Economist jobs?

October 5, 2009 6:59 AM

Are the NGO executive job listings in the Economist real or is it just some sort of legal requirement that they must advertise? How about the science jobs listed in New Scientist?

If you're not familiar, example jobs from the latest Economist :

Secretary of the International Whaling Commission
Senior Adviser to the World Bank
Executive Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies
Investment Officer at the UN

I assume they are real job listings but in this sector I would have thought they would be filled by headhunters or by getting a recommendation from your classmate at Harvard Business School or such. Is it not that insular?

posted by smackfu to work & money (7 comments total)

You better believe all of those positions were already filled months before the notices were even sent to the Economist for proofing. Unless some dream candidate applied -- not like, a PhD from Oxford, but like former president Clinton, or Robocop -- nobody is getting a callback about being Secretary of the International Whaling Commission.
posted by Damn That Television at 7:10 AM on October 5 [3 favorites]

I don't know about the USA, but in the UK (and presumably all of the EU) certain classes of jobs must be openly advertised and the best suited candidate chosen without favouritism. I'm not sure of the details, but I'm pretty sure that this basically means that "all jobs paying more than £x/year" must be open. This is to encourage competition and mobility, moving towards a genuine meritocracy rather than nepotism.

Of course, what actually happens is that the future boss asks to see their preferred candidate's CV, then writes the job description to suit them perfectly. This way the preferred candidate is garuanteed be "best suited", and thus get the job while an appearance of a fair application process is maintained. This is enormously annoying for people who spend time and money preparing applications and traveling to interviews at which they have literally no chance of success. Unfortunately, the practise is quite widely accepted and basically impossible to police.

At least some of the New Scientist jobs are genuinely open to applicants, as I know people who've successfully applied for a couple. NS has a dedicated jobs listings sub-site which is actually pretty useful, as do other big periodicals like Nature, Science, etc. The job I'm about to start was advertised on at least one of those sites and I had no connections with my new employer.

My impression in academic science is that low-level jobs (technician, research assistant, post-doctoral researcher) tend to be genuinely open and fair, although exceptions aren't rare. Then politics and networking get progressively more important as you get into the upper echelons (senior post-doc, group leader, lecturer, etc).
posted by metaBugs at 7:47 AM on October 5 [1 favorite]

I've been interviewed for postings in the NS, so those are at least real, the post-doc positions anyway.
posted by bonehead at 7:56 AM on October 5

Here's some more information, hopefully slightly better spelled:

I used to have a job where I filed a lot of forms at various courthouses in New York. It was nearly impossible to work at the Civil Court as a low-level clerk unless you had a relative get you the job.

Now try to imagine the necessary-but-almost-impossible-to-navigate bureaucracy of the United Nations or World Bank.

Now try to imagine a very very good-paying job with no real description or oversight at one of these international institutions.

Jobs in government/semi-government institutions (and to a lesser but still pretty hefty extent, academia and business) are almost always crony-ism.
posted by Damn That Television at 7:57 AM on October 5

My current UK academic job was in the Guardian and, IIRC, the NS and jobs.ac.uk and I had no previous links with the institution. The giveaways on whether those jobs are rigged will be very detailed job descriptions and very short application periods.
In academic jobs in the UK, I would argue a lot depends on where the money is coming from. A well established dept in a specialist area is likely to have people moving upwards into jobs as the are created and thus is less likely to be recruiting meaningfully. A new dept or one that is branching may be looking to bring in new blood, though there is still the risk that a poisiton will be linked to a new prof who already has somone in mind.
posted by biffa at 8:55 AM on October 5

One ex-employer of mine advertised genuine biotech jobs in New Scientist, so they're not all fakes...
posted by pharm at 9:01 AM on October 5

Yes, they are very real. Certainly candidates will come forward internally, via old boys networks, headhunters, etc. But why not cast the net as wide as possible when all it takes is an advert costing a few hundred Euros?
posted by randomstriker at 10:15 AM on October 5