• Job search recap
  • What to do?
  • How to establish a yeoperson blogger reputation
  • What you don’t need
• Coda
  • Source data for the sankey diagram

The comp bio job market is scarier than usual: 2023 was a biotech bankruptcy bloodbath, 2024 was a little better, and as far as layoffs, 2025 has been worse. Academic and government sectors are also reeling from government cuts, and in the two places I have recently lived (Massachusetts and Maryland), cuts have specifically targeted large biomedical research employers (Harvard and NIH). The tech job market is pandemically weird and also not so hot. Anecdotally, there are lots of interesting job postings in comp bio, but each one might get hundreds of applicants per week, among which are many brilliant people. Some of them have training and qualifications very similar to me. I applied to about 65-70 jobs and got almost no interviews (except where I had a referral).

Job search recap

Here’s how my job search went, and here are some suggested tactics. All numbers are approximate. For accessibility or screen readers, you can scroll to the bottom to find source data for this diagram.

What to do?

Increase your surface area for good luck to land on.

• Open your search to as many companies and locations as possible. I was unable to pursue really cool opportunities in several non-Boston cities, which was sad.
• Conduct informational interviews with people you know or people they know. Do it roughly like this. I did ~30 of these. It was super interesting and enjoyable. It also got me a lot of useful advice and some merciful affirmation during a stressful time. It netted me 1 offer for a good job that I was enthusiastic about, plus one really cool near miss.
• Establish a public reputation in an area you are interested in.

How to establish a yeoperson blogger reputation

• Publish useful stuff: whole-ass papers are great, but so are blog posts or something in-between. Focus on your scientific agenda. Avoid personal topics.
• Publicize what you wrote on the world wide web using social networking. I use Twitter and Bluesky. (But I do not “skeet”. Yuck. I “bleat”.) Also consider LinkedIn, Substack, or tiktok.
• Drive engagement. There are non-horrible ways to do this.
  • Post a lot. It does not have to all be original works. Even with little pointers saying “here’s why I like this”, sometimes you’ll land an unexpected hit example, example.
  • If you comment on other people’s posts in a good-faith high-effort way, that could net you additional eyeballs.
  • For your bigger announcements that you really want eyeballs on, people love legible accomplishments: baby’s first preprint; degree obtained; exam passed. Don’t be afraid to juice it up with some capital letters and emojis etc. If you have real substance, people won’t mind a tiny bit of cynicism about human attention.
  • Contrarian takes can also get a lot of attention, although you might make enemies this way. Even more popular are opinions that sound contrarian, but are actually already widespread, such as anti-AI sentiment.

What you don’t need

• You don’t need native or smooth English.
• You don’t need funny or charming jokes.
• You don’t need a huge body of work.
• You don’t need a huge reach.
• You don’t need everyone who reads your work to like it.
• You don’t even need a majority of readers to like it, though they probably will anyway.
• You don’t need perfect or complete posts. You can update them later as you learn more, or you can follow them up with “what I learned from the comments on so-and-so”.
• Not all of your work even needs to be good. Some of it can be bad. Especially according to you: cringe indicates growth.

Coda

The best way to get a job is for someone to have a job and think of you. If that isn’t happening yet, then you’ll be better off spending a month on reputation-building than a month uploading your resume to various jobs. Why?

• You get to keep the results of your labor (connections, posts, reputation).
• Reformatting your resume, only for it to be scrambled by a WorkDay parser, is boring and unpleasant. Building a reputation is interesting and enjoyable.
• YMMV but for the same amount of time spent, I got more opportunities rep-building than app-grinding. The opportunities were also more serious/credible and a better fit.

I hope someone reads this and goes out to claim the public standing they have silently earned through their ivory-tower toils. I wish you good luck – and a big landing pad for it.

Source data for the sankey diagram

Months unemployed [1] Biking
Months unemployed [1] Stressing
Months unemployed [1] Applying 
Months unemployed [2] Networking
Months unemployed [0] Waiting to joke about "came in a fluffer"

Jobs applied to (no referral) [64] No follow up
Jobs applied to (with referral) [4] No follow up
Jobs applied to (with referral) [3] Interview
Jobs applied to (no referral) [1] Interview
Info interviews conducted [30] No follow up
Info interviews conducted [2] Interview
Credible unsolicited inquiries [2] Interview
Credible unsolicited inquiries [3] Location mismatch

Interview [2] Job offer