ACS Boston Career Fair: 81 jobs, 239 job seekers

Numbers reported to ACS Council on Wednesday, August 28 in San Diego, CA:

Participating employers: 31
Number of open positions: 81
Job seeker profiles: 239

So that's a pretty darn good ratio for ACS Career Fairs, as I recall, but the number of available positions seems a little low, but it is more than last year in Boston (a place, one presumes, where there are plenty of chemistry positions.) 

ACS Boston Career Fair: 62 jobs, 539 job seekers

Numbers reported to the ACS Council on Thursday, August 23 (link goes to Powerpoint):

Number of Employers: 48
Number of Jobs Posted: 62
Active Job Seekers: 539
Career Counselor Interactions: 544

As I recall, that's a pretty good ratio, although I suspect that the number of available positions is down somewhat. It's surprising to me that there weren't more positions for Boston, but I suppose that if I were a Boston-based employer, it's not clear to me that I would be exhibiting at the ACS National Meeting, instead of just holding an open house...

ACS New Orleans Career Fair: 26 jobs, 422 job seekers

These numbers reported to the ACS Council this morning (data thanks to friend of the blog Chris Cramer):

Number of Job Seekers: 422*
Employers: 15
Number of Jobs: 26
Recruiter Booths: 15 

Résumé Reviews: 316
Mock Interviews: 139

*There was a change to the way that job seekers were counted, so job seeker/jobs ratios can't be compared anymore.

The job seeker to job ratio is 16.2 to 1, which is the worst for quite a while. Note that, in comparing to previous years, it may be difficult. Still, a tough year for employers. (I sense this may be geography-related more than anything else, but I don't know who the employers were at this Career Fair.) 

ACS San Francisco Career Fair: 145 jobs, 459 job seekers

These numbers reported to the ACS Council this morning:

Number of Job Seekers: 459*
Employers: 32
Number of Jobs: 145
Recruiter Booths: 27 

Résumé Reviews: 351
Mock Interviews: 150

There was a change to the way that job seekers were counted, so job seeker/jobs ratios can't be compared anymore.

The job seeker to job ratio is 3.11 to 1; even with the change in how job seekers are counted, the ratio is about typical for an ACS Career Fair. 

ACS Philadelphia Career Fair: 172 openings, 710 job seekers

Reported to the ACS Council this morning at the Philadelphia National Meeting:

Job Seekers: 710
Employers: 37
Number of Jobs: 172
Recruiters Row Booths: 17 

Résumé Reviews: 348
Mock Interviews: 194

 4:1 job seeker-to-jobs ratio is better than San Diego this last March, and somewhat better than average for recent years. 

San Diego Career Fair numbers

Reported to the ACS Council this morning at the San Diego National Meeting:

Job Seekers: 739
Employers: 30
Positions: 106
Recruiters Row Booths: 13 

Resume reviews: 360
Mock interviews: 217

The 7:1 ratio is a little higher than normal, but not too high (I should really track this better.)

(There was no white board this year.) 

ACS Boston Career Fair: 229 openings, 846 job seekers

These numbers reported to the ACS Council this morning:

Job Seekers: 846
Employers: 58
Jobs: 229
Recruiters Row: 15

Résumé Review: 444
Mock Interview: 254
Headshots: 513

I've been keeping records on-and-off since April 2009. This is the third best ratio since then, I think (3.69 job seekers to jobs, top being ACS Boston in 2010 at 2.2-to-1). This is the 3rd largest absolute number of jobs (Boston 2010: 484, Denver 2011: 261). 

No Career Fair whiteboard at ACS Boston

Credit: @curiouswavefn

 Some nice posterboards, though.

Credit: @curiouswavefn

2015 ACS Denver Career Fair numbers

Reported to the ACS Council this morning:

Onsite Career Fair

Job Seekers: 715
Employers: 27
Available Positions: 85

Mock interviews conducted: 218
Résumé reviews conducted: 368
Career workshops conducted: 23

Virtual

Job Seekers: 918
Employers: 6
Available Positions: 38

ACS Denver Career Fair: 75 positions, 473 jobseekers

Credit: Linda Wang, C&EN

From C&EN's Linda Wang, the stats from Sunday: 

Employers: 25

Recruiters Row employers: 10

Job seekers: 473

Positions available: 75

Virtual Career Fair: 

Employers: 6

Job seekers: 494

Positions available: 7

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. 

