Tips for job search in solar industry

When

There is a difference in hiring schedules between big conglomerate companies (GE, DOW, Dupont, etc), and companies that only does solar (Firstsolar, Sunpower, Nanosolar, and the like). The former companies will likely be able to hire as far as half a year out before your start date because they always will have something for you to do. For example, DOW and Dupont have on-campus interviews in September for positions that could have flexible start dates anywhere from December of the same year to June of the next year. In that sense you are not actually interviewing for a specific job opening, but as a nebulous "PhD-level scientist". The solar companies, on the other hand, will usually only look for people 1-3 months out. The time scale is leaning toward the shorter end of the spectrum if the company has fewer people. So if you want to work in a solar company (assuming June/July start date), your real on-site interviews will probably be around March – May. For example, all my on-site interviews were in late April – mid May, for jobs that starts at late June / early July. I casually started to look for work in Nov/Dec, but I didn't really get into the thick of it until Feb.

However, the fact that interviews won't occur until 1-3 months out doesn't mean you won't have to do anything before then. The job openings for a particular company usually fluctuate a lot with time, and the company could go from 0 to 10 openings in a month. By preparing in advance and talking to insiders early, you will be able to get a better idea of the hiring timeline of the company (and possibly time your defense and graduation accordingly).

You have to talk to your adviser about planned graduation date and make sure you have a consensus, because companies will ask about this during the interview.

What companies to look for

With a plethora of solar startups in the San Francisco bay area, there will always be job openings. But, not all companies are right for you, just as when you entered graduate school, not all professors who have spots are the ones you will be willing to work for. So you have to identify the promising companies you want to work with. Talk to people – professors, current and former students, etc, for a candid and impartial suggestion on the list of companies they considered promising.

You can also keep an eye on the GreenTechMedia and pv-tech websites to stay on top of recent industry developments. I got into the habit of reading the GTM website daily (or every other day) starting in the middle of my 4th year.

How many companies should you be applying to? There is no one-size-fit-all answer, because this depends a lot on personal preference, just like how many grad schools one should apply to. You definitely shouldn't put all your hopes in one company, but you also want to identify the companies that you REALLY want to work for. Applying to companies that you have little interest in working for is a waste of time for you and for that company. I think by the middle of my job search I have narrowed down to target 5-10 solar companies.

Of course, you have the option of switching to fields other than solar. In that case, you can play into the general applicability of materials science. Things you CAN do include, but are not limited to, organic electronics/transistors, LEDs, optical interconnects, semiconductors, etc.

How to look for jobs

As a PhD degree holder, you are likely to be interviewing for R&D positions, so the number of job postings won't be that many. (On the good side, the number of competitors will also be less.) With that said, I can summarize the three best ways to find job openings and to land interviews: connections, connections, connections!

Where do you get the connections? You might think that, as a PhD student, you don't know anyone in the solar industry. While that might be true, you are bound to know someone who know someone in the companies you are interested in. The way to find out is through LinkedIn. Assuming you identified the company you are interested in knowing more about, but you have no 1st-order contact in that company, you can search that company in LinkedIn and find out if you have any 2nd-order contact in that company. Then, email your 1st-order contact for an intro. This works much better than cold-emailing people. With that said, a comprehensive LinkedIn contact list does not happen overnight, so it is something that you should start earlier rather than later. When you actually get the chance to talk to the company insider, treat this as a informational interview. Offer to buy them lunch or coffee if the company is close, or give them a phone call if the person is far away. Things you could ask them about include: how did you find this job, how do you like the company, what do you work on in general, where things are in terms of R&D efforts and scaling up, where do you think the hiring situation is going to be in the next couple of months, etc. Refer to the handouts from CDC for common courtesy of informational interviews.

I made the mistake of not utilizing my connections early enough. In the first two months that I started casually looking for jobs, the only thing I did was to check the job postings of the companies every week, and apply to the ones that seemed interesting. I scored zero interviews and three rejections (i.e. "it's not you, it's just me" letters) during these two months. This "look for postings online" approach is especially problematic for startups, because some startups simply don't advertise job postings, or have really out-of-date postings on their website. The only way to get info on the hiring situation is to talk to a company insider, and if you don't know anyone directly, well, that's where LinkedIn comes in! One of the many reasons you come to Stanford is so that you will know the right people and will not have to do the cold-call approach! All the interviews that I got came from connections of Mike or his former students and postdocs, and not a single one came from the "looking for postings online" approach. I hope that gives you a better sense of how important connections are.

Another way to make connections includes attending PV-related conferences and get to know people. Identify the companies (or professors, if you are looking for a postdoc) that you are interested in, figure out their talk / poster session, and just go ahead and introduce yourself. Don't start the conversation by "are you hiring"; you can ask a few educated questions about their talks or posters, asking about their approaches and perspectives in the particular field, then ease into self-introduction and ask for job opportunities. You are your own advocate – if you don't go out and talk to people, you will not be able to make connections. If you are as focused in PV as I am, IEEE-PVSC and SPIE will be more useful to make connections than MRS, ACS, APS and the like. Going to these conferences, especially in your 5th year, can help a lot, because IEEE-PVSC and SPIE actually have quite a few industry attendees. A lot of the conferences will have a job posting section, and for MRS, you can also upload your resume to the career central, and employers who are interested in your background will contact you and schedule an short interview (30 min) with you during the conference.

