Recession-Proof?

I've been spending a lot of time interviewing candidates for a technician position in our lab. The hiring process always generates lots of fodder for blog posts--over-the-top cover letters, horrible references, bizarre interview behavior, etc. A lot of it is highly amusing...the first two times you see it. After that, it just gets depressing and you start to wonder how many weirdos you're going to have to screen before you find someone you actually want to bring in for a second interview, much less hire.

And then you wonder if perhaps you've set your standards too high by holding out for a candidate with intelligence, experience, good interpersonal skills, and work ethic. Perhaps you should settle for three of the four...or even two of the four. Is a smart and likeable, but inexperienced and lazy, applicant better or worse than an experienced and hardworking applicant who is churlish and dumb as a bush rock? Perhaps you should give up on hiring a person and just buy a robotic arm? Perhaps you should work on cloning your current technician instead?

There's probably a good "Five Stages of Being a Hiring Manager" analogy in here somewhere, but I'm too tired to put it together. Instead, I wanted to comment on a statement one applicant made during an interview. He said his wife had recently lost her job due to the poor economy, and he was looking for a position in academia because it would be stable and "recession-proof".

I suppose in a way, academia can be considered "recession-proof" in the sense that it tends not to suffer from the massive layoffs or complete shutdowns of entire institutions that can plague other industries. And the fortunes of academic research institutions, while undoubtedly tied to the general economy in some way, don't appear to fluctuate with the volatility of the Dow Jones or S&P 500 indices.

But academic jobs are still vulnerable to changes in the "academic research economy", namely funding availability. One striking feature of the current applicant pool is the unusually high number of very senior technicians who have been working for the same PIs for 10-20 years. Some of them have great breadth and depth of experience, are co-authors on papers, and come bearing enthusiastic references from their PIs. And on application after application, the reason given for their leaving their current positions is "PI's loss of funding".

While it may be true that being able to work for the same employer for 10-20 years indicates greater stability than one might find in non-academic positions, I would guess these people are the exception rather than the norm among all technicians. And short of being tenured, there is no such thing as a "recession-proof", or more appropriately, "funding-shortage-proof" position, even in academia.

I was tempted to point this out to the applicant during the interview, along with the observation that job performance, rather than relative vulnerability to economic downturn, might actually be the primary driver of job security in academic positions. But I didn't. I figured my purpose was to determine whether I wanted to hire him, not to provide a reality check.