Print This PostOne of the most important decisions that you will make when you start your own lab is who to hire. When your lab is small, the first couple of members are critically important, and can make the difference between a productive and satisfying early fellowship or a desperate stressful dash to meet your objectives. The problem is, most of us in this position have zero experience of having hired anyone before, and the institutional training we receive shows us how not to break the law, but doesn’t really give much advice on how to develop a hiring style. I’ve had a good look around the internet and while there’s lots of advice out there for candidates, advice for new hirers is pretty sparse. At the moment, one of our HR team is in the process of writing a hiring guide, and I took part in a survey, and that made me realize I’ve learnt a few things over the past decade that others may find helpful. Please don’t take these ideas as set instructions – part of the beauty and terror of the hiring process is that everyone will develop their own style as they get more familiar with it. There is no one size fits all, with different jobs requiring different skill sets and approaches to interviewing.
The first piece of advice I have however, does apply to everyone. Get as much practice in hiring as you can before it becomes essential for your own lab. If you have someone a year ahead of you in the fellowship game, ask to be on their hiring panels. If your PI is bringing in a Research Assistant on a project you’re working on, ask to be on the panel. Take as many chances as you can to observe the type of questions that people ask, the way they probe the candidates, and decide which parts you would like to incorporate into your own practice, and note which won’t work for you.
If it’s too late for that and you’re already ready to hire, then don’t be afraid to ask others for their job descriptions, essential criteria and lists of interview questions and adapt them for your purposes.
If you have no one in your institution to help, then HR will usually have generic job descriptions and ads for each grade. It is much easier to adapt one of these than build your own from scratch. Learn from others – you don’t have to do this yourself.
The more I interview, the more I realize that the main thing I value is selecting people who think creatively and critically about the scientific problem that they are approaching. For most of my positions, it doesn’t matter whether the candidate has years of experience in a specific technique, but that they are enthusiastic and inquisitive about the subject of the work they’ll be doing. I don’t need a Post Doc level of understanding of the field, but I do want to hear why a candidate is drawn to it, and that they have a genuine interest in the nature of the work. It’s actually quite shocking how many times you’ll issue a detailed job description with links to the project, only to find that people have no opinion on the work or respond “I don’t know about X disease,” in an interview situation. In a similar vein, I don’t expect a Research Assistant to have made critical decisions about their previous projects, but I do expect them to have thought about why their PI might have made those decisions, and to be able to discuss them.
To select candidates that fulfil these criteria, it’s first important to write a job description that’s going to include them. Keep in mind that women and minority applicants are less likely to apply to a job if they don’t fulfil all the essential criteria, so setting them inclusively is important. At the same time, you don’t want a job description that is so broad and non-specific that you get hundreds of applicants. There is a balance somewhere in the middle. The full essential criteria for my last Research Assistant post is below. I set the first three, HR set the last three, and the middle one is a combination of both;
- Hold, or be close to completion of, a first degree, together with relevant experience
- Experience in cell culture. Preferably in primary rodent cultures and/or human pluripotent stem cells
- Knowledge of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s Disease
- Experience of following and adapting protocols and selecting appropriate experimental methodologies, including image-based experiments
- Ability to manage own research and administrative activities
- Excellent communication skills, including the ability to write text that can be published, present data at conferences, and represent the research group at meetings
- Commitment to engaging with, and promoting awareness of, equality, diversity and inclusion and embedding these into your work
It’s pretty subtle, exchanging words like expertise for “knowledge of” or “experience of” and instead of focusing in on iPSC neuronal models of neurodegeneration, it asks for general cell culture work, with a preference for slightly more complex culture systems. I think you can see from these criteria how a whole bunch of enthusiastic candidates might see themselves in this job.
Interviewing for your lab? Thoughtful hiring decisions can shape your team’s success and research culture.
