by Michael Manhart
As a young scientist I spent a lot of time applying to jobs and interviewing. For me the most frustrating part was the lack of transparency and feedback — written job criteria were usually vague, and afterward I received little to no feedback on why I didn’t get the job. Now that I am on the other side of the hiring process, I want to make this process better for people, at least for the hiring in my lab that I can directly control. There is no secret recipe of course, but the purpose of this post is simply to be transparent so that people who apply to positions in our lab can know how they will be evaluated.
Note that this post is oriented toward recruiting people for full-time, multi-year research positions (e.g., graduate students and postdocs); my criteria for other positions (especially undergraduate researchers) may differ.
What is your previous research experience? This is the first thing I usually look for in an application and ask candidates about in interviews. The main priority here is to see how well an applicant understood their previous work and how well they can communicate it to me. When I discuss this with applicants during an interview, I ask as many questions as I can. It’s fine for an applicant to say they don’t know the answer to a question — while I do care about applicants’ knowledge, I care even more about their honesty about what they know. The communication aspect is key: if I am hiring someone that I’ll work with for several years, I have to make sure we understand each other’s questions and ideas.
Of course, my expectations here are calibrated according to the applicant’s experience level — I don’t expect a prospective graduate student’s knowledge of their previous projects to be as detailed and broad as I would expect a prospective postdoc to have.
Note that while it is nice if an applicant has worked on projects related to our lab’s work, that is definitely not a requirement for most positions in our lab. Having previous experience that is very different from what our lab does can actually be a major strength, but more than anything I care about people’s overall scientific knowledge, attention to detail, clarity of thought, ability to communicate, and interest in the scientific topics.
Why do you want to join our lab? I find this is usually the biggest weakness of most written applications I receive. Occasionally applicants have previous experience that is obviously related to our lab’s work, in which case it’s easy for me to see why they want to join our lab and what they might contribute. However, most applicants don’t have closely-related experience, in which case they need to make an explicit argument for why they are interested in our lab. For example, I receive many applications from people who have worked in clinical or environmental microbiology, which is not what our lab does, so I need to understand why they want to shift gears toward studying fundamental principles of ecology and evolution. Otherwise, I assume that I don’t have any relevant projects for such applicants.
Note that I don’t expect applicants in that case to already have a specific project in mind (especially not a prospective graduate student). I’m looking for a more general explanation of why the themes and projects of our lab interest them, and what topics, skills, or methods relevant to our lab they want to learn.
Discussion of ongoing projects in the lab. During interviews I usually give applicants a broad overview of our lab in terms of projects and people, and we then have a discussion about a few specific projects. I try to talk about specific projects that the hired candidate might eventually work on, but that is always just a forecast (i.e., things might change by the time the person actually starts the job). This is where I determine how well the applicant engages with ideas outside of their previous experience and that are closely relevant to our lab. It’s great to see any relevant knowledge applicants have, but more than that I want to see how interested they are in the ideas. Do they ask good questions? Do they try to contribute some of their own ideas?
Interactions with current lab members. I usually arrange a one- to two-day visit (either virtual or in-person) with our lab for a few top candidates. Besides giving a talk and having a longer meeting with me on some of the aforementioned topics, candidates will meet with all current members individually and may also join them for lunch or dinner. Of course these interactions are vital opportunities for the candidates themselves to learn about our lab and me, but they are also important for me to see whether the candidate shows interest in the other lab members and their projects. I strongly value candidates who will be supportive, enthusiastic colleagues.
Reference letters. After interviewing a few top candidates for a position, I ask them to provide contact information for three previous supervisors or mentors as references. I prefer to contact references directly so I can get more customized and candid responses than I can from formal generic letters. I usually follow-up with one or more references by phone or Zoom before offering a position to a finalist candidate.
Good references know what it’s like to work with the applicant on a day-to-day basis and have seen their development over time. In my experience, references rarely make or break applications, but sometimes they help to make fine distinctions among strong candidates.
Unusual situations. This includes career disruptions, major changes of field, a bad relationship with a previous supervisor, etc. In my experience, many applicants with these circumstances avoid addressing them, presumably to avoid trouble, but my opinion is that applicants are best served by directly addressing any unusual situations in their cover letters. I realize this is complicated territory, and I don’t expect applicants to provide full details, especially in cases where there are critical privacy issues (e.g., health conditions). My position is that applicants should acknowledge unusual situations but need not explain them. For example, “Please note that I have excluded my Ph.D. supervisor as a reference and have instead provided another mentor with whom I closely interacted.” This doesn’t explain why the Ph.D. supervisor was excluded, but it clarifies that the applicant made this choice deliberately. Otherwise, if I just see the Ph.D. supervisor left off the reference list, I don’t know if that was just a careless omission.
Minor issues. Submitting a well-written and concise application helps, as does following the specific instructions of the job advertisement. Unfortunately, many applicants don’t do this (e.g., not submitting their documents as a single file, adding extraneous materials like transcripts or letters). These are not disqualifying factors — I wouldn’t decline an awesome applicant just because they didn’t format something the way I requested — but a disorganized application or one that does not follow the instructions makes it harder to evaluate, and it does not bode well for them as a potential member of the lab if they do not read the instructions carefully.
Things that people think matter but don’t. A lot of applicants seem to think that their specific skills (e.g., being able to do PCR, coding in Python) matter a lot. I don’t care much about this stuff for most positions in our lab. I care more about an applicant’s overall scientific knowledge, attention to detail, clarity of thought, ability to communicate, and interest in the scientific topics. I believe people with these traits can learn most of the necessary skills on the job. There are some limits to this statement (e.g., it would be a problem if a prospective postdoc applied to do modeling projects but completely lacked the mathematical and computational skills), but my impression is that most applicants give this way too much weight. (To be fair, I get the sense that some other faculty do care a lot about technical skills, so maybe applicants are justified in emphasizing these things.)
I also don’t give much consideration to grades or test scores for prospective graduate students, and definitely not for prospective postdocs. (Undergraduates are a different story since there are few other things on which to evaluate them.) This is especially affected by the fact that grades are hard to interpret across countries and institutions, where they are encoded differently. If an applicant did conspicuously poorly, then I might benefit from a statement about this (see previous section on “Unusual situations”), but if the applicant has other strengths, then I’m not that worried about grades.
