How do you find a job? I once thought (as many people do) that the process is simple and linear:
1. Write Resume
2. Find Interesting Job Ad
3. Respond to Job Ad with Resume
4. Interview and get Job
Indeed, things were just that simple way back in high school when I got a part-time job at the local grocery store. The process of finding a professional position later in life can also work that way, occasionally. For many, however, the usual story goes something more like this:
1. Write Resume
2. Find Interesting Job Ad
3. Respond to Job Ad with Resume
4. Resume Disappears into Black Hole and You Never get a Response
Go through the second cycle ten or twenty times and you can start to get pretty demoralized. That is a very common experience which lots of job seekers have, myself and plenty of other PhD physicists included. The key to keeping your morale up and having a successful job search is understanding how the professional hiring process really works:
- Hiring is a Messy, Non-Linear, Human Process
First, realize that no singular hiring “process” exists. People find their jobs and companies find their candidates in innumerable different ways. At the core, hiring and recruiting is a match making process with a great deal of variety. You never know exactly what will work. I started the chain of events that lead to my current job by answering a want ad for an unrelated technical position at the same company. Basically, I took advantage of the contact information in the ad to write a cold email introducing myself and my capabilities. It so happened they were looking for someone with my talents even though they did not have an ad out for the position yet. This sort of decoupling between available jobs and advertised jobs happens all the time. - Want Ads are Not the Preferred Way to Find Candidates
It is important to understand that, from the perspective of the people doing the hiring, a candidate that has any sort of connection or relationship with people at the company is more attractive than an unknown candidate that comes in from a public job posting. People generally feel more comfortable with others that are somehow linked to their social group because they feel they know them better than total strangers. Add in the copious “resume spam” that public ads can generate and the numbness induced by searching the haystack of applications for needles, and you can start to understand why so many resumes end up going down the black hole. This strong preference for “known quantities” comes from the high stakes of hiring for professional positions. - Candidates are Typically Evaluated as Investments
Hiring me at minimum wage for my first job bagging groceries was not a big commitment on the part of the grocery store. Hiring a PhD physicist, or other similarly qualified professional, by contrast is a substantial investment. Consider that starting industrial salaries for newly minted PhD physicists can be in the range of $100,000 a year. Add in taxes, benefits, and general overhead and that number can increase by around a factor of two. Those are just the direct monetary cost. Typically, there is also a significant time investment to bring the new hire up to speed on the technical problem they will be working on. Consequently, the pressure to make good hiring decisions is intense. This can lead people to let the perfect become the enemy of the good and start tossing good candidate resumes into the black hole while the search for perfection continues. - Hiring Decisions Often Come Down to Confidence and Urgency
From what I have seen, interviews happen and offer letters get written when there is high confidence in the candidate and/or high pressure to fill a position. At the extreme end of the confidence spectrum are cases in which positions are created specifically for exceptional candidates. Yes, that really does happen, often without a job ad ever being generated. On the extreme urgency side, willingness to consider the merely “good” resumes that come in from public job ads goes up substantially.
Given all that, what is a job seeker to do? First, accept the black hole effect and keep applying for advertised jobs. Just because the odds of a reply may not be great does not mean they are zero. So, spend a reasonable amount of time customizing a resume and cover letter to the ad, send them, and move on. Second, spend the majority of your time becoming a known candidate that your target companies have high confidence in by engaging in lots of networking and informational interviews. Do enough of this and you are bound to surface hidden opportunities and escape from the black hole onto the short list of candidates.