Ask a Career Consultant
Hi there! Every week, the Career Development Team for Researchers at the Office of Career and Professional Development answers an anonymized career development question from the UCSF community. You can also visit the archive of all of our past columns. To submit your own question, email it to [email protected] with the subject line 'ASKOCPD.'
A postdoc asks—
I want to start applying for positions (I’m pursuing a few different kinds of positions that are not bench science positions). I know I can just open LinkedIn and start looking at lists of jobs and apply to them, but that feels sort of spontaneous and endless. Is there a better way you would recommend organizing a job search?
In general, I think it is pretty important to organize your search in a way that lets you periodically feel finished (at least for now), so you aren’t infinitely scaping the internet for a literally endless list of new job postings every day. I recommend only using broad searches of job postings (like you’ll find on LinkedIn, Indeed, etc.) to generate a list of the organizations you are interested in working for, not as your primary way to pick individual positions to apply for. I think a good target would be identifying something like 30-40 different organizations that (potentially) meet your needs. Personally, I would then create a folder of bookmarks in my browser to take me to each organization’s careers webpage (wherever they are posting their openings). Then I’d create a spreadsheet with a row for each organization, and start keeping track of how often I am checking those pages. I think a good goal is to check each organization at least every two weeks. This creates a system where you can periodically be “finished” checking for job postings! This system will also make it easy to add and remove organizations from your list as you learn more about them. Then, when you are periodically finished checking for job openings, you can comfortably dedicate your remaining time to the other elements of the job search, such as forming and activating networking contacts for each organization you are interested in. You can track this on your spreadsheet as well. Then, as you start sending in applications, this can be another column in your spreadsheet. Job searching can be a long, tiring process with minimal feedback, so, sometimes, it is just nice to be able to look back on all the work you’ve already put in.
In my experience, this tends to work well for most people and helps to make the job search feel a bit less all-consuming.
-David Blancha, Assistant Director, Career Development Team for Researchers