Science Societies: A Source Of Leads For The Job Hunter

Membership in scientific societies can offer a lot—meetings, newsletters, dialogue with peers, and so forth—to working scientists firmly ensconced in their careers. But what about the nonworking scientists— those who are finishing graduate school and seeking employment— or discontented researchers in hot pursuit of a career change? For them as well, professional associations can be the source of significant assistance and support as they take on the odious task of job hunting. Many of the major United States science societies offer career-placement services that match employers in industry, government, and academia with job-hunting society members. Job seekers who have been helped by these services run the gamut of career experience, ranging from new Ph.D.’s desiring postdoctoral fellowships or their first jobs to those in retirement pursuing consulting opportunities. Associations like the American Chemical Society (ACS), the American Institute of Physics (AIP), the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) provide a variety of such services, some, of which are also available to those who are not society members. Many of these services arrange for prospective employers to interview job hunters at the associations’ annual meetings; some also provide resources for employers and applicantsyear-round. “We are bringers-together of large numbers of people,” says Thomas L. Trudeau, who manages the FASEB Placement Service; he and his staff also run placement operations for several other professional associations in the life sciences, including the American Society of Anesthesiologists, the Endocrine Society, the American Association of Immunologists, and the Society for Neuroscience. At society meetings, Trudeau says, “we stand ‘around and cause magic to happen,” arranging as many as 5,000 interviews, depending on the size of the convention. He also directs year-round placement operations for FASEB and several other societies, conducting candidate searches for employers on request or sending them collections of applicants’ resumes. Chemists seeking employment can turn to ACS for a variety of services. The society will arrange interviews for candidates at its spring and fall meetings, and will even clip help-wanted ads from national newspapers and trade journals for applicants who participate in its Subscription Service. There is also a Confidential Employment Listing Service, in which chemists’ resumes—with names omitted—are circulated four times a year to employers who participate in the society’s annual retainer plan. Those seeking to hire chemists can also ask the society’s Employment and Career Services unit to search its Professional Data Bank for a pool of qualified candidates at any time during the year: “We can pretty much pin-point, the type of person that [employers] want,” says Joan Wheeland, ACS’ Employment and Career Services coordinator. ALP operates an on-line network called PINET (Physics Information Network), which offers monthly listings of job opportunities in physics in addition to other services like a calendar of meetings, article abstracts, and membership information. Employers pay a fee to have a notice posted on the network; job hunters access PINET to view the listings. In addition, the institute’s Career Placement Division will search the database for candidates or send resume books to employers on request. For a fee, ALP staffers will send the employers a file of materials provided by the applicants, which can include a profile, a resume, a list of publications, and letters of recommendation. “We have people who give us their entire Ph.D. dissertation,” says Beverly Citrynell, ALP’s Career Placement Division manager. The names of microbiologists who register with ASM’s Placement Service are entered into a computerized database; throughout the year, the society will search the files for employers and send them candidates’ resumes. The society also sets up a placement office at its spring meeting and fall conference; an employer can chat with registrants in a private interview room that ASM provides at the’ meeting place or can simply browse through books of resumes. While most of these services are computerized to some extent, not all rely exclusively on state-of-the-art technology to match employers with applicants. “I prefer to do it with my tired, old eyeballs,” says FASEB’s Trudeau. “We don’t do any matching by computer, because I don’t trust the computer.” ALP’S Citrynell says she checks the resumes her computer "provides “to make sure they’re suitable” before sending them to an employer. And although ACS’ Professional Data Bank uses a computer to churn out matches, staff assistant Anjalika Silva says that “the actual picking takes place manually.” Like Citrynell, Silva screens applicants’ information before forwarding it to employers, to avoid snafus such as sending candidates’ resumes to their own bosses. Fees for the services differ from society to society and can depend on factors such as whether ajob seeker is a member of the association, the extent of service requested, and how much computer time is involved. Members’ fees range from gratis (for ACS’ basic service to members) to $10 (for the FASEB service) to $35 (for the ASM service); charges for job hunters who are not society members can run as high as $100. For employers, cost depends on such factors as whether