PRODUCT ASSOCIATE ENGINEER and COSTING SUPERVISOR

Thomson, a world leader in digital video technologies serving the global Media & Entertainment industries, seeks dedicated individuals to join us as:

1. PRODUCT ASSOCIATE ENGINEER

Transfer new product from R & D lab to factory; able to conduct run & evaluation of component due to shortage or cost reduction; positioned inR & D lab in designing related issues; support production in resolving product quality and test related issue.

Requirements:

• Degree in Electronic/Telecommunication Engineering
• Good knowledge in RF and familiar with RF equipment
• Good communication skill in English
• Minimum 2 years experience in Electronic Manufacturing.

2. COSTING SUPERVISOR

• Model CostingEnsure accuracy of material costing in system, set up standard costs and define cost on monthly basis, follow issues with different departments involved.
• Sales analysisFollow sales/shipment evolution on weekly basis, Compare and analyze data against budget, release sales report to management.
• GSPAnalyze material percentage to price, prepare GSP qualification form.
  

Requirements:

• Male and Degree in Accounting
• Good communication skills in English (Oral & Written)
• Autonomous, dynamic, pro active
• Strong in computer skill especially with excel
• SAP knowledge is advantage.

Based in Batam, good remuneration package will be given, interested applicant are invited to send their detailed resume with full academic records to:


PT. THOMSON BATAM
Jl. Beringin Blok 213, Muka Kuning – Batam 29451
Indonesia

We're Getting Ready to Know

I was griping a couple of days ago about how my department didn't really prep us for interviews with teaching schools. Let me tell you a little good news on that front.

The good news comes from PC Jr. and Committee Member #3. Like all my profs, they don't really know much about how teaching school interviews work, but at least they know they don't know. So in our first placement meeting, PC Jr. said he and Committee Member #3 were going to ask around to some of their friends at teaching colleges to, you know, find out how their searches work, and how they run their interviews. Their idea is, if I'm following it right, to then tell us what they've learned. That way, we might actually have some inkling of what to expect in those interviews.

This is a really good thing. I mean that. I heart junior faculty.

System Administrator

We are multinational Company (MNC), urgently looking for qualified and motivated candidates to fill up the following position:

System Administrator

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree or Diploma in Computer / IT or equivalent
• Familiar with Oracle Developer / DB Administrator, FIS, PL/SQL, Java/Jsp/Web Technology
• 2 Years of experience in Installing and maintaining Windows XP, 2003/2000/NT server, server backup, and LAN / WAN is essential
• Hands-on experience in Exchange 2000/2003, Active Directory (Group Policies), DNS, DHCP, IIS, Site links and domain replication
• Fundamental understanding of windows, and UNIX operating system configuration options and troubleshooting techniques
• Fluent in English (both oral & written)
• Able to work under pressure, independently as well as a team player
• Good interpersonal skill and self motivation

A competitive salary and benefit package will be offered to the successful candidates commensurate to their qualifications, experiences and expertise.

All Applications will be treated with the strictest confidential. Please state the expectation salary and submit your application letter, CV and contact number prior to the closing date of 12 October 2007 to:

Human Resource Department
PT. Siemens Hearing Instruments Batam
Jln. Beringin Lot 12,2nd Floor
BIP Muka Kuning - Batam

Sales Executive

An established corrugating packaging company invites suitable candidates for the post of:

Sales Executive

Requirements:

• Male / Female, Diploma / Degree holder with relevant working experience
• Good knowledge of Ms. Office
• Good team player with good command of English
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills
• Able to speak mandarin will be added advantage
• Posses driving license

Candidates meet the above requirements are invited to submit their application attaching CV in details with recent photograph, stating salary expectation and put position code on the left of envelope not later than 06 October 2007 to:

The Human Resources Department
PT. Teckwah Paper Products Indonesia
Jl. Beringin Lot 268 – 269 Batamindo Industrial Park
Mukakuning - Batam 29433, Indonesia

Global Commodity Quality Manager

DELL GLOBAL B.V. (SINGAPORE BRANCH), as a US-based Company with a decidedly global infrastructure and team, Dell is a premier provider of products and services required for customers worldwide to build their information technology and Internet infrastructures. Dell’s climb to market leadership is the result of a persistent focus on delivering the best possible customer experience by directly selling standards-based computing products and services. Revenue for the last four quarters totaled $54.2 billion and the company employs approximately 63,700 team members around the globe.

To support the growth of our Singapore Design Center and its Printing, Imaging & Displays product design activities, we are looking for highly motivated and talented professionals to join us.

Global Commodity Quality Manager

• Represent Operations Engineering in Core Team
• Manage & strategic influence of supply chain fulfillment and quality performance
• Alignment & liaison with factories & regions
• Drive supplier organization capability maturity development
• New supplier selection and qualification
• Ensure rigor PrP milestones crossing and deliverables on time
• Program requirements definition, planning & risk mitigation
• Ensure new product launch readiness across supply chain
• Product EOL transition and management
• Support continuous improvement initiatives

Requirements:

• Minimum Bachelor’s or Master’s (Preferably Engineering)
• 10 ~ 12 years related experience in the field of supplier quality or factory quality under mass production environment.

Interested candidates please send your resumes in MS Word Format to: sg_great2b@dell.com Please indicate the Job Title and Reference number (Ref.: JDBS092072150).

Electronics Design Engineer

i-Sirius Pte Ltd (“i-Sirius”) is a young, dynamic Singapore based telecommunication company that designs, develops and supplies advanced products for the consumer telecommunication business. The company was incorporated in 2006 in Singapore, with offices in Singapore and Seoul, Korea. i-Sirius is a subsidiary of Jurong Technologies Industrial Corporation Ltd (“JTIC”), an Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) company listed on the mainboard of the Singapore Stock Exchange.

We are looking for suitable candidates for the post of Electronics Design Engineer with job responsibilities as listed below. Candidates should have at least 2 to 5 years of prior experience in electronics development related post.

Electronics Design Engineer

Main responsibilities and Roles:

• Design and develop the GSM/GPRS module and phone architecture.
• Develop wireless module applications like as modem, multimedia and industrial telemetry.
• Responsible for development, design and testing electronic components, product and system.
• Interface with customers to determine specifications for new product.

Requirements:

• BS or MS in electronics/communication or related discipline
• Experience in wireless industry. GSM/GPRS/EDGE experience is a plus.
• Understand wireless digital and analog products like BB, RF(Radio Frequency), PM(Power Management) and wireless peripherals.
• Be able to handle multiple tasks in parallel.
• A self-starter.