Tom Barton is making sense

From this week's C&EN, a lovely little section from ACS President Tom Barton on #chemjobs: 

Availability Of Jobs For Chemists 

In 2011, unemployment among ACS members reached 4.7%, the highest point recorded since ACS began compiling data in 1972 on the employment status of its members. In the most recent survey, done in 2013, the picture had improved slightly, with unemployment among members falling to 3.5%. 

Despite this modestly encouraging news, job seekers at ACS Career Fairs, held at each national meeting, still find the number of available positions to be minuscule compared with the number of applicants. For example, at last year’s ACS national meeting in New Orleans, 131 job listings were posted, but there were 807 candidates for those openings—slightly more than a 6:1 ratio. Of those 807 people looking for work, 590 (73%) hold advanced degrees. 

The response to this invariably seems to be that we need to generate more jobs for chemists in the U.S., and of course this is a logical and laudable goal. However, another view that should be equally obvious is the possibility that we are training too many advanced-degree chemists, especially at the Ph.D. level. That’s an elephant-in-the-room viewpoint that needs to be addressed. (emphasis CJ's)

Because the overwhelming majority of chemists are employed in industry, I believe it behooves ACS to expend considerable effort to learn what it is that industrial chemists need from us. I have a concern that chemists in industry may view the society as more of an academic endeavor. (emphasis CJ's) That actually is not the case, and we must put in some serious effort to make sure that it is not reasonably perceived to be the case. Any thoughts on how to achieve this would be much appreciated.

I do not recall ever reading such a section from the presidential addresses of recent years past. I'll have to do a little double checking. 

#ACSIndy Career Fair: 99 positions, 523 job seekers

Credit: @CountTheBricks

The ACS Indianapolis National Meeting has the following stats, thanks to our multiple photographers, @CountTheBricks, @rgcjk and @xtalca:

Employers: 29

Job seekers: 523

Positions available: 99

Recruiters Row: 13

That's a ratio of 5.28:1 (job seekers to position), which is slightly worse than #ACSNola at 5:1, but better than Fall 2012 (Philadelphia), 5.71:1 and Spring 2012 (San Diego), 8.76:1.

Other photos after the jump:

ACS NOLA Career Fair numbers

As reported to the ACS Council for the 2013 Spring ACS National Meeting:

ACS Career Fair (Onsite):

• Job Seekers: 863
• Employers: 38
• Number of Jobs: 131
• Recruiters Row Booths: 10

Virtual Career Fair (Online):

• Job Seekers/Attendees: 552    
• Employers: 11
• Number of Jobs: 169

Looks like the number of available positions jumped from what was listed on the C&EN Jobs database. Good news, I think. 

ACS Career Fair board, #ACSNOLA: 130 positions, 651 job seekers

Credit: Sonja Krane

Thanks to both Matt Hartings and Sonja Krane, we have the data for Monday and Tuesday of the Spring 2013 ACS Career Fair.

Employers: 35
Positions: 130
Job seekers: 651

That's a ratio of 5:1, which is surprisingly better than both Fall 2012 (Philadelphia), 5.71:1 and Spring 2012 (San Diego), 8.76:1.

ACS Career Fair board: 144 positions, 829 job seekers

Credit: @sciencegeist

Fresh stats from the ACS Philadelphia Career Fair, thanks to @sciencegeist:

Employers: 44
Positions: 144
Job seekers: 829

That's a ratio of job seekers to positions of 5.75 to 1, which is a lot better than the 8.76:1 ratio at ACS San Diego. More positions than San Diego, as well.

Fewer positions than last year's fall conference in Denver, unfortunately.

The official numbers off the ACS Careers database shows 121 positions for the Career Fair and 40 positions for the Virtual Career Fair. Aigh. 

David Harwell responds to a reader question, talks ACS Careers' strategy

The other day, Anon040420120157p had the following comment on the official numbers from the 2012 San Diego Career Fair:

I think good or bad numbers like these are meaningless. Number of offers made based on career fair interviews - now that's something I'd love seeing!

In response, David Harwell of ACS Careers has a fairly lengthy e-mail, both on the statistics and on ACS Careers' general strategy for responding to these times:

The question raised by Anonymous is a good one.  We ask our employers if they made offers, and we ask job seekers if they received them; however, neither group is good about returning information to us.  It is also important to note that very few actual offers are made at career fairs.  Most employers are using the career fair as a first screen.  Therefore, it is more realistic to look for the number of people that received follow up interviews, or invitations for site visits.  We don’t have good numbers for those either.