the organization is a private firm, an academic institution, or a nonprofit agency; some societies, such as ACS, also vary their fees according to the extent of services requested or how many candidates are found. Many of these services charge employers $100 to $200; yet others request as little as $35 from a nonprofit agency, and some charge as much as $500 for a commercial firm. By and large, placement-service staffers say they don’t check applicants’ credentials, leaving that work to the potential employer. “We don’t pretend to be police forces,” says FASEB’s Trudeau. AIP’s Citrynell, however, says she will do some research into a candidate’s background “if I see a school [on a resume] that I’m not aware is accredited.” How helpful are these placement services? The evidence is largely anecdotal, because most do not keep statistics; staffers must rely on newly hired candidates’ requests to be removed from the database or repeated requests for searches from employers as indicators of their success. “I have employers who turn around and register as candidates,” says Juliet Jacobsen, manager of ASM’s placement service, a phenomenon she says can be viewed as a testimonial to the success of the service. Although many placement-service staffers try to follow up in some way with questionnaires to members, virtually all say they would like to have a lot more feedback on the efficacy of their operations. “Most people don’t answer surveys,” laments Jerome Perry, chairman of the microbiology department at North Carolina State University who also serves as chairman of ASM’s Placement Committee. One limitation of these services, says Susan Stern, principal investigator for the National Institutes of Health’s AIDS reagent program and vice president at the Maryland-based ERG International laboratories, is that they’re “not very useful for people who want to work for large companies, like Abbott Labs, Merck, and Du Pont. Advertisements in journals and headhunters are probably better” for finding jobs with such firms, because few turn to science-society services as a source of candidates, she says. But Stern, who has used Trudeau’s service both as a candidate and as an employer, says that FASEB’s resources are ‘the best [avenue] for finding an academic job or a postdoctoral fellowship.” Others who can be identified as having used these services successfully laud them as an efficient way for employers and scientists to find each other. Mark Atkinson, research engineer at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, a hospital and national referral service for primary specialty care, used Trudeau’s service for the first time at the Society for Neuroscience meeting held in Phoenix last month. “We found four or five very likely candidates” through the placement service, he says. An important advantage of the service, says Atkinson, is that it enables employers to interview candidates in person. “On the phone for 15 minutes is one thing, but face-to-face for 15 minutes is another thing,” and much more helpful in determining whether the candidate is worth interviewing more extensively. Although he says he would have preferred to be able to extend these preliminary interviews to a half-hour, 15 minutes “is adequate for us to establish a short list.” Bob Przybylowicz, manager of recruiting at Mead Imaging, a division of the Dayton, Ohio-based Mead Corp., has used the ACS clearinghouse to find chemists for the past three years. Przybylowicz points out that accessing the ACS clearinghouse is less expensive than either relying on a headhunter or running classified ads. When he signs up for ACS’ service, he points out, “for $100 I can ‘buy’ all the resumes in the clearinghouse; I can choose the candidates who I want. My company literature is on display, so the candidates can read about Mead Imaging. There’s no clandestine meetings; it’s all aboveboard and very well handled.” Przybylowicz cautions other employers, however that quantitatively “you get a tremendous population; you have to screen carefully, or you’ll be inundated.” Being able to interview candidates at the meetings, he says, is an “extremely good deal for the dollar,” especially when compared with the expense of “flying a candidate into my location in Dayton. taking out a significant amount of time for lunching the candidate and the expense of housing the candidate.” But one technical recruiter for the chemical, food, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical industries disagrees with Przybylowicz’s assertion that these services are economical. The headhunter says he used a science society’s placement service once, but “the expense that they imposed—about $150 to scan their system on my behalf—was more than I thought it ought to be, and I like to make sure that my clients’ money is used well.” For candidates, however, such placement services can be a godsend. Gerald Ballough, who plans to receive his Ph.D. from Penn State University in May and is looking for a postdoctoral appointment in neuroscience, attended the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Phoenix and had a “superpositive, excellent response” to his request for interviews: nearly 10 conversations that he says are likely to result in job offers. Ballough advises applicants that while the requests for interviews may be numerous, it’s important not to accept too many of them. “I made sure I cut it down to less than 20 so I could