End run around the ASML (Netherlands) personel department?

Hello Bill,

Is that ASM Europe B.V in Bilthoven? I know someone there, not sure if he still works there but he has nothing to do with electronics. Might not help you.

Anyway, the method to approach a company in what we consultants refer to as "cold call" style is to find out name and contact info for the manager who calls the shots on that type of project. Then approach him with a proposal. Short, but concise. No fluff.

This doesn't always work. I have had folks who made it clear that they do not want to work with consultants (or in your case folks who don't go the "prescribed path" via HR). Often the project later failed and in one case (in your country) the whole company went because they couldn't make it work on their own.

Regards, Joerg

But always remember that the cold call that you don't make always fails, while the cold call that you do make only sometimes fails.

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Posting from Google?  See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/

He might know enough about the personalities (not to mention phone numbers and e-mail addresses) in electronics to be very helpful.

The shot-calling project manager is probably one level too high for my purposes - I need somebody who knows about the hardware and the physics of the problem they are going to have to try and solve. The politically decisive manager won't know enough about the technical details to be able to detect that I'm not talking bullshit.

I've done a certain amount of cold calling in the past, and I got two of my jobs that way. I don't recall anybody being unhappy about by-passing the Human Relations department, when there was one - personnel departments don't understand what engineers do, and happily reject excellent candidates who don't meet their arbitrary criteria.

My favourite story about that involves a brilliant Chinese mechanical engineer, who so impressed his fellow engiineers in China that the sent him to a Chinese university to do a first degree, where he so impressed his teacher that they sent him to Cambridge U.K. to do a Ph.D. working on an academic electron beam microfabricator (which could be made to do amazing things for about six hours eery six months or so when served by a full-time squad of graduate students).

When this guy go close to finishing, he started applying for jobs in the U.K. and made three applications to Cambridge Instruments over a six month period, none of which got through the personnel department to engineering. Fortunately, his wife played badminton with the wife of one of my colleagues, who passed the CV on to the engineering manager, who hired him immediately.

The immediate result was that Cambridge Instruments went over to building their electron microscope columns by machining all the components to much tighter tolerances than they had used to, and put them together by heating the outside sections (to about 200C) while cooling the inside sections to -196C to get a sliding fit.

Once the assembled column had equilibrated at room temperature, it was permanently aligned, which saved us the cost of of a great many aligning screws, and the time it took to adjust them to get the column aligned - not just once, at manufacture, but every time the column got moved.

The first column built that way went from Cambridge to Spain in the back of the Sale's Manager's SUV, wss unloaded onto the exhibiton stand, and worked as soon as they got the power turned on - saving about six hours of column alignement.

We could only hang onto the guy for three years before he got head-hunted by an American firm with a promise of U.S. citizenship for him and his entire family - Cambridge Instruments didn't have that kind of political clout in the U.K.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

my

physics

Nah -

because those people will *not* be hiring, they *will be working on the problem*, their problem! Your problem is *getting hired* and not any hardware or physics so you do not need that.

Find out if you know someone that works on the project already and ask them - that is the fastest way in.

The very first thing that any of the managers is going to do is to ask his people when they need new employees is: "do they know anyone to do ?" or "any of you guys work with this Bill Sloman?" when the manager gets your resume.

manager,

That's how most really good jobs are given - someone knows someone.

Third option are the headhunters - often HR will not bother with the whole selection process but outsource it and only handle the "matching" candidates, the select few that goes for interviews.

So, you get your resume to the headhunters and *they* will market you to HR because they get a recruitment fee if you succeed and HR has lowered it's guard against strangers because they can always wipe any failure off on the headhunters.

Everybody is happy.

PS: I have always had very good results from phoning the headhunters when i got bored with a job.

They get to talk to prospective colleagues before anybody ever makes a job offer. It is rare for an manager to pay any attention to their opinions - managers are like that - but management school does train managers to give their subordinates some illusion of participation in team formation.

At my age (63) I'm not going to get hired unless they think I've got significant experience to contribute - understanding hardware and physics is an essential prereqisite for understanding what I could usefully contribute.

That is what I'm doing here. I've got no contacts inside ASML, and I need to find one

Been there done, done that. My successor at Fisons Applied Sensor Technology had worked with me at Cambridge Instruments, as had our wireman (and I had to jump through a few hoops to get the wireman hired

- essentially getting him hired by a contract engineering bunch I knew, who then hired him out to Fisons).

Badminton seems to work well, but golf is more traditional.

Headhunters are better than personnel departments, because they do tend to know quite a lot about a limited range of specialised jobs. There is one guy in Eindhoven - Wim Toonen of Basic Engineering - who thought that he might be able to smuggle me past the ASML personnel department, around the end of last year, but nothing came of that.

Except the personnel department. I've had the Philips personnel department block me being hired for a short term job over the vigurus protests of the engineers who desperately need me to write an English language application note. I never got to hear their reasoning.

About six months later, one of them very kindly explained to me that they couldn't hire me to work on the front end receiver for a fibre-optic video distribution system (basically aimed at replacing the cable TV with fibre-optic TV) because I was too old to learn the new technology involved (which was a cheapo version of stuff I'd been using on electron microscope and in photochemistry labs for many years).

