Career-Building Sites On The Internet: Hunting For Jobs Electronically

With no signs that the continuing scarcity of scientific jobs will ease any time soon, job hunters are being challenged to take more creative approaches to identifying open positions. The explosive growth of the Internet is providing a new, highly efficient medium for the dissemination of information on scientific employment. Electronic replies to job ads, too, can give a job seeker a quick-response advantage over his or her competition. There are dozens of different places to look for job ads on the Internet, with more seemingly being added every week. One problem, in fact, is that there may be an overwhelming number of places to look. Nearly every major university posts job openings on its gopher server--a system that uses menus to point to various resources. Many scientific societies post openings, as well. Online job ads can be found on Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, World Wide Web "home pages," and electronic classified sections, not to mention commercial and noncommercial employment services. This list contains only a small sample of the dozens of free online resources for job seekers. Many of these resources can be obtained in a number of different ways in addition to the ones listed here. --In Usenet, look in the sci.bio or sci.answers newsgroups, where the guide is posted about once a month --Connect via anonymous ftp to sunsite.unc.edu, where the guide is stored aspub/academic/biology/ecology+evolution/bioguide/bioguide.faq --Send E-mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with the message: send usenet/news.answers/biology/guide/* --Point your Web browser to http://chronicle.merit.edu/ or gopher to chronicle.merit.edu --Gopher to aps.acad-phy-sci.com 70 --Gopher to rodent.cis.umn.edu 11111 --Gopher to e-math.ams.com and follow the menus to Professional Information and Professional Opportunities --Gopher to oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu 3300 --Gopher to una.hh.lib.umich.edu and look under the menu heading "inetdirs," which is the University of Michigan's Clearinghouse of Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Guides openings) --Point your Web browser to http://www.fedworld.gov or telnet to 192.239.93.3 --E-mail listserv@netcom.com with the following message:subscribe geosci-jobs --Send an E-mail request to hotlist@jobnet.com --Point your Web browser to http://www.medsearch.com:9001/ or gopher to gopher.medsearch.com 9001 --Point your Web browser to http://www.iquest.net/occ/ or gopher to gopher.msen.com --Gopher to oasis.cc.purdue.edu 2525 or gopher to bongo.cc.utexas.edu --Point your Web browser to http://rescomp.stanford.edu/jobs.html or http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/Economy/Business/Employment/Jobs --Point your Web browser Perhaps the single most efficient way to access the myriad online possibilities is through the World Wide Web. A "node," or location, on the Web can contain a wealth of information, including position announcements and resume banks, and it can also point you to other Web nodes with their own announcements. In order for you to navigate the Web, your Internet connection must have Web "browser" software such as Lynx (text only) or Mosaic (text and graphics). It's important that your Web browser be "forms capable"--which allows you to fill in the blanks in an online document--otherwise you won't be able to search for keywords in large databases of job announcements. But even if you don't have a Web browser, you can still find jobs online. Most Internet connections give you access to gopher, and gopherspace--the universe of gopher servers--is one of the best places to find job ads. If you can't get to gopherspace, you might still have access to the thousands of Usenet newsgroups, some specializing in position announcements and others in resumes. And even if you can't get to the newsgroups, if you have E-mail you can subscribe to mailing lists that will automatically send you compilations of job openings. If you have no route to the Internet at all, with just a simple computer and modem you can dial up one of dozens of local bulletin board systems (BBSs) around the United States that carry job announcements of specific interest to the science professional. Scientists who are just beginning an online job hunt will do well to obtain a general guide to the Internet. One of the most complete is "A Biologist's Guide to Internet Resources"-- which even non-biologists will find useful. Written by Una Smith, a graduate student at Yale University, the free guide contains general information, such as the proper etiquette for Usenet postings and how to subscribe to a mailing list, as well as specific details, such as which mailing lists have job announcements, and the E-mail addresses of federal government agencies. (To obtain this guide and other resources mentioned in this article, see accompanying list.) Job-seekers will also find two other guides of particular interest. One, written by WPI's Riley, is called "Employment Opportunities and Job Resources on the Internet," and it contains an annotated list of Usenet groups, telnet services, gopher servers, mailing lists, and Web resources. The other, which computer analyst Harold Lemon began compiling during his own job hunt, is called "Harry's Job Search BBS & Internet Hot List." Lemon's guide is unique in that it lists dozens of job- related dial-in bulletin board systems, some of which can be reached with toll-free 800 numbers. One of the most valuable types of World Wide Web resources is a list of lists, or "meta-list." Each meta-list provides hypertext links to dozens of related resources, and there are at least two meta-lists designed specifically for job seekers. Both happen to be located at Web servers at Stanford University, and each has numerous links to job resources of particular interest to scientists. A simple search through the thousands of Usenet newsgroups yields more than 50 with "jobs" in their names. Most of these belong to local hierarchies (tx.jobs for Texas or ba.jobs.offered for the San Francisco Bay area, for example) although some, like misc.jobs.offered, are nationwide or even worldwide. Unfortunately, most of these are a waste of time unless you're looking for jobs in electrical engineering or the computer industry. Of the hundreds of job openings posted each day in misc.jobs.offered, only one or two, at best, will be for academic or research jobs. If you're a scientist looking for a research or teaching position in academia or industry, your best bets in Usenet are the newsgroups devoted to your specific discipline. Chemists should keep an eye on sci.chem, for example, and neurobiologists should watch