be well prepared” for each interview, says Ballough, and he made sure he allowed enough time to study potential employers’ research abstracts. Also attending the neuroscience meeting was Zarena Post, who is about a year away from finishing her Ph.D. in pharmacology at the University of Texas, Austin. Post, who wants to begin a postdoctoral appointment in January 1991, says she knew it was a bit too early to begin looking for jobs, but “I wanted to see what was available.” Although she is not yet ready to begin a postdoc, Post says, “I was surprised at the response”—12 requests for interviews. The experience was “an excellent way to make an initial contact with a variety of people: not even just potential employers, but contacts, faces to recognize at the next meeting. It gave me a good excuse for talking with investigators about what’s going on in their labs, and many avenues for checking further” into job opportunities. Ballough says he wasn’t fazed at being ‘just a number” during the interview sessions. “It was kind of fun,” he recalls. “I was a number—I was 173—but that number took on significance.” For purposes of arranging interviews, Ballough says, “I had to be a number; but it immediately turned personal” once the coversations began. Roberto Nunez, now finishing up a Ph.D. in chemistry at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, says he did not feel at all like a number at the ACS employment clearinghouse he attended. Employers at the meeting, he says, “don’t care about numbers; they want to hire people.” Nunez got two job offers as a result of his interviews at the clearinghouse, and accepted one of them; he will begin working at Milliken Chemical, a division of the Spartansburg, S.C.-based Milliken Co., when he completes his studies. But one job seeker who attended the ACS meeting in September takes a dimmer view of the society’s employment clearinghouse. Employers. at the meeting, says the applicant, who is now completing a postdoc at a large Northeastern university, “are just looking for bodies” to fill empty slots on their staff. For job hunters who are “looking for a career-development position,” he says, the clear inghouse is “not the way to go.” The chemist, who has a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry and works with lasers, was interviewed by six firms that were “looking for synthetic organic chemists.” When perusing his file, he says, the firms— primarily drug and oil companies— searched for keywords like ‘organic,’ but five out of six had never even looked at my resume. On my resume, it clearly says ‘physical or ganic chemistry’; the word ‘synthetic’ is-never mentioned.” The applicant does see a place for such clearinghouses, however. From the perspective of an employer, he says, “if you’re a small company and don’t have much visibility, and you’re in some remote location where it’s too expensive to fly people in and out [for interviews], this is probably the only way for you to make contact.” For candidates, he says, “if you want to work for a startup, it’s probably good, but I want to work for a big company. I don’t want to work for someone I never heard of.” In general, the chemist estimates that at clearinghouses, “you get a hit rate of about one tenth of 1%. Maybe that’s good—but you’re going to end up wasting a lot of your time.” A further limitation of science-society placement services—one that is particularly troublesome for employed scientists seeking new positions—is their “shotgun approach” of sending batches of resumes to any employer who requests them, says Erwin Rudifer, president of the West Caldwell, N.J.-based Krow Associates, a recruiting firm specializing in science professionals. “There have been some embarrassing moments. They have been known to send out resumes even after a candidate has found ajob, and may even send them to the company where the person is working.” And indeed, although some societies, like ACS and ALP, will take steps to ensure confidentiality, others make no bones about their registrants’ lack of anonymity. “We’re up front with everybody that there’s nothing confidential about [the service],” says FASEB’s Trudeau. In most cases, however, this doesn’t matter, he says: “40% to 50% of our candidate population is at the junior level, people who’ve recently received their Ph.D. It’s no surprise to anybody that they’re putting themselves on the market.” ASM’s Jacobsen concedes that although her service’s jobs are listed “blind” and applicants use registration numbers instead of their name, if employers look through the book of resumes that she circulates, there’s a chance that they would spot an employee’s resume. “But, to be honest,” she says, “the people who are worried about that probably. would not use the service.” Science-society staffers are generally up front about the limitations of their services. “Sometimes [applicants] expect too much,” say, ACS’s Silva. “We’re only a medium of contact; we’re not like an agency that goes all out” to find jobs for people. “We don’t guarantee employment. We only guarantee exposure.” But those who have used these services successfully, like Atkinson, believe they serve a vital function. Without a science-society service, he says, “I don’t think we would access nearly as large a base of candidates with a specific interest.”

Science Societies: A Source Of Leads For The Job Hunter

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