Please send your detailed resume with expected salary and photo to: recruitment@i-sirius.com.sg

Vista Hotel Batam

Vista Hotel is currently looking for:
1. FO Supervisor
2. Night Audit
3. FO Receptionist
4. Bellboy
5. Waiter / Waitress
6. Houseman
7. Clerk

Requirements for position 1 - 2:

• Male / Female age above 25 years old
• Enthusiastic personal with excellent leadership
• Strong background in hospitality with minimum Diploma / Degree educated and Posses min. 2 years of working experience in similar position
• Posses outstanding selling skills &knowledge

Requirements for position 3 - 6:

• Male / Female, presentable with min. 160cm (Male) 155cm (Female) and single below 30 years old
• Min. SMU with Tourism background or having experience in the similar position
• Able to communicate in English and good computer skill (for no. 3)
• Well groom with good interpersonal skills
  

Requirements for position 7:

• Female, Single below 30 years old
• Have a good knowledge in Accounting
• Min. SMU with Computer literacy, Fresh graduate are welcome to apply

Assistant IT Manager

Breadtalk Pte Ltd are a fast growing life style F&B Group listed on the SGX seeking dynamic, energetic and committed individual to join as:

Assistant IT Manager

Job scope:

• Responsible for the administer, maintenance and user support for key business systems
  Work closely with other business units to roll-out projects relating to systems’ enhancements (plus monitoring of its progress to ensure timely and successful implementation)
• Validate business systems: (to) develop and maintain up-to-date documentation and operational procedures in accordance to cooperate best practices and regulatory requirements
• Liaise with software vendors / and cooperate support teams relating to the implementation of technical solutions for projects as well as to provide the necessary technical support and user training
• Assist to plan, develop and implement IT-related solutions to business / operational problems
• Ensure proper documentation of system solutions
• Setup / install / troubleshoot workstations & network printers for users

Requirements:

• Candidates must possess at least a Degree / Diploma in Computer Science, Information Systems or related discipline
• Minimum 3 years working experience
• Experience in supporting Windows OS, Active Directory and Backup software
• Experience in functional, system design and project management
• Knowledge in IT infrastructure such as Network, VPN, Server etc
• Knowledge in Microsoft SQL, and Crystal Reports will be an advantage
• Knowledge in Point-of-sales will be an added advantages
• Ability to work independently and perform under stress

We offer great opportunities for career advancement as well as attractive salary package that commensurate with experience. Interested candidates are invited to apply online or forward your resume stating your availability of employment, current and expected salary to us at:
hr@breadtalk.com

Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting

. . . but it sucks for trying to hammer out a postdoc research proposal when you're under a deadline.

God damn.

ASST. MANAGER FOR OPERATION

PT. Panasonic Shikoku Electronics Batam is seeking candidates with general requirement who have excellent work attitude & strong interpersonal skill, efficient & self motivated person, strong character and hard working person, able to speak English both oral and written, computer literate (MS Office) for the following position:

ASST. MANAGER FOR OPERATION

• Graduated from any discipliner.
• Able to do planning and inventory
• 5 years have experience operational manufacturing
• Able to liaise with other department.
• Have good customs knowledge.
• GLOVIA system or any other relevant inventory
• Good English communication skills (oral and write)

Interested post applicants should submit your complete application in English, stating details of your qualification, experience, current and expected salary including the recent photograph and contact number to:

Human Resource Department
PT. Panasonic Shikoku Electronics Batam
Lot 209-210, Jalan Beringin Batamindo Industrial Park-Mukakuning
Batam-29433, Indonesia

Please indicate the position code on the top right corner of the envelope.Only short listed candidates will be notified.

Senior Recruitment Consultant (Singapore)

Responsibilities:

• Source, screen and identify suitable candidates
• Market placement services

Requirements:

• 3-4 years relevant experience in skilled recruitment industry
• Diploma or bachelor’s degree
• Passion for recruitment work

Others:

• High basic salary + attractive incentive
• Excellent opportunities for career advancement in the region
• Position is open to Singapore citizens/permanent residents only

If you are interested to join this dynamic and growing global company, please e-mail your resume to: philip@hotjob.com.sg

You Can't Teach Me a Goddamn Thing

So most of my senior profs' don't know a single thing about teaching portfolios. But there's a more general point about how my department preps candidates for the market.

None of the profs in my department have a feel for what goes on in job searches for teaching positions. Not even the junior profs have any real idea. After all, for them to get jobs in my department, down here in the middle of the rankings, they all pretty much had to come from top-10 departments. They never had to worry about clawing their way into 4-4 teaching loads at rural branch campuses in banjo country.

But that's them. It's not us. People coming out of my department typically get teaching jobs, when they jobs at all. So last year, a big part of our prep was getting ready for all the ultra-high-powered interviews most of us will never have. There was absolutely no time spent talking about the kinds of APA interviews that actually turn into jobs for most of us.

Here's an example. Sometime in late October or early November, the department has a placement meeting where we get told all kinds of stuff about what to expect in interviews. For the most part, we get told, the interview's going to open with some fairly non-specific question about your dissertation or your research or something like that. You'll probably talk about your work for about a half-hour to 40 minutes, and then you'll get some questions about teaching. Those questions will mostly be about the material you'd do in various courses, and you need to be ready to talk about who you'd read and why you'd read them. That'll take about ten to fifteen minutes. Then they'll ask if you've got any questions for them, and you should have one or two ready to go.

Okay, fine. Except this interview formula was exactly wrong for most of the interviews people in my department get. When I interviewed last year for a teaching job, the interview went nothing like that. They didn't give a flying fuck about my work. The entire interview was about my teaching. And not just about what I'd read in what courses, but what my basic views were about the "role of a teacher in a learning community." The first questions they asked me were about "how teachers should relate to students, both in and out of classroom". I was totally fucking blindsided. I had no idea what those questions were about, and I don't think I ever got an idea as the pedagogy questions just kept coming. (Yeah, no fly-back for me.)

It was an interview totally unlike any my senior profs had any experience with. Even the junior profs' experiences are probably pretty thin with interviews like this. So how are they supposed to prep us for them? Last year, they just didn't.

Jenny, I Read Something You Said, About Rock and Roll and Life and Death

Check this out. Just in time for me to spend my weekend freaking out about postdoc applications, I find a blog about . . . postdocs and the job market! Excellent.

Here's JZ's first post. Also, don't miss her awesome tags, like "anxiety" and "dissertation". (Wait. Is that one tag or two?)

A Bit of Free Advice (Vice, Vice)

Here's Sisyphus on sitting in a placement meeting, trying to understand what a teaching philosophy is:

The teaching philosophy is one of the places (oh, I could make a list of the places, honey) where my department falls down on the job in prepping us for the market. We are given no models, no examples, no list of what to do and not to do in the teaching philosophy. Last year whenever I mentioned I needed to write one and was having trouble, the job market advisor, my advisor, all the profs I talked to, just cocked their heads in that Aroo?-confused-dog look and then changed the subject. In one of the meetings I piped up to tack on “and sometimes a teaching philosophy” to a list of required materials and the job market advisor paused for a sec, then said, “Oh yeah, some places will want that sort of stuff."

This was exactly my experience last year. The Old World Septuagenarian, and, really, the rest of the senior faculty, had no fucking idea what a teaching philosophy was. They'd never written one. In fact, Evil Columbo made it clear they never even read them when candidates for jobs in my department send them.

It was one thing for the senior profs to be stone fucking ignorant about stuff they were supposed to help us out with. But what made me grind a half-millimeter off my molars was their blithe indifference to not being able to help. They just didn't want bother themselves with details about teaching portfolios. They'd never cared about that shit before, and our job market problems weren't going to make them start now.

Anyway, a few junior profs saved our asses and gave us (what seemed like) some great advice. Get the nickel version of it here.

Update: Sisyphus suggests we go take a look at the advice she got in comments. It's a very good suggestion, since she got some very good advice. So go read. I'm on board with concrete examples to backstop vague pedagogical abstractions.

Sixteen Tons, What Do You Get?

