The first year of IDDjobs

The Jobs

There has been a pretty steady stream of jobs since the beginning, with a short break at Christmas/New Year. Plots made using the incidence package (thank you RECON!). There have been 257 jobs in the first year, which is a new opportunity every 1.4 days!

Stratified by job type in the 6 categories of position, we can see that the available jobs are dominated by postdoctoral positions.

The category “Non-academic” is for positions outside universities or research institutes, and “Other” is for positions that don’t require a PhD or particular qualifications, and those positions have mostly been pre-PhD research assistant positions.

IDDjobs.org seems to have a shortage of faculty positions. Is this just the regular attrition of the scientific career pyramid? Or, might there be less responsibility for sharing the ad for a faculty position? Possibly because faculty positions are from departments (who might not know about IDDjobs) rather than from PIs looking for people? So, if there’s a faculty position in your department, or you see one online that could in any way be related to infectious disease dynamics, please add it! (We don’t tell anyone who adds what!)

 

Where are the jobs that are advertised?

Below are the jobs stratified by location of the position, and we can see a lot of jobs are in the UK and USA. This may be a numbers game, or may be due to the network of people we know to spread the word about IDDjobs. The next challenge will be to reach as many people and places as possible.

The high number from the UK might be because it’s where IDDjobs started, but might also be the result of different hiring practices in the UK vs USA: positions like postdocs in the UK generally must be advertised, with a clear job description and opening-closing dates for applications. This is not neccesarily the case (in my experience) in the USA. Happy to hear other experiences, ideas or theories on this, and also to encourage US & international colleagues to post their jobs! If you don’t have a closing date, don’t worry - the closing date for positions on IDDjobs.org can be a maximum of 3 months from the posting date. When that expires (or you fill the position) please come back and edit the information!

The Audience

So, who’s using IDDjobs.org?

We don’t track much: IDDjobs retains very very little information - no cookies, no usernames, nothing like that. But we have Google Analytics so we can see how many people visit, how they get to the site, and where they’re from.

Firstly, how many users does IDDjobs.org get per day, week, and month:

You can see a peak when IDDjobs.org was started, followed by a dip over Christmas. For those keen on time series, there doesn’t seem to be a strict weekly pattern - it’s mostly driven by posting of new jobs, and sometimes people post jobs on the weekend! Saturday is usually lower though!

Since the very beginning it’s been quite high and steady - about a thousand unique visitors per month. We think that’s absolutely great! That is A LOT of modellers, looking at A LOT of jobs.

 

How do IDDjobs.org users end up on the site?

IDDjobs.org cross-posts all jobs to Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/IDDjobs. @IDDjobs has about 1300 followers, and this number has grown pretty steadily - well, after some excitement at the beginning. You can bet if Twitter let you download your follower numbers, we’d fit a growth rate to it! If you’re on Twitter, please follow the account! And if you already follow us, tell others!

 

But, does the Twitter traffic drive the site?

Interestingly, as shown in the figures below, Twitter is not where most users come from. The pie shows that over the past year it’s been about 40%. That’s important to note if you’re planning to share your available positions on Twitter alone.

This is part of the reason that @IDDjobs doesn’t retweet jobs that we’re tagged in. IDDjobs.org is the site, and we really think that’s the best way to share these opportunities. On every tweet we’re tagged in, we leave a message with instructions on how to add jobs, so please go to IDDjobs.org/jobs/new to enter the job information. There’s plenty of good reasons not to be on Twitter, and we want to reach everyone, including the parts of the community that don’t go on Twitter.

 

Where in the world are the users?

The user base is dominated by the USA and UK, but there have been visitors and users from many more countries.

This pattern somewhat mirrors the locations of the posted positions. We hope in the future that IDDjobs.org can be as international as possible, and help make the community as wide as possible. We accept job ads in any language!

The Future

IDDjobs.org is for the community, and is also by the community. In order to have good jobs and opportunities on the site, it needs people to add them. And the point of doing this is that it benefits the person with the job as well as the job seeker - by increasing the reach of each advertisement you will get better applicants, and pull from a wider pool than you can reach on your own. So, if you’ve got a position, add it!

Please add your positions and tell your friends, colleagues, and students to look for positions on IDDjobs.org. And it'd be great to hear if it helped you find a position, or hire someone great!

We want to provide something that the IDD community wants and needs, so if you’ve got suggestions for changes, improvements, or comments about the site, please use the contact email or send a Twitter message @IDDjobs.

IDDjobs.org is by Roz Eggo, who is also on Twitter.