Tech Valley Connect focuses on building both professional and personal ties to the area through networking. According to the Department of Labor, 70% of all people employed, obtained their positions through networking. Much attention has been given to the two-career problem which has become a major challenge for PhD-hiring employers, costing anywhere from $250,000 to over $1 million for each PhD hire they lose. Tech Valley Connect helps with placement of an accompanying spouse/partner by having formed a consortium of PhD-hiring employers. In addition to the usual settling-in services such as information about the community, schools, and cultural opportunities, our program, using the consortium’s resources, arranges three “informational interviews” with highly placed professionals in the field of the partner. These informational discussions will serve as networking opportunities and valuable aids in the partner’s job search.
Working with Us
If you decide to become part of this consortium, we would suggest you review your forecasted hiring for the coming year and then meet with us to go over various cost levels of membership that work for your company. It is up to the participating member to identify a contact person for Tech Valley Connect to go through to set up informational interviews and for your division managers to go through to refer candidates and families.
Tech Valley Connect comes on site to do an orientation for the organization’s leadership team so that everyone is up to speed with how it works and what value this has for them.
When referring families, keep in mind you can choose candidates you are either recruiting or current employees who you are trying to retain that may be experiencing challenges where we can be helpful.
The contact person you have identified to manage this program at your end would contact the family, letting them know a little bit about us (provide attached brochure) and that we will be contacting them within 24-48 hours.
What we need from your company/institution:
Each participating organization commits to high-level informational interviews. This becomes a type of ‘pay it forward’ scenario where your leadership team will be asked occasionally to give 15 minutes of their time, either over the phone or in person, to a spouse/partner from within our consortium who have recently relocated to this region. In turn, when your leaders are hiring, part of their recruitment can be to offer our program to incoming candidate families. For instance, part of the recruitment effort when Rensselaer posts a job, they include “Rensselaer is a member of Tech Valley Connect, a consortium committed to helping professionals with dual career challenges and to ease family transition into the Capital Region,” on the posting.
In order to make this a successful and meaningful encounter, Tech Valley Connect needs to come to your site for an orientation; giving a 15-20 minute overview of our program to obtain buy-in from your division managers and leadership team who will be the ones asked to give these interviews. We prepare both the interviewer and the spouse/partner for this meeting so there is no wasted time. The spouse/partner comes with questions and the role of the interviewer will be to give the local landscape of what their discipline is like in this region and perhaps refer them on to another professional peer who may be able to do the same. It is important to note these are NOT job interviews. If there is a position available – GREAT, but our goal is to provide introductions to people of influence in the field of the spouse so they are better able to find the position that is right for them by talking with those influential in their disciplines.
We also ask that the interviewer do a 5 question exit survey after meeting with our spouse/partners so that we can track our program.
