On-campus recruiting

Recruit The recruiting strategy I rely on to attract minority, as well as majority, candidates is fairly standard and easily duplicated by anyone. In addition to the RTCI conference noted above, we continue to rely heavily on campus recruiting. Representatives of my office visit about 40 campuses each year and annually conduct about 600 campus interviews with doctoral chemistry students who are no more than a year away from graduation, or who are completing a postdoctoral assignment. 

Your campus career center Ask if if has any printed information about firms fhaf interesf you, particularly if those companies participate in on-campus recruiting. 

The firm participated in on-campus recruiting, so Michael s first stop was his college career center. Here, he was able to find pamphlets and fact sheets about the firm. This gave him a general idea about the type of work the firm did. 

Your college or university may also participate in on-campus recruiting. This means that you can arrange interviews with certain firms through your college career center. The interviews will take place on campus. 

The companies that participate in on-campus recruiting tend to be large firms that hire many new employees straight out of college. The types of companies that recruit vary depending upon which college you attend. 

I came back to the LSU faculty and told them about this young man and about his record. They said, We don t want to see this young man. We have completed all of our recruiting for the year. I told them to just interview him. So, we brought him in and interviewed him. The faculty were so wowed that they made him an offer on the spot. Five years later, he graduated with a Ph.D. He went on to start his own company. He was the greatest ambassador for our department and he was all over the campus. Everyone on campus knew him. He did phenomenally well in our program. There are a lot of schools that would not have taken a chance on him. He is an extreme example however, there are a number of other examples like that, of students that we took a chance on, and some of them are extraordinary students. 

With the war over, the recruiters came on campus. I was invited to visit Shell Development in September, so Margie and I came up again for a few days for the interview. We had pretty well made up our my minds that Shell was it, but U.S. Rubber in New Jersey as well as Hercules in Delaware also offered me visits. But it was a fine trip—the Superchief to Chicago and then the 20th Century limited to New York. U.S. Rubber really went all out to get me. We were wined and dined, and then on the second day they asked me what Shell had offered me. I told them 375. a month. The interviewers went into a huddle and came back cheerfully saying that they were able to up that to 385 ... 

The Ku Klux Klan (or any controversial organization) should/should not be allowed to speak (or recruit) on campus. 

What to study. The drug industry employs more synthetic chemists than any other kind, regardless if they work in chemical discovery or development groups. Competition for places is therefore keen, so objective qualifications like research success help recruiters hire chemists. Publications and particularly patents express success in chemistry. Desirable experience includes relevant summer internships and on-campus imdergraduate research. It especially improves B.S. graduates prospects for employment in the pharmaceutical industry. 

A final word of caution Don t be tempted to fabricate your role on a team. Company recruiters say that they are often in situations on campus where they interview every member of a team. Eventually, the real contributors to the team are clear to the recruiters because all the other team members corroborate their story. 

In any case, you won t have time for even one good success story, so you have no choice buf to focus on facfs. Be prepared to know whaf fhey are and make as compelling a case as you can for yourself. Don t be shy. Campus recruiters expecf a hard sell because of fime limitations and the sheer number of sfudents who want to be interviewed. Once you get a date for a second interview, you can work on presenting yourself at length— and with a little more polish. 

Towards the end when he started out on job interviews, he again used Joe as a partner in discussing job opportunities. He was approached by several recruiters from various companies including one from Bell Labs. He knew this last one reasonably well since she had visited him each year during her visit to campus. After a number of interviews and company visits. Bill finally decided on a job at Bell Labs, maybe because he knew it best. He came to the choice on his own and he was glad there had been no pressure put upon him to make it. 

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