Precisely why they actually don't want to hire me isn't clear - Philips fired a lot of engineers of roughly my age in the 1980's and 1990's and may be afraid that if they hired me, the other guys might sude to get their jibs back ....

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Why go to all the trouble to be hired by those ignorant riffraff. Why don't you prepare a subcontracting proposal.

If that were on the table, Basic Egineering would have been able to sell me to them as a sub-contractor. It is acutally a pretty silly way to employ a system architect, who has to function as a walkin, talking system archive, on top of iventing the system in the first place.

Ad they aren't ignorant rif-raff, merely cultrualy restricted manifestations of a sub-optimal system.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Hello Bill,

The PacBell server swallowed yours and Frithiof's posts. But Google groups had them. On the weekend I'll see whether my friend is still in that area and willing to make a contact. But I doubt he works in the right department for that and they usually aren't allowed to broach contact information.

Just keep in mind that there are lots of managers who never had any formal management school training. I am a living example. Those can be especially open to outside proposals.

Age discrimination is, unfortunately, much more legal in Europe than it is in the US. When I hired people I was told to never, never, ask for age or birth dates. Of course we had private gatherings later, backyard parties and so on and I found out that the average age of the folks I had hired was well above 40. Because they had experience.

That's why there needs to be a list of publications, usually. If you have published with reputable societies and editors that yields a whole lot of credibility.

Yes!

Ahem. My experience is slightly different.

Letting old folks go has de-facto broken the backs of many companies. They just don't know what hit them.

Regards, Joerg

Period! Sadly. Anything above 50 and you might improve your chances by putting "paedophile" or "vivisection" amongst your "interests" on the CV efectively diverting the attention away from that fateful date of birth!

What you *could* perhaps do is setup a business offering consultancy in your areas of experience and contract for some of the work. Nobody will mind that the *MD* is "geriatric" ;-)

vigurus

English

"Policy" it is coming to take you away: "Ericsson puts age limit on redundancy -

"

My next performance interview shall be ... perhaps interesting!

Hello Frithiof Andreas,

"

Starting at age 35? That is crazy. I wouldn't be surprised if the real reason is to get rid of expensive European employees and then hire lots of folks in places like India.

Ditching older and thus experienced folks is what has IMHO caused grief at companies such as IBM. This can go down to assembly level work. I remember a company where only one guy was able to perform complicated aluminum welding. "Just make sure he's happy, doesn't get the urge to return to his home country and doesn't smoke", was the saying in management.

Regards, Joerg

Yow! to quote Zippy.

Some interesting issues:

Are there too few young people seriously interested in technology?

The real knowledge base in any company is in precisely the age group they want to replace with young/cheap/crapshoot beginners.

In a zero-growth (and especially a negative-growth) company or country, it is true that you have to kill jobs or reduce productivity to create new jobs. France is deep into this loop.

US companies have enough "natural" turnover (which includes layoffs and firings, as well as normal retirement and job-hopping) that things like this aren't necessary. Older US technology companies do sometimes actively try to push out older workers, generally mid-50's and up, partly to let younger blood move up and partly to get rid of the people who have the highest salaries. We have a friend who was early-retired from HP; it was entirely voluntary on her part, nice payout package, and she was bored from having nothing much to do since the Compac thing.

John

Wim Toonen is worried that this might be seen as a criticism of his competence - which wasn't the intention. He had already managed to get me accepted for work at Philips, albeit it was work on a project that didn't, in the end, go forward, which makes him some kind of miracle worker from my point of view.

There are all sorts of reasons why I mightn't have been suitable for the job at ASML for which he was putting me forward - I never got to see a job description, and for all I know, the job might have been filled before he got to talk to them - and I'm just grateful to him for trying.

As far as I am concerned mhr. Toonen is one of the good head-hunters, and any good electronic engineers looking for work in the Netherlands would be well advised to let Win Toonen have a look at their CV's.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I've had the same experience several times when applying for jobs in the software industry. Mind you, those weren't really jobs I wanted very much, they would just have been more lucrative and more long-term than what I'm doing at the moment. And I was interested in doing something else for a change.

Some time ago a friend of a friend told me that there was a vacant position at Adobe and gave me a number to call. Promptly I was invited for an interview with some head engineers who obviously liked me. Then followed more interviews, including a video conference with some overseas boss who told me that it looked pretty good but that I still had to go through the personnel department. By that time the company had spent 15 senior man-hours just on interviews with me.

My talk (on the phone) with the London "human resources" woman was rather brief. She apparently was holding my CV (that no one had asked me about before) next to the job description (which I had not seen before, having had plenty of verbal description) and found no correspondence that she liked. She said she'd have to check back with my (possibly) future boss. I asked her if she was going to get blamed if she employed someone who later turned out to be incompetent, and she said, to an extent, yes. Her best protection against this blame, obviously, is to only hire people whose CVs match the job perfectly. If the hireling turns out to be a loser, it ain't her fault.