bionet.neuroscience. And within the bionet hierarchy there's a newsgroup called bionet.jobs that lists biology-related jobs of all types. A similar resource for earth scientists--geoinfonet.job-market--is in its infancy and is not yet available at most sites, although anyone with E-mail access can subscribe to a related mailing list called geosci-jobs. Michael Benedik, an associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Houston, has found both a postdoc and a research technician through ads he placed on bionet.jobs, and his department is now using this newsgroup (in addition to other sources) to list several open faculty positions. "The major advantage is, it's free," notes Benedik. "Placing an ad in [a professional journal] is very expensive. I recently hired a research technician, and research technicians don't read [such journals] usually. I posted it on bionet.jobs. The person I hired is now at the University of Illinois, and his wife was coming to Houston to do a postdoc. It was a perfect hit. I got a large number of very good applicants over the net." But Usenet newsgroups don't work for everyone. Tim Nelson, an adjunct professor of biology at Seattle Pacific University who's looking for his first tenure-track job, hasn't found bionet.jobs to be very useful. "It's more sales jobs," he says, "the kind of jobs that are a dime a dozen. The only good job that I've come across on it is one that I'd seen earlier" in newspaper and journal classified sections. Some Usenet newsgroups, such as misc.jobs.resumes or bionet.jobs.wanted, as well as such online employment agencies such as Medsearch America and the Online Career Center, have sections specifically designed for electronically posting your curriculum vitae, or C.V. Employers can scan these C.V. banks for good fits for open jobs. But posting your C.V. may not always be a good idea, because once you post it, you lose control over it. Says Harold Lemon, "You need to have control of where your resume goes. There might be some places you don't want it to go, for whatever reason." For example, you may not wish your present employer to know that you're looking for another position. Or you may wish to tailor your resume to highlight certain skills for certain jobs. Margaret Riley warns that if you do plan to post or E-mail your C.V., you must first prepare it as a plain ASCII document, stripping all the special characters and codes added by most word processors. She recommends checking out the resumes posted in misc.jobs.resumes as possible models for how to set up your own. "See which ones you like, see which ones you don't like, see which ones the guy posted without checking his formatting," she says. "If the lines all wrap around, it looks awful. Even in the academic research field, you want to present a good image." And don't assume that just because you see an ad online, you may apply online. Although the University of Houston recently posted several faculty positions online, it won't accept E- mail applications. Michael Benedik explains: "For faculty positions, we are very strongly going through an affirmative- action process, so we really want a paper trail on everything." Online Classifieds One other place most universities list their job openings is in their own gopher servers, but it's a tedious task to go through each of the menu trees at each of the universities you might be interested in. Fortunately, there are several meta- lists on gopher and on the Web that will link you with the job listings at many universities. Two of the best are based at Purdue University and the University of Texas, Austin. The Texas meta-list also provides links to state and federal government positions. University gopher servers are useful for more than job announcements. "Once I've targeted a school that I might be applying to, I try to find out as much as I can about them using gopher," says Seattle Pacific's Nelson. In addition to mission statements and data on such things as size and number of students, university gophers often have "the mundane, day- to-day things that are going on that can give some insight into what kind of school it is." The Chronicle of Higher Education's classified section has long been an important source of academic and administrative jobs, but the printed version has always been difficult to use, since the display ads, though indexed, don't appear in alphabetical order. The online version, called "Academe This Week," allows you to search for keywords, so that you pull up only ads in your field. It's proved to be remarkably popular: According to Joyce Giusto, the Chronicle's director of strategic planning, the service gets about 40,000 visits--and keyword searches pull up 350,000 "hits"--each week. "Academe This Week" lists only the latest week's worth of jobs, and most other services list only open positions, but if you wish to search job announcements that go back a year or more, your best bet is the Young Scientists' Network (YSN). Available both on the Web and via E-mail, YSN provides listings of jobs and grants, information on alternative careers for scientists, political items, and pointers to other career resources. Other possibilities are the Academic Position Network, the Academic Physician and Scientist Web site, or position listings maintained by scientific societies, such as the American Physiological Society or the American Mathematical Society. Academia, of course, is not the only place that employs scientists. If you're looking for jobs in a federal government agency, your best bet is FedWorld, available via telnet or the Web. If your goal is a job in industry, try the Online Career center or Medsearch America. Beginning by mid-spring, the job opportunities section of The Scientist will be posted with the Internet edition of the newspaper. This will give a much broader--indeed, international--circulation for both employers and job seekers than is available in the print edition alone, according to publisher Eugene Garfield. Also, job listings will be maintained for a period of three months (six issues) to accommodate the typical range of application deadlines. Despite the great promise of online job hunting, scientists should be aware that it takes more to find a job than a good Internet connection. Developing strong interpersonal skills, as always, can play an important role in landing a new job. "The bottom line is that people still hire people they know," says Ed Weck. "It's still personal networking that gets you a job, and not whether your resume appears electronically or in paper form." Robert Finn is a freelance science writer based in Long Beach, Calif.

Career-Building Sites On The Internet: Hunting For Jobs Electronically

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