Thursday, August 26, 2010

A bit of good news, perhaps: ACS job fair numbers

Good morning! The following numbers were reported to the ACS Council regarding the ACS Boston Career Fair:

Employers: 68
Number of positions: 484
Job seekers: 1066

Those numbers are better than the last two sets of numbers, especially the ratio of jobseekers to positions. An improvement from 5-to-1 and 10-to-1 to 2-to-1 is nice to hear. Hope that people had good luck finding positions.

UPDATE (8/31/10): The ever-helpful David Harwell (Assistant Director for Career Management and Development at ACS) (here, speaking for himself, not for ACS) e-mails to say that "We also recorded 770 interviews. Please note that this number only reflects interviews scheduled through our system. Some employers prefer to schedule interviews independently. Using our number, there were 0.7 interviews per job seeker."

8 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Indeed, not surprisingly, people out of work lack the resources for room & boarding in a city like Boston. 

    Let's also assume that either (a) they've requested ACS due waiver for not more than two consecutive years (which is not allowed, according to ACS bylaws) or (b) they were able to sneak in to the meeting/career fair venue w/o a badge.

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  3. @MCC: I'll see what I can find out about that (re 1,066 job seekers.)

    I'd be interested to know if Nalco was hiring for its US, India or China locations.

    Re 20% of tables, that's been my experience for the 2008 Fall ACS. That said, if you only have 68 employers interviewing (doesn't that seem kind of low?), I wouldn't expect the tables to be very full. Then again, if I were an interviewer, I wouldn't be using the tables at all.

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  4. Anon9:51P:

    The plural of anecdote is not data, but I know at least one unemployed chemist at the Boston ACS.

    You've put a good idea in my head, though.

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  5. Oops. Accidentally removed the original post. Sorry!

    I have a good friend who works at Nalco and she says they are hiring at all three sites.

    In fact, she said the company held a mixer at Boston and something like 200 people showed up in about an hour. The applicants were, not surprisingly, very aggressive towards the recruiters.

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  6. Dude, here is my career fair anecdote from the ACS meeting. (BTW, I wasn't looking myself.) I was heading to the expo when a visa-holder/seeker accosted me. From what I could decipher, the guy was looking for the career fair. He was 10 minutes late for his first interview...he had three more that day. Anyway, I was feeling nice and decided to walk with him to the fair. He told me that he was interviewing for 3 analytical & 1 organic position; 2 positions were back in his motherland. Anyway, those stats that you mention may not be as rosey as they appear.

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20