I'm exhausted. Besides sitting in on a seminar and getting ready to teach tomorrow, I spent today trying to line up my letter writers for some postdoc applications coming up. So I spent close to four panicked hours trying to decipher badly written websites, exchanging long e-mails with my committee explaining what they have to do with their letters, and getting chewed out by the Professor and my second committee member for not giving them enough time to write those letters. (Yes, I know I fucked up these early applications. Can we all just move the fuck on?)

So yeah, I'm exhausted. And these early applications aren't even close to being done.

My Brains All Broken, But I'm Feelin' Alright

I said it last week, the job market is on. My department had its first placement meeting a little while ago, and if that first meeting is any indication, it's going to be a very different experience from last year. The Old World Septuagenarian and Evil Columbo are off the placement committee, and instead we've got a different senior prof as well as a junior prof. Neither of them can remember FDR's presidency, and both of them had to go through the job market after the free-for-all hiring sprees of the 60s and 70s, when drooling idiots got offered tenure-tracked jobs before their shitty dissertations were even half-done.

Let's call this year's committee members Placement Committee Sr. and Placement Committee Jr. When someone asked a question about what we're supposed to do with our student evaluations (What does the department send? What do we have to send ourselves?), their response couldn't have been further from the Old World Septuagenarian's and Evil Columbo's.

First, PC Sr. and PC Jr. actually knew that some--even many!--departments ask for information about candidates' experience as teachers. They even knew what a teaching portfolio was, and that student course evals probably fit into them somehow.

But even better? There was one particular question about how the department deals with student evals, and neither PC Sr. or PC Jr. knew the answer. So you know what PC Jr. did? He said he'd find out. And then, like the next day, he actually found out. He even e-mailed the answer to us, which isn't something either member of last year's committee has the technical chops to handle on a regular basis.

So I'm on board with this year's placement committee. They've already headed off problems that drove me into aneurysm-inducing rage last year.

And Where Are You When the Sun Goes Down?

Long time readers might remember how I dealt with my complete and total failure on the job market last year. I spent the better part of a couple of months lying in bed, sucking my thumb and watching hours and hours of The Wire. My problem was, I'd actually sorted of expected to do better. Not get a job necessarily, but for my 94 applications, I thought I'd do better than three APA interviews followed by sweet fuck all else. I wanted a fly-back. I wanted to give a job talk. I got nothing, and the failure to get anything I'd hoped for hit me like a piece of rebar in the stomach every time I thought about it.

As fun as that was, I don't want to do it again. So this year, the plan was to keep my thoughts about the market in check--to expect and to hope for nothing. That was the plan anyway.

I just got an e-mail telling me about a job opening I can apply for. The thing is, it's in the same city as a job the Future Dr. Mrs Dr. PGS is applying for. Getting jobs in the same city--me in philosophy, her in her MLA discipline--is our only hope of not going back to a long distance relationship at the end of this year. And sweet holy God, I don't want us to go back to long-distance.

So the plan for the year's dead in the water, I'm hoping for everything, and while the excitement feels good, I've got a bad, bad feeling about the beating I'm going to take in the spring.

Going to Find Out Who's Naughty or Nice

I'm interested in this bit of speculation from Brandon over at Siris:

I suspect how nice or nasty the interviews are tends to depend a great deal on the type of search and college your AOS tends to get you.

Huh. I hadn't really thought of that possibility. What do you have in mind, Brandon? Anyone else have any ideas about what the patterns are here?

Rain Down Alienation

The Chronicle has a piece up about the skills involved in rejecting people for jobs or funding or whatever. But what caught my eye is the way they blurb the article:

The ability to communicate negative information without alienating your audience has become an essential administrative skill.

That's an interesting claim. I'm inclined not to believe it. But what I know for sure is, it's absolutely not essential for department or search committee chairs to have the ability to communicate negative information without alienating their audiences. In fact, I have a stack of letters and a folder of e-mails that attest to just how effective their communication of negative information can be, even while they're alienating the shit out of me.

Excuse Me, Is You Saying Something? You Can't Tell Me Nothing.

Committee Member #3 was bitching me out earlier today for the lack of posts recently. (That's interesting, given that he didn't mention my dissertation going nowhere. I guess now I know how he wants me to spend my time.) But since he's writing me a letter right now, I figure I better give the man what he wants.

So let me tell you a story about a placement meeting I had last year with the Old World Septuagenarian and Evil Columbo. The Old World Septuagenarian had been saying some general things about what to expect about the market, and Evil Columbo decided he'd give me and my office mates some advice about our professional development.

He started, as he always did in those meetings, with the story of how he got his job without ever having to think about such crass concerns as application packages, job talks, or, really, professional development of any kind. He helpfully told us things would be different for us, and we should start thinking of ourselves as "junior academics". Apparently, this would involve such steps as going to conferences, and seeking out philosophers working on stuff related to our work. We should even try to meet these people, in order to make them aware of our existence. We should, Evil Columbo instructed us, start to "network".

Yeah. We were on the market, we were three months out from the APA, and Evil Columbo was telling us to maybe start thinking about networking. What awesome fucking advice. Because that definitely hadn't already been obvious for many fucking years.

You Know a School Cafeteria Believes in Mass Production

In comments, Jon adds his two cents about the massive field of interviews going on at the tables in the corporate hotel ballroom:

Also the room itself feels like an institutional cafeteria, which radically increases the likelihood of post traumatic high school flashbacks at worse, or at least memories of all the times in HBO's Oz when somebody gets shanked over a tray of prison gruel.

Even Birds Stop to Drop Their Turds, On the Freakshow, Even Geeks, Even Other Freaks, Hate the Freakshow

Following up on Job Cogburn's post about the job market cycle, here's a great line from John Symons about the Eastern APA: "because of the job process, the Eastern meeting has a bizarre and depressing freakshow quality." No doubt.

The depressing part is something we're all about here at PJMB, but I feel like maybe I've neglected just how bizarre it is. So for grad students or civilians who've never been, let me tell you about something deeply fucking weird.

The better departments interview in hotel suites, but most departments can't afford that. So instead, they interview at a table--a crappy, folding banquet table in the middle of a massive corporate hotel ballroom filled with hundreds of crappy folding banquet tables, each with its own philosophy department doing its own interviews for hours and hours.

So you arrive at the room at 2:55 for your 3:00 interviews, and you stand at the side of the room with all the other people waiting for their 3:00 interviews, everybody looking on from the wall, and everybody feeling like the girl at the eighth grade dance whose orthodontic headgear meant she couldn't even bob her head in time to the Rick Astley without drawing all the wrong kinds of attention to herself.

When your watch says it's 3:00, you start to wind your way between the tables, with luck aiming in the direction of the one your interview's at. But the tables are really close to each other. Like, maybe there's six or seven feet between people's chairs. So you're trying get your game on, and you keep hearing random little things about Sidgwick and Kierkegaard and structural realism.

But the noise is only really a problem when you manage find your table, shake everybody's hand and get into your interview. Then you keep hearing the loud guy interviewing six feet behind you talking about mereology, and that's really fucking distracting. But the distractions aren't just auditory, because the room gets so hot someone opens the fire escape door, which lets in a bunch of pigeons. So you're trying to answer a question about how you'd teach a course on something you don't know anything about, and out of the corner of your eye you keep seeing tables off to your left getting dive-bombed by greasy birds who spend their whole lives eating out of corporate hotel dumpsters. Some rambling old senior prof is asking you a question and all you can process is "blah blah blah" because you can't stop thinking, "Oh fuck, is that nasty flying rat going to fucking shit on me?"