This is how the system works. Like I said, I have a job and wasn't particularly keen on that one, so what I got out of the whole rigmarole was quite alearning experience and about a gallon of free coffee.

robert

Personnel departments seem to be full of people who know so little about hiring highly skilled people that they don't realise how little they know.

If your human resiources woman had correctly appreciated her positon in the scheme of things, she'd have realised that nobody would expect her to have a clue about your technical competence.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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engineers

15 hours on interviewing!. Clearly a company in need of radical corporate surgery. Once turned up late for lunch, to a solidly packed dining room. Took a seat at a (curiously) empty table with one solitary occupant. Found out later it was the "human resources" director. From a UK corporate perspective, these bloated tossers are employed primarily to hand out the bad news that higher managements are too spineless to action themselves. john

Robert Latest wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@localhost.localdomain:

Seems rather strange to expect an HR dweeb to judge technical competence. My experience getting jobs at large firms (only in Canada though) has been that the technical manager responsible for the area with the assistance of his technical staff pick a suitable candidate and HR checks your past employers to make sure you weren't fired for gross incompetence, larceny or assault. HR also does the hiring paperwork. Not sure I'd want to work for a company like the one you encountered.

Rob

--------------------------- Letter of Recommendation -

While working with Mr. Xxxxxx, I have always found him working studiously and sincerely at his table without idling or gossiping with colleagues in the office. He seldom wastes his time on useless things. Given a job, he always finishes the given assignment in time. He is always deeply engrossed in his official work, and can never be found chitchatting in the canteen. He has absolutely no vanity in spite of his high accomplishment and profound knowledge of his field. I think he can easily be classed as outstanding, and should on no account be dispensed with. I strongly feel that Mr. Xxxxxx should be pushed to accept promotion, and a proposal to administration be sent away as soon as possible.

Sd/-

Branch Manager

---------------------------

To get the gag, read only the odd-numbered lines. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

e=2E

een

of

y or

or a

All I know about this ASML topic, is that I've got an interview there today.

Here my interview confirmation email, perhaps the names will help you out.

" FROM: snipped-for-privacy@ASML.com subject: interview confirmation

Dear xxxxx,

As agreed, we hereby confirm your invitation for a personal interview:

date: xxx time:xxx

xxx uur Frank Morselt, Groupleader Motion Control xxx uur Maurice du Mee, Groupleader Measurement Systems Development xxx uur Sandor Snoeren, Resource Advisor

You can report yourself at the counter of building: 7

Best regards,

Jet Vos Secretary to Jan Stoeten Director Embedded Software Development

ASML Netherlands B.V. PO Box 324 - 5500 AH Veldhoven - The Netherlands De Run 6501 - 5504 DR Veldhoven - The Netherlands Tel: +31.40.268.4490 Fax: +31.40.268.4990 E-mail: snipped-for-privacy@asml.com Website:

Route description

Location of ASML buildings

All ASML buildings (except building 21) are located in Veldhoven, which is near to Eindhoven. Building 21 is located near Eindhoven Airport.

By car:

Motorway routes are:

- From Amsterdam and Maastricht: E25/A2, exit 32 (afrit 32)

- From Rotterdam and Tilburg: E312/A58, exit 32 (afrit 32)

- From Venlo and Dusseldorf: E34/A67, exit 32 (afrit 32)

- From Antwerp and Brussels: E34/A67, exit 32 (afrit 32) Buildings 4, 8, 9, 11, and 14: After leaving the motorway at exit 32, turn left at the traffic lights at the end of the offramp. Continue along Kempenbaan. For buildings 4, 8, 9, 11, and 14 (De Run 6000) turn left after the petrol station at the second set of traffic lights. Building 7: After leaving the motorway at exit 32, turn left at the traffic lights at the end of the offramp. Continue along Kempenbaan until you reach a roundabout. At the roundabout, turn left, then first left, then first right. Follow this road to building 7. Building 21, Silver Forum (industrial area Flight Forum):

- From Amsterdam and Maastricht: E25/A2, exit 29 (afrit 29)

- From Rotterdam and Tilburg: E312/A58, exit 29 (afrit 29)

- From Venlo and Dusseldorf: E34/A67, exit 29 (afrit 29)

- From Antwerp and Brussels: E34/A67, exit 29 (afrit 29)

By public transport

Visitors arriving at Eindhoven central station can choose between following bus route to ASML. (Buses currently have no direct route from Eindhoven central station to building 21.) The bus route numbers for building 4, 7, 8, 9, 11, and 14 are:

- Route 98, 149, 150, or 177 Travel time: around 35 minutes Bus stop: hospital "M=E1xima Medisch Centrum"

You are expected in building:

4 De Run 6301, 5504 DM Veldhoven 7 De Run 6665, 5504 DT Veldhoven 8 De Run 6501, 5504 DR Veldhoven 9 De Run 6529, 5504 DR Veldhoven 11 De Run 6381, 5504 DM Veldhoven 14 De Run 6360, 5504 DM Veldhoven 21 Flight Forum 1900, 5657 EZ Eindhoven "

Greetings,

CHRING