Therefore, we concentrate on the variables that are most within our domain of control and/or influence.  Namely, I look at the number of employers and the number of jobs they bring.  In recent years, several things have changed making it harder to attract employers.  The biggest change is the availability of job seekers.  Employers have more candidates to choose from than ever before, and those candidates are actively searching out opportunities.  Therefore, employers don’t have to come to us, because, job seekers will go directly to them.  The second factor affecting onsite job fairs is that most employers are listing two or three jobs instead of 100 or more.  With that reduction in volume, many companies decide that it is not economically feasible to send a hiring manager to a meeting for several days to recruit.  The cost of travel and missed days on the job is greater than the gain of one or two people.  For this reason, we coupled our onsite career fair with our virtual career fair, and I look at them as one hybrid event.  Attending the virtual fair eliminates travel costs and losses of productivity.  We have been able to grow the number of jobs and the number of employers through this strategy.

With regard to interviews, the number one factor determining whether a candidate gets one is their application package.  This is out of our immediate control, but we can help.  At the last meeting, we doubled-down on our workshops with a new series called the Chemical Career Pathways series.  In the workshops we explore careers in four different sectors: higher education, industry, government, and self-employment.  We explore strategies to successfully address the application process in each sector with the exception of self-employment.  For self-employment, we lead attendees through the creation of a business plan.  We also offer resume reviews and mock interviews onsite and online to our members.  We know from surveys that going through the resume review process increases a candidate’s chances of a callback fivefold.

The Chemical Career Pathways series was piloted in San Diego.  We are currently optimizing the content based on participant feedback, and we will roll out the full-scale program this fall.

The second stumbling block for candidates is the interview process.  Again, we have beefed up our workshops and advice.  We also have onsite mock interviews, and an online practice interview program called InterviewStream.  Going through a practice interview with either system will increase a candidates chances of success significantly.  For the onsite program, we staffed the mock interview booths with hiring managers and HR consultants from ACS.

In the coming months we will continue to supplement our online support materials for job seekers, including a stronger focus on online applications.  For example, that means looking at a resume as an online document that must be optimized for searches (search engine optimization), as well as formatted for people.  As a start, we conducted an interview with Joshua Waldman, author of Job Searching with Social Media for Dummies, in San Diego with an online simulcast.  A recording of the event can be found in our OnDemand archives:
http://acswebinars.org/virtual-career-fair-2012
This is a big problem, especially for new graduates and postdocs, but we are trying to help in the ways that we can.  We are also open to advice, constructive criticism, and suggestions through careers@acs.org.

I'd like to hear from readers if they participated in the Chemical Career Pathways series -- it'd be interesting to know both what you thought of it and how your job hunt is going.

Official 2012 #ACSSanDiego Career Fair numbers

Reported to the ACS Council, regarding the Career Fair at the Spring 2012 ACS San Diego conference and the Virtual Career Fair:

Job seekers: 943
Employers: 31
Number of jobs: 85
Recruiters Row booths: 8

Virtual Career Fair (online):

Job seekers/attendees: 2,673
Employers: 14

ACS Career Fair numbers from #ACSSanDiego

Credit: @UnstableIsotope

Via @Unstable Isotope, the numbers from the Spring #ACSSanDiego convention's Career Fair:

Employers: 31
Positions available: 85
Job seekers: 775

For comparison's sake, here's all the ones that I've collected since '09. None of the numbers are pretty.
85 positions is the lowest number of positions since I've been collecting data (since spring '09, with the exception of fall 2009.) It's also the lowest absolute number of employers, just edging out 31 employers at the Spring 2009 conference in Salt Lake City.

As UI mentioned in a following tweet, the ratio is 9.12 job seekers to 1 position, which is the worst ratio that I have records for (just edging out the 8.76:1 job seekers/position ratio at the 2010 Spring ACS conference in San Francisco.)

Best wishes (and my sincerest prayers) for the job seekers out there. 

ACS Career Fair numbers from #ACSDenver

Reported to the ACS Council on August 30:

ACS Career Fair (Denver):

Job seekers: 765
Employers: 51
Recruiters Row employers: 16
Job openings: 261

ACS Virtual Career Fair: 

Job seekers / registrants: 3,925
Employers: 14
Job openings: 362