But the worst distraction is the scale of it all. It's weird and bizarre and unreal. You can't look up without seeing hundreds and hundreds of philosophers in every direction. You can't look up without thinking, you're treading water in the middle of an ocean of desperation and socially awkward chit-chat.

Pathetic.

Know what's awesome? Drinking alone. Know what's even awesomer? Drinking alone and updating your C.V.

Seriously. I've been putting off dealing with this for weeks. But I'm beavering away at it quite happily now. Nothing puts a better damper on the howling job market fantods (Which, btw, totally shoulda been the name of this blog. If only I'd thought of it sooner. Not sure PGS would've gone for it, though.) than a little liquid courage. Or, you know, a lot of it. That works too.

It's a Shame You Have to Learn the Hard Way

I'm sure everyone's already seen this, but via Leiter, here's Aidan McGlynn's handy roundup of publishing advice for grad students in philosophy. As someone who's gotten astonishingly shitty advice about this in the past, it really is useful to see the thoughts of people who aren't evil freaks.

There's one thing about publishing I wish someone told me back when I was starting my dissertation. Obviously, I don't have a whole lot of experience publishing, so take this for what it's worth. But I wish someone had told me not to think of what I was writing as a chapter. It wouldn't make sense to think about it as a stand-alone paper, either. I wish someone had told me to think about what I was writing as neither a chapter or paper, but work. Because the work is going to be the basis for both a chapter and a paper. I wish I was thinking like that, because then I'd have been thinking about how the work would have to be packaged to be a chapter and how it'd have to packaged to be a paper. It seems like that could have saved a lot of pain in figuring out how to rewrite a chapter as a stand-alone paper.

Anyway, I wish somebody had told me that.

And the Storm Blows Up in Her Eyes

It's on. The job market's hit me, and I already feel like I'm running just keep up.

One thing is postdoc applications. Some of them have retardedly early deadlines. Last year, I blew the deadlines and I had to tell my supervisor, the Professor, I couldn't apply for postdocs he'd explicitly told me to apply for. That was humiliating, and I wanted to make damn sure I didn't fuck that up again this year.

Well, I might have already fucked it up. One of my letter writers wants to see what progress I've made on my dissertation since he wrote me a letter last year. The thing is, I've only got one new chapter more or less drafted. And I've thrown out another chapter I had last year, so it's a fucking wash. Now, I have made progress--I have a draft of another new chapter in the works, but it's a mess right now and not fit for my committee's eyes, and I have fairly detailed plans for another two chapters. But big plans and pieces of drafts aren't a dissertation, so it sort of looks like I've spent the year fucking off.

My cunning plan was to promise this guy a detailed abstract, so he could get a sense of the shape of the whole dissertation, and to promise I'd have it for him in two days. So now my head's down and I'm writing like a motherfucker, in between sending panicked e-mails to my committee about deadlines for their updated letters.

More later on those panicked e-mails and just how well and truly fucked I am.

Everyone can see we're together, as we walk on by

How common is it -- or was it -- for philosophers to list their spouses and children on their CV's?

I've recently been looking at a lot of CV's, with an eye towards finally re-writing mine. I've been surprised to find that a few of them (usually belonging to older British men) include the names of spouses and children.

Maybe these family CV's aren't meant for the job market, and maybe they stay put on the websites of tenured faculty. (In that case, some pictures might be better.)

Even so, it's pretty creepy to list one's family alongside one's presentations and publications. Or maybe I value my work too little, or my family too much.

You Like Potato and I Like Potahto, You Like Tomato and I Like Tomahto

Here's the puzzle of the day. It's fall. Suppose you're moving at the beginning of term and getting ready for the job market. Do you take a break from packing up boxes to work on your dissertation abstract? Or is packing the break? Do you take a break from your abstract to pack up boxes?

For the solution, highlight the space below:

Fuck. Another weekend's going by and you're not working on your dissertation.

Hope I Die Before I Get Old

I'd meant to get to this a few days ago, but non-blog life got in the way. (Remember my dissertation? No? Don't feel bad. Neither do I sometimes.) Anyway, in case anyone here hasn't already seen philosopher Jon Cogburn's great summary of the entire year-long job market cycle, go take a look. You should read the whole thing, as they say, but I want to highlight something that jumped out at me.

Jon has a great description of the "smoker," something so bone-chilling both PGOAT and I haven't quite been able to find the words to describe it. But beyond the general horror of milling around a loud, badly lit corporate hotel ballroom, trying to make small-talk with a bunch of social retards you want to hire you--besides all that, Jon describes a generational aspect to it I was lucky enough to miss out on at last year's smoker.

During the heydey of the post World War II great academic job market, these smokers were quite different. For one thing, people actually smoked. For another thing, the Baby Boomers actually smoked pot at the smoker. Unless you are a Generation X job candidate who has been stuck at a table with a drunk Baby Boomer during one of these things, and he (it's always a he!) is telling you how great it was "back in the day" when everybody had over ten interviews and there was a "dance circle" of pot smokers in the middle of the room. . . unless you've been through this, you maybe don't even know the meaning of the word "rage". . . .

I speculate that this is one of the main reasons Generation X academics are often so unrelentingly hostile (when talking with one another) about Baby Boomer academics. Baby Boomer academics had a much easier time getting jobs and tenure. Somehow on their watch we not only got Reagan, the two Bushes, and abandonment of cool plans to colonize space, but we also got a university system where now less than half the positions are tenure or tenure-track. And they don't care.

That sounds about right to me. Although my own rage-inducing experiences with this sort of dynamic have involved pre-Boomer philosophers more than Boomers, there's no doubt the earliest Boomers had a pretty easy time on the job market. And that's just not something I want to hear about when all my energy's going into not puking with anxiety into the over-priced, shitty beer I was forced to buy, just to make myself look like the kind of genial junior colleague some asshat Boomer would like to have in the office down the hall.

Attrition

In comments from a few days ago, JC bemoans the PhD graduation rate at his alma mater. I can relate—my dept has a pretty dismal attrition rate. And while on the face of things this might look like just one more way my dept excels in its suckitude, upon closer reflection I’m not so sure.

A lot of the people who don’t finish the program really shouldn’t finish—they get kicked out or wither away because they just can’t hack it. This is a good thing, ultimately. Depts aren’t doing people any favors by stringing them along when they have no hope of ever working in the profession.

And then there are the folks who bail because they’ve got something better going on. It was a pretty formative moment in my graduate education when I realized that the people who made it all the way through my program weren’t necessarily the smartest or the best philosophers. Often, they were the ones who stuck around because they had nothing better to do.

But there are also people—really good people—who don’t finish because many of our faculty members are perfectly happy to let good people fall through the cracks. I’ll save my bitching about those fuckers for another post.

Still, it’s sort of a mixed bag, the attrition thing.

Assistant Director of Supplier Quality

Job Function: Quality Management

Industry: Manufacturing -- Motor Vehicle, including body/trailers/parts

PACCAR is a global technology leader in the design, manufacture, and customer support of high-quality light- medium- and heavy-duty trucks under the Kenworth, Peterbilt, and DAF nameplates. It also provides financial services and information technology and distributes truck parts related to its principal business.