Stanford also has job fairs, but I didn't find job fairs all that useful for two reasons: first, the solar-focused companies (Firstsolar, Sunpower, and all the smaller startups) usually won't come to these job fairs, and second, even for the big companies who do show up (GE, IBM, etc.), it is unlikely that you will be able to talk to employees from the right division, and a lot of them will just tell you to drop your resume and look for job postings online. But, if you are interested in knowing more about the company in general, a career fair is a good chance to talk to those people.

Interviews

Once the employer is interested in you, they usually will have screening interviews, which can either by phone (30 min – 1 hr) or in person (if the company is nearby – could last from 1-3 hours). Most likely the interview will be by your hiring manager, and will be about your graduate work.

If they like you enough during the screening interview, you will be invited for an on-site interview. For bigger companies, they will pay for the airfare and lodging, and all you need to do is to spend the time and go there. For startups, I don't know if this is still the case. The two startups I interviewed for are all in the bay area, so I didn't get reimbursements. This interview will usually last for an entire day, and you will meet with 6-8 people on that day, each one takes 30 min – 1 hour. Most likely you will be giving a presentation about your graduate work for 30 – 45 min to the technical team (I gave my entire defense talk), and afterwards it is breakout-time for one-on-one interviews.

One thing that makes the job talk different from your normal conference talks is that in a conference talk, you would usually say "we did this, we found that…" But in a job interview, the interviewers are deciding if they want to hire YOU, not your entire research group. If you say "we" every single time, it will be hard for them to gauge what are the things that you actually did; worse, they might assume that everything you presented is done by other people, and you really haven't completed a project all by yourself. For this reason, be very clear in your talk that "I did this" or "I collaborated with another research group and did that".

Throughout the one-on-one interviews, they will likely ask you two types of questions: technical, and behavioral. The technical questions are going to be mainly around your research talk, and most questions will not be difficult to answer, since they don't work on organic solar cells. They will also ask you what part of the projects did you actually do the hands-on work in, whether you or someone else set up the equipments, and which aspects of experiments you feel most comfortable doing (fabrication, characterization, simulation, etc). Don't overpromise – they can easily check your references to figure out if you actually did the things you said you did.

The behavioral questions are asked to figure out if you work will with others, how you handle conflicts, etc. Employers would prefer to have a crystal ball to figure out how you will behave in the future, but since they don't have that, the next best thing they can do is to see how you behaved in the past in order to predict your future with them. But, when you answer this kind of question, it is important to think of examples that back up your answer. Saying "I work well with others" is one thing; saying "in my last project I worked with three different research groups to bring the project to completion" is much better. One popular approach to answer this kind of questions is to use the STAR (Situation / Task / Action / Result) format. Please refer to Stanford CDC (career development center) or internet resources for more detail.

Other sample behavioral questions include examples of your strengths, your weaknesses etc. Sample answers that I came up with are shown below. 1. Sample strengths (back with example): proactive, not shy to talk to experts, self starter, fast learner, team player 2. Sample weaknesses: (this has to be something that you either are working on improving, or something you can somehow cast a positive light onto.) e.g: prefer to work with hands-off managers who give you some freedom.

During the one-on-one interview, it is also your best chance to ask questions of them. This not only shows them that you are genuinely interested in the job (and have done your homework before the interview), but also is your best chance to collect information about the company. Remember, a job interview is a process in which two parties (you and your potential employer) decide if they want to "go steady". Once you take their job offer you will likely spend several years with them, so this is not a decision to be taken lightly. They can't tell you what they are working on in detail because of the proprietary nature of their work, but hopefully you have done some homework before your on-site interview so that the Q&A time can be spent on things that aren't public knowledge (such as – when they were founded, where are their production facilities, who are the investors and what round of investment are they operating on, etc). Sample questions that I asked include: (depending on if the interviewers are entry-level employees like you (EL) or hiring managers (HM))

1. What would be my main responsibility if I am hired? (EL, HM)
2. What is your day to day like? (EL)
3. Strengths and weaknesses of other people in the similar position? (HM)
4. What are the personal attributes that set a successful employee apart from others? (EL, HM)
5. How did you start in this company / why did you decide to work here? (EL, HM)
6. What do you wish you had known about this company before joining? (EL, HM)
7. What training is available when I start? (HM)
8. When can I expect to hear from you after this interview? (HM) – ask this question to have a better sense about the timeline they make hiring decisions. My experience is that they will be able to make a decision within 1-2 weeks after the final interview. Note that the interview is NOT the time to ask about salary and benefits package, stock options, etc. That is something you negotiate AFTER you have formally received the job offer. Please consult the references below for more information on offer negotiation.

Other useful resources

1. "Knock 'em dead: the ultimate job search guide" (Yates, 2011): this is a book on the job hunting process in general. It went through all stages of job interview, from job search, information interview, on-site interview, offer negotiation, etc.
2. "What color is your parachute?" (Bolles, 2011) – also a general book. Shorter (and therefore less detailed) than the first one, but also very useful.
3. "Negotiating Your Salary: How To Make $1000 a Minute" (Chapman, 2011) – this is a book that talks specifically about the salary and benefit negotiation. Not all jobs have negotiable salaries, but it doesn't hurt to be prepared. Highly recommended read, especially if you think there will be offers coming.
4. Stanford CDC (career development center) has a lot of great resources and workshops. I didn't start using them until my 5th year, but I didn't think you would need to start using CDC that early until you are actually in the thick of your job hunting / interview / negotiation process.

Good Luck!