Once you’ve put out the job ad, you will need to shortlist for interview. This can be pretty painful, and I tend to do two sweeps – a quick overview that eliminates candidates who meet less than half of the essential criteria, and then a slower sweep over those who do.I mostly shortlist alone, but if I get to the point that I really can’t pick between 10-12 candidates, then I will ask other panel members to help select from that pool. It’s a lot to ask a colleague to shortlist the whole list, so when I bring them in, it’s in a targeted way. A side note here for if you’re mentoring job applicants; a cover letter split up by the essential criteria, preferably in bullets, with specific concise examples, is by far the best way to communicate your suitability for the job. Don’t expect that a screener will intuit your connection to the criteria when screening, as when you’re looking at 100 plus applications for a job, there’s not much intuition left by the end of the process. Be sure to address all the essential criteria in your letter, even if it acknowledges a gap in your experience but a willingness to learn. The vast majority of candidates who apply to me ignore the final criteria about diversity and inclusion. It doesn’t take much, but even an example of changing your communication style to work with someone different to you can get you a tick in that box.
Once you’ve shortlisted, the next thing you have to think about is assembling a panel, and how to conduct the interview. I try to aim for a 3 person panel, with a representative from both sexes. If you’re replacing someone and they are moving on for positive reasons, then feel free to ask them to be on the panel. After all, they know the job best, and may notice things that you don’t about candidates. Don’t be afraid to ask a more senior mentor or a colleague with a great team to join in, their experience will be helpful. In terms of interview location, I’d always prefer to bring people in person, but due to budgets and other constraints that is not always possible. I would recommend that you don’t mix and match Teams versus in-person, I’ve found that it’s easier to put people at ease in person, and that in person candidates are better at picking up on non-verbal cues and interactions, leaving online candidates at a disadvantage.
In my interviews everyone gives a presentation first, even for administrative positions, where we’ve asked people to prepare an event, and present the most important parts of their preparation. Questions about the presentation are flexible, but once that is done, it is good interview practice to have a set list of questions that are asked in the same order by the same people. Questions should test across the essential criteria, so usually I draft them, and then ask the panel to adapt them to their style. I have also been trialing sending out these questions in advance to the candidates, as this has been shown to help neurodiverse candidates in interview settings. I’m torn as to how useful this has been, as in my experience it has led to long, pre-prepared answers, sometimes read from a script in online interviews, that have been less revealing of the way that a candidate might think than a spontaneous reply. In future I may give out some questions in advance, and say the interview will contain, but not be limited to these questions, as ARUK do for their fellowship interviews.
The final thing I sometimes do is to set a task. When I was hiring at Mass General, we wanted to test if people understood the importance of reproducibility in running a large biomarker operation, and I would set a series of questions about the differences in antibody types, and which you might prefer to use in ELISA assays. It led to us employing a barista with interest in automation as opposed to a traditional lab scientist, and he did such a spectacular job in his role that he was scooped by Quanterix to develop their instrumentation after a couple of years with us. We’d not have hired him without this reasoning task.
And with that, we’re pretty much through the process. After the interviews there’ll be a panel discussion, and so far we’ve always agreed, or we’ve had a choice which has come down to references. I’ve not yet had to deal with a full-on disagreement! After that HR will handle the offer, there will be chance for negotiation, and you can offer feedback to the unsuccessful candidates. Always give feedback through HR, not directly, and make sure that it references the criteria and is as constructive as possible. “You were great but someone else was better” is both good and frustrating to hear, so think about whether you can offer any specific advice for future interviews, even if it’s just “keep on doing this thing that was great.”
Phew, that turned into a bit of an epic post!
It really is unfortunate that our first few hiring decisions have the greatest potential effect on the success of our lab, and they are made when we are the least experienced.
But just know that you will find your feet, and if at all possible, try to do it before you are running your own lab. Future you will thank you.
Dr Becky Carlyle
Author
Dr Becky Carlyle is an Alzheimer’s Research UK Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford, and has previously worked in the USA. Becky writes about her experiences of starting up a research lab and progressing into a more senior research role. Becky’s research uses mass-spectrometry to quantify thousands of proteins in the brains and biofluids of people with dementia. Her lab is working on various projects, including work to compare brain tissue from people with dementia from Alzheimer’s Disease, to tissue from people who have similar levels of Alzheimer’s Disease pathology but no memory problems. Becky is also a mum, she runs, drinks herbal tea’s and reads lots of books.
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