PACCAR has an immediate opening for an Assistant Director in our Corporate Supplier Quality department who will lead deployment of Quality initiatives at PACCAR, train, mentor, and lead Supplier Quality staff to improve supplier capabilities, reduce total defects, and manage projects on time. Approximately 30% travel.

Additional duties will include:

• Supervise Supplier Quality Managers located in the U.S. and Canada to reduce supplier related rejects, improve process capabilities and effectively launch new projects on time.
• Develop processes to improve supplier selection and management, new product implementation, and business sourcing.
• Assist and manage suppliers to achieve 50 PPM
• Depending on the candidate’s skill set: Manage the Advanced Quality initiative or PPAP group.
• Track and manage supplier selection and readiness on major projects.
• Support and manage containment activities for responsible suppliers.
• Ensure status reporting is accurate and on time.
• Manage the group travel budget.
• Partner and collaborate with management in the development of process improvement initiatives and quality problem solving.
• Prepare internal and PACCAR supplier quality reports, assist in the resolution of supplier issues.
• Support global integration on supply chain management.

Requirements:

• Excellent oral and written communication skills; excellent organization and interpersonal skills.
• Must be able to multi-task.
• Significant experience (+5 years) with project management and lean manufacturing required.
• Ability to manage conflict; effective problem solver.
• Demonstrated leadership, teambuilding and mentoring skills, effective conflict resolution skills, ability to drive change and get results.
• Masters degree and/or Six Sigma Black Belt training desired.
• Formal Lean training/certification preferred.
• Bachelor degree in Engineering, Business or appropriate major; 5-7 years of related experience; manufacturing experience is desired.
• Experience should include Six Sigma tools and concepts as a black belt, including but not limited to DMAIC, flow-enhancement, Lean manufacturing and Kaizen.

PACCAR offers a competitive salary and an excellent benefits package to include: medical/dental/vision/Rx, retirement, 401k, life and disability insurance, tuition reimbursement, and more. Equal Opportunity Employer

To apply: e-mail resume in Word format to corp_jobs@paccar.com and include #07-70-02631 in the subject line.

PACCAR Inc.
Bellevue, Washington 98004, United States of America
www.paccar.com

Designer & Drafter - PT. McDermott Indonesia

PT. McDERMOTT INDONESIA, The biggest offshore fabricator in Indonesia and one of the largest offshore construction companies in the world requires proficient, efficient, and highly motivated individuals for the following position:

1. DESIGNERS

• Structure
• Piping

Requirements:

• High School graduate (preferably from Technical High School) with minimum of three years experienced as Designer in Oil and Gas Industry or Fresh Graduate with Diploma degrees in Civil / Mechanical / Shipyard / Electrical.
• Familiar with engineering drawings and CAD software, preferably in 3D modeling software of PDMS/PDS/X-Steel
• Previous experience in Design Engineering office or Construction Company would be advantage
• Proficient in English both oral and writing
• Willing to work in a fabrication/construction conditions.

2. DRAFTERS

• Structure
• Piping

Requirements:

• High School graduate (preferably from Technical High School) with minimum of two years experienced
• Familiar with engineering drawings
• Familiar with AutoCAD or other CAD system are required.
• Proficient in English both oral and writing
• Willing to work in a fabrication/construction conditions.

3. ENGLISH TEACHER (TEACHER)

Requirements:

• Degree in English Education/ Literature.
• Minimum 3 years experience in teaching English for adults.
• Latest TOEFL/ IELTS score.
• Knowledge of Adults learning principle, Independent, self motivated.
• Strong interpersonal skill.
• Able to work in shift.
• Good organization skills.

If your vision of a work environment includes the challenges which can lead to personal growth, respect for ideas, and colleagues who rank with the best, then please send your application and resume, quoting job code, with copy of qualification certificates and recent photograph (4×6cm) to:

PT. McDERMOTT INDONESIA
Jl. Bawal - Batu Ampar
Batam 29452, Indonesia

Students Only - SAP Business Consultant

Opportunity within Global SAP ImplementationDo you hold a Bachelor’s degree? If so, A.P. Moller - Maersk offers you a job while you study for your Master’s degree. We do not acknowledge the traditional dividing line between being a student and building a career. Instead, you start building your career from the very first day at work and we commit ourselves to a future co-operation. When you have finished your studies, you will continue your career within our organisation on full time basis.

You will be part of a dedicated team and you will meet the daily challenges and expectations just as your colleagues. Annual appraisals defining your Key Performance Indicators, on-going training and on-the-job learning will be the corner stones in your future development within our organisation.

SAP Business Consultant – Finance & Accounting Solutions
Since 2003 we have worked with the vision of implementing world-class, uniform, and cost effective financial processes for the Container Business. As SAP Business Consultant you will be involved in state-of-the-art ERP finance and accounting solutions. Your main tasks will be verification of local requirements, training and support of local super users and identification and validation of new functionality. In addition you will participate in ad hoc based activities regarding bigger developments and projects.

The project today comprises of people from more than 25 different countries and you will gain solid knowledge enhancement within the newest SAP based infrastructure. The position will give you an excellent overview of the Container Business Activities and you will be part of a dedicated and ambitious team, providing you with challenging tasks and significant professional and personal development.

Strong drive to achieve your goals
You have graduated as a Bachelor and are now studying for your Master’s degree. You are an independent and out-going team player with excellent communication and interpersonal skills enabling you to work across functions and disciplines. You must be a goal-oriented and driven individual, who thrives on assuming responsibility and achieving results independently and as part of a team. Leadership comes naturally to you and you are used to standing out in a positive way, as you really want to make a difference. Finally you have financial and IT insight and interest and your English skills must be high, as you will work with international contacts every day.

For further information please visit www.maersk.com/studentsonly or call HR Partner Jenny Bergin on +45 3363 5696.

A.P. Møller - Mærsk A/S

Asset and Liability Consultants, APAC - Fermat Pte Ltd

Fermat is an international provider of Enterprise Wide Risk Management Software Credit Risk Basel II, Asset and Liability Management, Limit monitoring, IAS 39 and VaR) dedicated to the Banking Industry.

Founded in 1996, Fermat has today 100 reference sites of its software in Europe, Americas, Middle East and Asia Pacific.

Responding to the current growth of its business activities in Asia Pacific, Fermat is now seeking to hire Singapore based ALM Software Implementation Consultants.

Asset and Liability Consultants, APAC
(Singapore)

Requirements:

• Master or Degree in Finance, Banking or Accountancy from a leading University.
• Strong functional skills in finance (trading and banking book)
• An IT bias (SQL, RDBMS – Oracle preferred) with a good understanding of banking information systems will have an added advantage
• A minimum of 5/7 years of overall professional experience gained in the banking arena (banks, software house, consulting firm, integrator etc)
• Good understanding of ALM concepts
• Prior ALM software implementation experience (BancWare, QRM, IPS Sendero, Kamakura) or core banking and/or treasury solutions (Summit, Kondor+, Panorama, Globus etc)preferred with a hands-on approach
• A team player and enjoy interacting with people of all levels in a multicultural environment
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• Strong analytical, quantitative and problem solving skills
• Must be prepared to travel

Interested applicants, please send detailed resume to hr@fermat.com.sg

Fermat Pte Ltd #3, Church Street #16-03/04 Samsung Hub, Singapore 049483

Senior Recruitment Consultant(Singapore)

Responsibilities:

• Source, screen and identify suitable candidates
• Market placement services

Requirements:

• 3-4 years relevant experience in skilled recruitment industry
• Diploma or bachelor’s degree
• Passion for recruitment work

Compensation:High basic salary + attractive incentive

Excellent opportunities for career advancement in the region

Position is open to Singapore citizens/permanent residents only

If you are interested to join this dynamic and growing global company, please e-mail your resume to: philip@hotjob.com.sg

Production Supervisor

We are a Multinational Vacuum Forming & Packaging company invites suitable candidate for the following position:

Production Supervisor & Senior Production Supervisor

• Degree in management, max. 35 years old
• Have 5 - 10 years experience in Supervision
• Discipline, responsibility & Supervisory skills
• Able to operate Windows system (PC)
• Hard Working & able rolling shift

Please submit your application letter to:

Admin Department
PT. Etowa Packaging Indonesia
Panbil Industri Type B3 Lot.7
Mukakuning – 29433, Batam - Indonesia

QC Piping Supervisor

PT. Pan-United Shipyard Indonesia, an International Shipyard Company seeks qualified candidates to fill the position of:

QC Piping Supervisor

• Diploma/degree graduated from reputable university.
• Min. 2 years of working experience at the same field.
• Hold a Welding Inspector Certificate.
• Knowledge of Yard Quality Performance Standard.
• Interested applicants are invited to send details resume other supporting documents to:

Human Resources Manager
PT. Pan-United Shipyard Indonesia
Jl. Brigjend KatamsoTanjung Uncang Batam Island - Indonesia

Territory Manager

At Accenture, we relish the opportunity to solve problems, push back the boundaries and do what hasn't been tried before. We're one of the world's leading management consulting, technology services and outsourcing companies and we want talented people who are looking for a challenge. Join our global team and you'll be delivering the innovation that helps our clients become high-performance businesses.

Territory Manager (Singapore)

Job Description:

If you join Accenture you can make great ideas happen for some of the world's most dynamic companies. With broad global resources and deep technical know-how, we collaborate with clients to cultivate ideas and deliver results. Choose a career at Accenture and enjoy an innovative environment where challenging and interesting work is part of daily life.Accenture’s Services workforce is a dedicated team of people who work on outsourcing engagements. These are long-term partnerships with clients for whom we manage and provide increasingly specialised business operations, such as finance and accounting, IT, applications development and maintenance, help desk services, and HR. We not only maintain key business functions for clients, we constantly seek to improve them to help our clients move ahead of the competition.Most of our people in Services are based long-term at a client location, an Accenture Delivery Centre or, in some cases, an Accenture office.

This role reports to the Regional Account Director and the purpose of the role is to:

• Work with the HR team to drive HR transformation activities in the country or cluster to align HR operations and business processes.
• Provide advice and guidance on the planning and implementation of the HR operating framework which defines the retained HR resources into expertise teams, business partners, and a shared services operation.
• Work with the regional and local expertise teams to guide the implementation of business process realignment in line with global standards. Provide advice and guidance on the implementation of global technology tools, liaising with the Accenture transition team where appropriate.
• Work with the Service Delivery Manager to ensure effective implementation of the Service Management Framework. Drive, communicate and monitor contract and service management processes: SLAs, Service Measurement, Service Reporting, Customer Service Perception Surveys, and Benchmarking
• Assist the SDM with defining, tracking and managing progress of HR transformation activities using the Country Continuous Improvement Plan.
• Periodically review local “entry readiness criteria” for potential move to full outsourcing model
• Drive the problem management process and report upon and seek to resolve escalated service issues
• Conduct quarterly reviews to discuss service performance and changes to service requirements
• Make change recommendations to regional/local management for their decision/action
  Act as the escalation point for local service delivery problem resolution for critical issues
• Provide input to the local performance management processes for in-scope people
• Help to track savings against the business case
• Represent Accenture HRS at external client forums
• Develop relationships with key contact points (SDMs and local / regional HR
• Management) to ensure a “partnering” approach to service management
• Ability to understand client business objectives and bring to bear the Accenture client proposition and to support the client in reaching their objectives, by advising, recommending, maintaining frequent interaction.

Qualification:

• Broad understanding of HR Service Operations
• Creative approach to problem solving and solution design
• Analytical mindset for problem trending and resolution planning
• In depth experience of managing change within a commercial environment and knowledge of techniques for successful change management
• Broad knowledge in the Client Management arena — experience of relationship building; business management and knowledge (finance, commercial awareness and understanding of budgets and planning)
• Experience of successful project management within business transition, transformation or systems projects
• Ability to understand and interpret complex client challenges and identify service improvement initiatives
• Ability to develop new ways of working and informally or formally roll these out across Operations
• Ability to coach and influence the SPOC and the in country management teams
• Knowledge of outsourcing commercial imperatives
• High degree of problem solving and analytical capability
• Requirement for out-of-the-box solutions, that are also in line with policy and strategy
• Ability to see the process through to resolution is key
• Ability to work closely with senior leadership on trend analysis and continuous improvement opportunities.
• Deals on a daily basis with generally complex/in depth issues
• High degree of virtual team management capability required as problems usually require coordination with various parts of the organisation to achieve resolution

Visit http://careers.accenture.com/singapore

Accenture Pte Ltd
250 North Bridge Rd #32-00 Raffles City Tower, Singapore 179101

Tell Me With Perfection in Your Voice, That You Never Really Had a Choice

Trolling through this Crooked Timber thread about advice for prospective grad students, I found this little turd of crappy advice:

Also, if a school admits you to its PhD program, but offers no funding, I’d think very long and hard before committing to it. (I would never have, for one thing, I already had enough loans from college.) If they don’t believe in supporting you financially, it’s not clear whether they really believe in supporting you at all.

No. I can't make it any clearer than that. You should not "think very long and hard before committing" to the PhD program, and yes, it is clear they really won't support you. There's no thinking to do here. Your decision's been made for you.

A Dollar When I'm Hard Up

Questions from the Chronicle forums. . . .

I recently found an ad for a T-T job at a university on the West Coast that in many respects could be considered my dream job if not for the salary. In terms of numbers, I live in an area where the cost-of-living index is around 90, and the university is in an area where it's around 160. At the same time, the salary they offer is 35% below what I am making now, and according to CNN Money, they would have to offer me 2.5 times as much as they do now if I wanted to maintain my current lifestyle. I'm going to pass on this job, but I still wonder how these universities can get away with such offers? Has it become so much of a buyer's market that some applicants are willing to accept anything?

And the answer is. . . . Yes!

I Drag Up Ancient History

You might remember a post about rejection letters I shamelessly lifted. ("I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to offer me an assistant professor position in your department.") I couldn't figure out where it came from originally, but a commenter at the Chronicle finds it way back in a mathematics newsletter from 1996. Interesting. Is that the source? I have no idea.

Also in the Chronicle's comments section is this awesome response:

In writing and sending such a letter, the applicant confirmed his immaturity and the department probably breathed a sigh of relief that they indeed had rejected him.

Um, in writing and posting such a comment, the commenter confirmed he's a total knob. How's that for maturity?

