making the right pick, but I felt bad about rejecting several great candidates.
I’m convinced that the solution is that the hiring manager must be the one to review the resumes, not some HR person or recruiter. I had to spend a lot of time on this, but it’ll be absolutely worth it when we hire the right candidate and not some “good enough” person Aerotek, Judge, etc sent.
Thanks to KT for sharing his experiences. Best wishes to those looking to hire, and to those looking to be hired. - CJ
