Leaving academia, from the hiring side

November 9, 2021 6:06 PM

Where do people who want to leave academia look for industry jobs? I want to hire them!

I’m trying to hire people with advanced degrees in STEM fields and teaching experience for education-related roles. Adjuncts, assistant professors, lecturers, retiring full profs have all been successful in this team but they are hard to find. I see plenty of job boards for academics looking for academic jobs, but is there someplace besides the usual LinkedIn/Indeed that I should be posting to target those people looking to make the jump?

I’m being purposefully vague about the role/company here, but would be happy to share more info via MeMail.

posted by the_shrike to Work & Money (10 answers total)

I might consider posting the job to common academic trade publications, actually -- the Chronk, or Inside Higher Ed, or does Educause even have a job board? Maybe hit up a relevant conference or two somewhere nearby.

I mean, go where the applicants are, right?

Idealist.org might be an option too, if you're at a nonprofit.
posted by humbug at 7:09 PM on November 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

Alumni job boards for STEM-focused Universities -- I see jobs like this posted on the alumni job board quite often for the engineering focused university I went to.
posted by chiefthe at 7:12 PM on November 9, 2021

Find the professional organization for the discipline that you're interested in in the country that your company is located. For example, if you're interested in physicists in the United States, you'd look at the American Physical Society. Then find that organization's periodic publication / magazine (continuing with the same example, that would be Physics Today) and figure out how to post your job advertisement in its jobs section. Generally you would have to pay to place an advert.
posted by heatherlogan at 7:14 PM on November 9, 2021 [7 favorites]

I'm a STEM lecturer and a few weeks ago I accepted an offer for my first non-academic job. While I was searching, I was looking at:

1) The usual LinkedIn/Indeed
2) Personal connections
3) A few specific organizations' listings on Greenhouse
4) Tech Jobs For Good, which might be a good fit for education-related roles?

That said, I found the role I ended up accepting when the ad was posted on a blog in my field that I visit to read about subject matter stuff, because one of the authors had previously done some consulting for the same organization. So ultimately it was a little closer to traditional "networking" than a job board, even though I didn't have a personal connection to the person who shared the ad.
posted by egregious theorem at 7:16 PM on November 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

There... are a lot of us out there. On the offhand that you haven't earnestly considered - do your job postings convey/ confer sufficient prestige (and a posted salary range) to attract even 'desperate' academics?

If someone's currently still on the academic track, there's got to be enough there to make it past the threshold potential to make the jump.

A friend from grad school started the HirePhD LinkedIn group, but it's pretty local though. Brings in guest web speakers - maybe you can pitch your company there?

My last job was through networking, current through plain old LinkedIn job listings.
posted by porpoise at 8:15 PM on November 9, 2021

My experience is that a lot of folks do just use LinkedIn, but struggle to figure out which jobs it's worth applying to with their background.

So if you don't already, mention specifically in the job post that ex-academics are often successful at this job.

Also, mention any of these that are true:

1. You are open to applicants who have never had this job title before.
2. You are open to applicants whose skills come from side projects or hobbies.
3. You are willing to teach the specific skills to someone who's got a good foundation of teaching experience.

All of those are common stumbling blocks for people leaving academia. We often know how to do things that don't show up on our resumes—maybe we taught them to ourselves in the course of doing research, and maybe they were never part of our job title, so substantiating that we can do them is hard. In the world we come from, this isn't a problem, because everyone assumes that everyone can learn independently and take on new roles informally. But in industry, it's a huge problem. So if you can truthfully advertise that you respect that sort of informal knowledge, that's gonna be catnip to ex-academics.
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:46 PM on November 9, 2021 [9 favorites]

All the jobs I see [about 1 a week; mostly seeking academic postdocs and postgrads] appear on a particular LISTSERV - here's one for UK which is more accessible. They tend to be private and niche but you shd be able to contact the list-curator for the relevant fields and geography.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:16 PM on November 9, 2021

Also, I'll second everything in nebulawindphone's answer about making the posting friendly to academics, implicitly or explicitly. In my case, the posting stated that the start date would be flexible, and emphasized that people with standing academic obligations should apply -- so I knew that having to finish my semester wouldn't be a problem. The qualifications also listed skills and knowledge but avoided the common trope of "5+ years working on a team doing X".
posted by egregious theorem at 7:36 AM on November 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

Tons of them hang out at VersatilePhD.com.
posted by Frenchy67 at 8:44 AM on November 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

My sense is that you're probably better off recruiting people before they've definitively made up their minds to leave. People with STEM backgrounds who know for sure they want to go into industry are likely brushing up on coding or data science skills and using those keywords in job searches, but people who prioritize teaching and feel undervalued by their current institutions may also be persuadable.

In math, this would involve showing up at the Joint Math Meetings and talking to people. You could do this formally, by organizing a recruiting event, or informally, by getting an appropriate team member onto some career panels (maybe reach out to the folks involved with the MAA's Business, Industry, and Government working group?) If you also hire people with undergraduate math degrees, people will be thrilled to talk to you, because that offers options for their students. But even if you only want folks with graduate degrees, mathematicians do a lot more teaching as graduate students than their counterparts in the lab sciences, so they might be a good group to target.

You could also post an ad on MathJobs, but if you do this without a recruiting effort to let people know who you are, most of the applications you get will come from would-be postdocs copying and pasting their cover letters.
posted by yarntheory at 4:45 PM on November 10, 2021