I've Been Everything You Want to Be, I'm the Cult of Personality

I've talked before about how your advisor's reputation affects the your prospects on the market. No doubt with those considerations in mind, a well-placed departmental source points me to this passage from Leiter's old piece in the Chronicle:

Far too many students attach themselves to professionally marginal faculty members, who may happen to be charismatic or congenial or who seem to loom large in local departmental affairs. No matter how good their subsequent work, these students will be at an enormous disadvantage when it comes to getting a job. What matters isn’t how important and impressive your advisor looks in Austin or Madison or Berkeley or New Haven. What matters is how he is perceived in the profession at large.

When I was new in my department, some of the best senior students got killed on the job market because they fell into the orbit of Evil Columbo. With breadcrumbs and bits of sandwich meat falling out of his mouth, he told them not to bother engaging with recent work on their dissertation topics, because, well, what did anyone younger than him have to say anyway? And he told them search committees wouldn't care about publications, since real philosophers don't need some journal referee to tell them what's good work and what's not.

The man doesn't have a clue, but the force of his personality's stopped some fuck-off smart people from seeing that.

So am I still waiting

Since the first of the month's come and gone, that must mean it's time to e-mail the journal that's been sitting on my paper for nine months now. I suppose I'm well past the point where I could have any hope it would be on my CV by the time my applications go out.

Dear [Lazy Fucking And/Or Appalling Disorganized Journal],

Remember when I sent you my paper and you replied with an e-mail saying this would take four months? Remember? You might not, because it was way more than four months ago. I'm sort of wondering what the fuck happened to my paper? Can you see it lying around the office somewhere? Is it stuck in a drawer? Maybe you should ask the referees if it slipped down behind all the old copies of the New Yorker they keep beside their toilets for reading during snatched moments of quiet repose. Anyway, I'm going to be trying to get a job in, like, six weeks, so any news about the paper sure would be great.

Kisses,

[PGS].

How's that for a first draft?

Taking Care of Business Every Way

I'm late getting back to this, because PJMB HQ had no internet for most of yesterday, but on this question of what happened to the projected surplus of jobs in the humanties, a couple of people in comments mentioned something that scares the fuck out of me.

NS, for one, points to a slowing demand for profs in the humanties. Job Cogburn raises the possibility of something that seems pretty plausible to me. The massive growth of pre-professional BAs has sucked a kids away from a traditional liberal arts-based education. Take a look at the Princeton Review's summary of the top-10 most popoluar majors in US colleges. Only four of the 10--biology, english, communications, and poli sci--are not pre-professional. And even then, in their blurb about why people should consider biology, the Princeton Review people say talk about students being pre-med.

Even worse, although the list doesn't say it ranks majors by popularity, I don't exactly feel all warm inside by the fact that number one is "Business Adminstration and Management." Ugh. I wouldn't be in this business if I didn't really believe in the value of a liberal arts undergrad education, so it really, really hurts to think of b-schools peeling off majors from philosophy and physics and Spanish or whatever.

And besides having all these bright, shiny ideals about undergrad education, I also want a fucking job teaching philosophy. But for that, there's got to be some philosophy students to teach.

Now Renegades Are the People With Their Own Philosophies

The Sally Haslanger article (pdf!) Leiter's linked to is a cold blast of perspective. I'll leave it up to PGOAT say more about women philosophers' experiences in grad school and the job market, since she's the she around these parts, but I want to point to one thing. Haslanger talks a bit about hostility within philosophy to feminism. Wanna see what that looks like up close and personal? Lookee here in this random forum:

Feminist Theory? This is philosophy?

---

I was peeking around the ol' internets this evening, and stumbled across a page listing philosophy jobs (mostly schools hiring for philosophy teacher positions) and more than a few of them were hiring for "Feminist Philosophy" or "Feminist Theory".

Since when is this philosophy and not sociology? Can anyone tell me what "Feminist Theory" is beside what I think it probably obviously is? Can one devote an entire career to the "theory" of feminism? . . . .

ETA: If "Feminist Theory" is considered philosophy, couldn't "Football Theory" be a valid discipline at that point?

To which some other guy responds:

There are 2 or 3 philosophers at my school whose main interest is feminism. I don't know anything about it and don't care to. I avoid those classes like I avoid race theory classes. I don't have a problem with it or anything; I just don't give a damn.

I might check out "football theory" though. :)

Where the fuck does that hostility come from? Both these asshats seem to be undergrads, so they hardly speak for the profession. But they had to get these attitudes somewhere, and I'll bet it wasn't from random goons they talk to in laundromats.*

*Yeah, I know this post doesn't actually have anything to do with the job market, but I've been looking for an excuse to link to those two knobs for a while, and that Haslanger article is too awesome not to mention.

This One's Optimistic

A couple of months ago I ran across a philosophy department claiming:

the Philosophy job market is just now beginning to change from conditions of severe shortage of jobs to ones where, in a few years, there will likely be a shortage of candidates.

At the time I asked, "where the fuck does anyone get the idea there's ever going to be a shortage of candidates?" Well, maybe this is part of the answer. This piece in the Chronicle points to a 1989 report by William G. Bowen and Julie Ann Sosa. The Chronicle's original article about the report opened with this lede:

The arts and sciences face severe faculty shortages in the future, especially in the humanities and social sciences, a new study has found.

"Severe faculty shortages"? Wow. And that's under a headline that says, "Big Faculty Shortages Seen in Humanities and Social Sciences." Apparently Bowen and Sosa's big idea was that lots of faculty were due to retire in the late '90s, leaving buckets of jobs for everybody. I guess it didn't work out that way.

Was this a common thing to think in the late '80s? It's hard for me to understand where that kind of optimism could come from.

I Have a Plan, We're Gonna Make it Happen

Last night I started talking about the disconnect between well-meaning non-academics' advice and the realities of the job market. But maybe I was too quick to dismiss the advice. Maybe we should give it a shot. What do we have to lose, right?

So in the spirit of taking very seriously the thoughts of non-academics on the job market, I offer these real-life suggestions about how to get a job.

First, just to get warmed up, you have to fully exploit your mother-in-law's connections:

Recently we moved across the country. Before we left, my MIL told me that a guy in her office had a brother who was in the admissions office at a university in our new state and that she had talked him into asking her brother to hire me. She means well, but despite my frequent explanations still has no idea how the academic job market works and was offended that I wasn't more excited about her "inside contact."

This plan is sure to work. Your mother-in-law's co-worker's brother--got that?--works in the admission's office. And that guy's got juice with the philosophy department.

Okay, so maybe that doesn't work out. No problem, you've got options. Have you tried a headhunter?

A friend suggested to me that I hire a professional headhunter. I explained that headhunters know the corporate market; they don't understand the academic market. He insisted that a headhunter could let me know about all the jobs available that I'm not aware of. I told him I pretty much know about all of the jobs available in the US in my field, that I am linked to several job posting sites and get email notifications about jobs, and the problem is not finding jobs to apply for, but getting the job after I apply. He was not convinced.

The real genius of this plan is, after you've applied to all the jobs in the JFP, the Chronicle, and the all the listservs you're on, you can pay a guy to tell you about all the jobs in the JFP, the Chronicle, and all the listservs you're on. He can also probably offer professional advice about how to jazz up your "resume" with things like your professional goals and personal interests.

But if the headhunter doesn't do it, you're going to have pull yourself up by your bootstraps:

No, I can't just decide I really really want a job at, say, Princeton, and get a job as an administrative assistant in X department and "work my way up."

Why the hell not? You can be just like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl, except you do epistemology. Once the chair of the department at Princeton sees how awesomely you answer phones and make photocopies, he'd be insane not to give you a research budget. After all, this is America.

