I once had a conversation about career issues with a fellow STEM PhD who had spent many years in the world of business and technology entrepreneurship. It was a real eye-opening moment for me when this person said something along the lines of:
Look, people say we need more scientists, but there isn’t market pull. There’s not a huge demand for the supply of PhDs out there.
There it was: a point-blank statement describing what I (and many others) have experienced, but that virtually no one is willing to admit. Things aren’t as bleak as they sound, however. Going deeper into the concept of “market pull” led me to a much clearer understanding of how to run a successful PhD scientist job search.
In the field of marketing, you come across the concept of market pull vs. technology push. Basically, market pull is a situation in which you are developing and selling a product that satisfies a specific, known need that customers are clamoring to have met. Alternatively, in technology push, you start with a new and excellent product or service that will really help a customer, but it doesn’t fit neatly into an existing category. Therefore, you must explain the value and stoke the customer’s desire to buy. Electric lighting is one technology that always had strong market pull. Everyone understood the need to light their homes and businesses at night and was very eager for a bright solution that worked at the flick of a switch, didn’t pollute the air, and was far less likely to burn down their buildings. Personal Data Assistants (PDAs) are an example of a long technology push. For many years, people tried to convince the average customer of the value of a handheld computerized address book/calendar/note pad through several famous failures like the Apple Newton and moderate successes like the Palm Pilot. However, the product category didn’t explode until the addition of a cell phone. Steve Jobs reimagined these new, and at first clunky and poor-selling, “smartphones” as the iPhone and eventually sold a billion units. It was the high degree of integrated functionality, ease of use, elegant packaging, and inspired communication and salesmanship on Jobs’ part that kindled our desired to buy iPhones.
I happen to have a personal front-row seat to similar dynamics in the job market. My wife is a nurse practitioner and there is clearly market pull in the entire field of nursing. On the other hand, as a PhD physicist, I experience more of a market push situation, just as my acquaintance above noted. One manifestation of the pull vs. push dynamic in everyday life is that my wife gets at least ten times the number of calls from recruiters that I do, despite the fact that I probably invest ten times more effort into career marketing (maintaining my LinkedIn page, posting to social media, etc.). The need for nurses is acute and what a nurse does is well-defined by many licenses and certifications. Physicists? Not so much, especially outside the few traditional roles: professor, postdoc, etc. As previously established, there are not nearly enough good traditional jobs to go around, so the typical physicist will eventually find themselves in a candidate push scenario in the private sector job market.
Another way to look at market pull vs. candidate push is to think of it as the linear vs. non-linear job search. When market pull is in effect, things are much more likely to go in the simple order most people expect when job hunting: advertisement, resume, apply, interview, offer. However, this linearity also means well-defined jobs with well-defined pay. Candidate push is a much more non-linear situation requiring more creativity and communication savvy to craft an attractive value proposition. This is harder than simply writing resumes and applying to job ads. However, as with innovative products like the iPhone, there is unlimited possibility and potential.
How do you succeed in candidate push marketing? Here are a few pointers for executing a successful job search:
- Start by defining, in relatively broad terms, what you are interested in doing and what you are good at. Are you a crack coder happy to spend all day on the keyboard developing? In graduate school, did your passion for advocacy lead you to spend a lot of time with student groups (much to your advisor’s chagrin)?
- Investigate where your interests and talents intersect with employer needs. Expect to do a lot of networking and informational interviewing. People ultimately do the hiring, so you need to know what they think and really want, not just what the job advertisement says (if there even is one).
- Tailor your resume and other communication so that it focuses on the intersection between your talents/interests and the market need. This is your personal market niche “theory” about your next job.
- Expect to do more networking and informational interviewing, along with a keen-eyed review of advertisements, to find nascent job opportunities and see whom you can inspire with, in Dale Carnegie’s words, an “eager want” for your services.
- If your theory doesn’t survive the experiment, then go back, modify the theory, and try again. Before iterating your theory, however, you want to test it thoroughly. I have spoken to people who were discouraged after one or two networking phone calls or meetings, but it really takes more to get a sense of what’s out there. I’ve done around ten informational interview calls before iterating my market niche theory in my own job searches.
Good luck, and don’t be afraid to seek help if you feel stuck. Lots of great resources are out there and you can send me a note if you need more.