Hammerfall 3.0: Week 6 Report

Period:  21 January to 25 January (truncated due to travel)

Positions applied to:  I applied to 2 position this week.  Total jobs applied to/opportunities investigated are 63 unique positions (more on this below)

Note 1:  As of Monday 22 January, there were less than 50 jobs in total for the entire state that Old Home/The Ranch is in that were listed on one of the job sites I frequent.  Likely this does not include the major Biologic/Pharma manufacturers as they have their own websites, but still - that is a staggeringly small number.

Rejections:  I was rejected for 1 position (12 total rejections).

Conversations: 

I had one screening call with a large biologics company, one on-site interview, and two phone interviews.

My screening call on 23 January was for an "individual contributor" position at a major biopharmaceutical company.  To be honest, I am really interested in the possibility of the position after the screen.  Pay would be equivalent to what I had at my last job, so not necessarily a step down.  It went so well (apparently) that I had a follow up call with the hiring manager due to my availability next week.  That went well too, so far as I can tell.  They had several other candidates to screen and would follow up if interest, etc.

My on-site interview for the potential job in New Home was on Monday (22 January 2024).  It was a panel interview of about 40 minutes, a few minutes for me to ask questions, and then a short tour.  Bottom line:  Interview went okay and should hear something by the end of next week.  On the negative side, another round of questions on how do you handle underperforming employees (which now sounds like a problem) and how do you dealing with moving things to closure for competing timelines (You do not; you have a limited time and resource bank and you prioritize).  Also a concern is that they are a service organization focused on a rather small part of the overall ecosystem; long term success may be a concern.

My phone interview was for the higher level out of state site Quality position on 24 January also went well.  Conducted with the hiring manager, it was more a review of my career as well as them explaining the company, the job, and the location.  It went well enough that I will moved forward to a panel interview.

Of note, both out of state positions would put me with a long days' drive of The Ranch.

Job losses:  As of this writing (25 January), only one company, Cara Therapeutics, announced they were laying off 50% of their staff (no numbers) to "extend the cash runway into 2026 (this number keeps coming up).

Mood:

In summary, it appears I have four reasonably possible candidates at this time. I have begun to build a matrix to evaluate the opportunities against each other with an attempted degree of like for like comparison as it seems likely they are tracking closely together in terms of timing.

The Dog Whisperer sent me something this week that made me think.

The quote is from a newsletter called "The Work Shift" which I guess is somewhere on LinkedOut (I cannot find it):  "Even in this job market where 'job vacancies have come down across the board' amid  a 'higher interest rate environment', job seekers are applying to jobs with 21% more intensity than they were this time last year, (Chief LinkedIn Economist Kim) Kimbrough continued.  That could be because there are currently fewer available positions.  By mid-2023, LinkedIn data showed there was about one opening for every two applicants, down from a peak of one job opening for every applicant."  Note the phrase "mid-2023" - we are well beyond that now. 

Add to that "21% more intensity" that does not necessarily mean "21% better matches".  There is likely and equally a sense of "throw it against the wall and see what sticks", which of course means more applications and CVs incoming, which means increased reliance on automatic screening tools, which means more tweaking to CVs using AI to be "the candidate of choice", which leads to AI reading the AI to catch the AI...not a great environment.