My mind's made up. I'm totally trying these out.

But I Can't Answer You Anymore

One thing I wasn't ready for last year was how totally confused non-academics can be about the job market. One night I was out with some people who work with the Future Dr. Mrs. Dr. PGS's sister, and I ended up talking a lot with this guy who'd been a philosophy major in college. He seemed to like me, and the more he thought about it, the more convinced he got that I should swing by his old department and "drop off a resume." He really liked this idea, and he got pretty animated about it.

That kind of confusion can be funny or it can piss me off, depending on my head space. But something more subtle made me grind my teeth more than any yuppie dumb-ass telling me he'd "put in a good word" for me with his old professors. All kinds of people--friends, family, random people--asked me what my top choices for jobs were. Sometimes they wouldn't use exactly those words--"What are you hoping for?" "If you got to choose, where would you go?"--but that's what they were asking. You can tell that's what they're asking because when you answer by saying you're hoping for any job and, no, you don't get to choose, they don't think you've answered their question. They think you're being evasive and obtuse and weird. Or worse, they think you're just being a dick.

But what they don't get is, I wasn't being evasive or obtuse or weird. What's the point of having preferences when getting even a single job is a long shot? I don't want to consider the inevitable counterfactual, "Yeah, but if you got to choose. . .?" What's thinking about that going to get me? An extra crowbar of disappointment laid into my ribs when I get rejected? That's exactly what I'm trying to avoid. But how do you explain that to someone when they're just trying to make small-talk?

Rocking the Passive Voice XVII

Guess what turned up in my inbox on Friday? A PFO! I guess the department that sent it wanted to get their rejection e-mails out of the way before, you know, the Labor Day weekend. That's like, what? 10 months between the application deadline and the rejection?

But I bet I know why it took so long. Someone obviously put a lot of thought into it:

Thank you for your interest in the following position:

Position Title: Assistant Professor
Posting Number: [blah, blah, blah]
Department: Philosophy

Your application has been reviewed and based on our current pool of applicants, you will not be considered for an interview at this time.

We appreciate your interest in this position and we wish you well in locating the opportunity you desire. We invite you to log on to http://blah.blah.edu to apply for other job opportunities at [C]SU for which you feel you qualify.

[Crappy] State University

Not having a salutation of any kind is pretty awesome, but what makes this PFO super-awesome is the way it's just signed with the school's name instead of a real person's. Now that's class.

Update: In comments, himself puts a positive spin on how late this PFO was: "[w]hen universities send you rejections before they've interviewed applicants, that's when they're really telling you to get fucked." Fair point.

How hard is it to write a letter?

After reading PGS talk about his rejection letters, I’m reminded of how few of them I received. And that’s not because I got job offers instead of letters.

Now, I did a very selective search last year. I only applied for eight jobs. But, I received one (one!) rejection letter, and that was from the only school that gave me an interview. (I must have made a good impression to deserve a letter.)

Maybe hiring committees have been reading PGS’s rejection letter posts and decided that my feelings would be hurt less by being ignored than by receiving a letter written in the passive voice. Or maybe I should add another item to the list of things that are dehumanizing about the philosophy job market.

Introducing Akhtaboot

An unconventional name for an unconventional company. Akhtaboot is taking on the online recruitment market with all 8 tentacles. With an edgy brand and a friendly mascot to go with it (the Akhtaboot even has a Facebook profile like any normal user, he’s called “Akhtaboot Jobs”), Akhtaboot is bringing the dot com culture to the Middle East. You just need to take one look at the design and functionality of the website (www.akhtaboot.com) to know that Akhtaboot is set on raising the bar.

Established in 2007, Akhtaboot is an online career network that is committed to providing a user-friendly way of linking the right person to the right career opportunity. Akhtaboot is the only recruitment website that allows companies and users to establish connections with one another and build a professional network. Built and headquartered in Amman, Akhtaboot.com is initially set up to serve the Jordanian market, however Akhtaboot plans to serve as a career network for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Akhtaboot is a young revolution in the online space. The company was soft-launched on June 17 2007 and officially inaugurated by the Minister of Labor, His Excellency Mr. Bassem El Salem, on July 7 2007. It has been exponential growth since then, and Akhtaboot is seeing a phenomenal increase in traffic and users with every passing day.

Essentially, Akhtaboot is designed to operate as a community of people who share professional and career interests. Offering web 2.0 functionality, Akhtaboot provides an interactive and dynamic interface for its users. In addition to traditional job postings, it also offers “word of mouth” postings that mimic how people hear about jobs in their daily life. The filtration tools on Akhtaboot are highly advanced and efficient, and the content is locally and culturally relevant.

Recognizing the importance of placing the right person in the right job, Akhtaboot is the only career site in the Middle East that is qualified as a Myers-Briggs© (MBTI) provider. The MBTI is recognized as a global leader in personality tests with over 70 years of extensive research. It is used by Fortune 500 companies worldwide both for hiring and human resource development purposes.

Akhtaboot’s added-value and benefits serve two entities: career seekers and employers. Career seekers can benefit from Akhtaboot whether they are actively searching for a job or simply interested in building a professional network of business contacts.

The services provided to career seekers include: free job application and search functionality, receiving “word of mouth” job announcements, and the opportunity to take the MBTI personality test. The MBTI provides a reliable and valid analysis of the career seeker’s strengths and areas for development in a career context. It also includes suggestions on how the career seeker can capitalize on his/her strengths and compensate for his/her blind spots.

For users who are simply interested in professional networking, Akhtaboot’s services include: the ability to build an extensive network of professional contacts, the opportunity to hear about potentially interesting career prospects from your network’s “word of mouth”, and the functionality to add personal notes related to their list of professional contacts. Professional networkers also have the opportunity to take the MBTI.

Akhtaboot is built upon 20 professional communities. Communities are sections within Akhtaboot grouped according to job function that attract people of similar career interests. Every job seeker must express interest in at least one and at most three communities. Career seekers can join communities so that they can network with fellow community members, grow their knowledge in a specific field and, of course, look for and apply to relevant jobs.

Akhtaboot’s community based model also allows companies to see only relevant candidates. Companies can either post jobs to certain communities to target a relevant audience or can search within members of certain communities. In general, the services provided to employers include: posting employment opportunities onto specific job function communities in order to receive relevant applicants, efficient CV browsing through user-friendly filtration tools, and the ability to create a comprehensive company profile.

Akhtaboot’s services are based on extensive research, and their approach was a solution-based approach in that companies were asked what recruitment pains they had and then the website was built to help solve these pains. Akhtaboot was built by its users and for its users, and they encourage everyone (employers and career seekers alike) to continuously provide their feedback, as they plan to incorporate their ideas to help make Akhtaboot even better. Akhtaboot is committed to putting users first and is focused on providing only the best service.

In addition, Akhtaboot is also committed to attracting the passive job seeker and high quality candidates. The Akhtaboot brand, the locally-relevant information in communities, the professional networking functionality and, of course, providing job seekers with the ability to simply upload their CV are all efforts in making Akhtaboot the leading destination for the highest quality talent.

The young management team at Akhtaboot is dedicated to keeping Akhtaboot on the cutting-edge of technology, continuously researching and implementing new Internet trends that cater to the needs of career seekers and employers alike. As it expands its network, Akhtaboot is expected to spread its tentacles in the MENA region.