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>nepotism: one of your employees gets a hiring or intern suggestion from their old PI Not nepotism >your employees go back to the school they went to for care

>nepotism: one of your employees gets a hiring or intern suggestion from their old PI Not nepotism >your employees go back to the school they went to for career fair/outreach programs Also not nepotism

olliej 4y ago
Yes. Merriam Webster defines nepotism as "favoritism (as in appointment to a job) based on kinship" In this case kinship does not mean family. You have a kinship with your PI, you have a kinship with your school. The favoritism is the act of bypassing the hiring processes available to people who do not share kinship with you. If you want to argue about "kinship" meaning family, MW defines it as being "the quality or state of being kin". The example sentences are "Despite our close kinship, canines and humans are quite different", "He feels a strong kinship with other survivors of the war", "feelings of kinship between the team's players and their fans". None of which mention any familial relationship. If you think that getting to skip the normal submit CV/resume to a website and hope for the best, and generally go straight to an in person interview is not favouritism I can only assume that you have only ever done one or the other of those options, and so have no awareness of the immense advantage you get by not just being one of thousands of resumes going through recruiters that are doing randomized keyword searches, and just getting to sit in an interview and answer questions. This is nepotism: you get an advantage over others in the hiring path based not on your abilities, but based instead on just having the correct connections. So if you happen to have a PI with a former student now working at X, and the PI forwards your resume directly to them you have an advantage over everyone else, who does not have that relationship (kinship if you will). Similarly if you go to a school with former students at company Y, and those former students come to collect resumes at your school, you have an advantage over people who went to schools without that relationship. If you go to church and another person there works for company Z, and you hand them your resume, and they then say "let's interview him" you have benefited from a relationship that is unavailable to others. This last one is a direct example from my personal experience. As an interviewer I was looking at a resume that would not have got past the normal application phase, and even if it did this candidate would not have got past a phone screen. Now it's important to realize that if as a candidate you can get to an in person interview I would estimate you're already well on your way to an offer. Interviews are not a perfect system, and you can be a fairly middling candidate and get an offer. I'm not going to say you have to really blow it to get rejected, but you sure as hell don't need to be a perfect and amazingly flawless person either.
- PubliusMI 4y ago
  If you want to claim that taking a reference from a skilled professional you worked with in the past is the same as favoring as a personal friend or family member for a position, then you can call it nepotism. It's important to realize most people will think you're crazy for that.

olliej 4y ago

Yes. Merriam Webster defines nepotism as "favoritism (as in appointment to a job) based on kinship" In this case kinship does not mean family. You have a kinship with your PI, you have a kinship with your school. The favoritism is the act of bypassing the hiring processes available to people who do not share kinship with you. If you want to argue about "kinship" meaning family, MW defines it as being "the quality or state of being kin". The example sentences are "Despite our close kinship, canines and humans are quite different", "He feels a strong kinship with other survivors of the war", "feelings of kinship between the team's players and their fans". None of which mention any familial relationship. If you think that getting to skip the normal submit CV/resume to a website and hope for the best, and generally go straight to an in person interview is not favouritism I can only assume that you have only ever done one or the other of those options, and so have no awareness of the immense advantage you get by not just being one of thousands of resumes going through recruiters that are doing randomized keyword searches, and just getting to sit in an interview and answer questions. This is nepotism: you get an advantage over others in the hiring path based not on your abilities, but based instead on just having the correct connections. So if you happen to have a PI with a former student now working at X, and the PI forwards your resume directly to them you have an advantage over everyone else, who does not have that relationship (kinship if you will). Similarly if you go to a school with former students at company Y, and those former students come to collect resumes at your school, you have an advantage over people who went to schools without that relationship. If you go to church and another person there works for company Z, and you hand them your resume, and they then say "let's interview him" you have benefited from a relationship that is unavailable to others. This last one is a direct example from my personal experience. As an interviewer I was looking at a resume that would not have got past the normal application phase, and even if it did this candidate would not have got past a phone screen. Now it's important to realize that if as a candidate you can get to an in person interview I would estimate you're already well on your way to an offer. Interviews are not a perfect system, and you can be a fairly middling candidate and get an offer. I'm not going to say you have to really blow it to get rejected, but you sure as hell don't need to be a perfect and amazingly flawless person either.

PubliusMI 4y ago
If you want to claim that taking a reference from a skilled professional you worked with in the past is the same as favoring as a personal friend or family member for a position, then you can call it nepotism. It's important to realize most people will think you're crazy for that.