PhD graduates struggle to enter industry roles

The reason is simply that the recruiter feels a PhD will get bored in the position that's going to focus mostly on performing stuff in the lab as it reads in the protocol. RA positions are not there to teach basic lab skills to a fresh PhD who will then leave for a scientist job as soon as one opens up somewhere internally or externally. The ideal RA candidate in most cases is someone who has no significant ambitions on advancing into scientist roles. Sometimes you can purposefully recruit people with that goal in mind but probably not in most cases. It's a product of the economic situation w…

yeah i literally removed phd from my cv for some ra roles and suddenly got callbacks this years job hunt is actually miserable lol actually companies hide behind keyword filters, ignoring people. i only got calls after i used a tool to reword resumes for every job post. i’m talking about Jobowl, google it

It’s a really bad market and it feels like damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Companies don’t want to hire PhDs for non-PhD jobs since they’re worried they’ll leave once things stabilize/they find another position on the side. Meanwhile they’re not hiring fresh PhDs since PhDs with experience are also all on the job hunt right now. It’s flat out bad luck, bad timing, and none of it is your fault. Unfortunately all you can do is keep applying, broaden your search areas (ie geographically), and take gig jobs on the side to pay rent. I walked dogs and cat sat via Rover, and drove for DoorDa…

In addition to “PhDs will get bored”, the other arguments often used are “we have a salary band for this position that is below our band for PhD positions” and “the person taking this job cannot outrank their manager in education or experience”

If you are in Europe, the technician/RA positions literally cannot hire PhD as you will not paid according to your qualification. Normally, this is designed to protect you but unfortunately it is working against you.

On the one hand, you've lost out on this job opportunity. On the other hand, if they have to specify "non-PhD," there probably isnt much opportunity for advancement.

I will never hire a phd for a non- phd role. It just doesn't work - the person getting the phd will have expectations that dont align with what the role will be. It will cause bad blood on the phd side of things - they will often report to a person with a phd or sometimes without and that alone causes issues. Salary is also below expectations too. And then with all of that, we know the person will move on as soon as they get an opportunity to do actual phd level work. Which is fair enough but why would I hire them vs the BS/MS students who are more likely to stick around and have the right m…

Yep. But take heart that there are a lot of positions masters holders won’t be considered for either