Should you tailor your job interview style based on the age, gender and cultural background of the person asking the questions?

Margot Smit and Dietmar Hutmacher compare their approaches to hiring and how generational influences might shape how they respond to candidates.

Smit, a plant molecular biologist who became a group leader at Tübingen University Germany, in late 2023, and Hutmacher, a regenerative medicine researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, list what they look for at interview. Coming from different generations, one with a background in industry, do they differ?

This is the third episode in a six-part podcast series about hiring in science.

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Julie Gould compares hiring practices across industry and academia by seeking perspectives from Tina Persson, an organic chemist-turned-careers coach based in Malmö, Sweden, and Lauren Celano, a recruitment consultant who founded Propel Careers, based in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2009.

Persson, whose coaching business is called passage2pro, tells Gould why it typically takes longer to hire scientists in academia. Margot Smit, a plant molecular biologist who now recruits scientists for her lab at Tübingen University in Germany, reflects on her own experiences as an academic jobseeker in 2022. It involved panel interviews, lab tours, team dinners, and, in one case, a symposium where all candidates gave a talk. Now, as someone who recruits scientists to her lab, she involves junior colleagues in hiring decisions.

Jen Heemstra tells a similar tale. Her search for a department chair position in 2022 meant moving not only herself but also her entire chemistry research group to Washington University in St. Louis. She explains how she updated her colleagues and addressed their questions and concerns about the impending move.

Finally, Rachel Howard describes how she hopes to make the process quicker and easier for hiring managers at the Francis Crick Institute in London, where she is head of talent acquisition.

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Successful job candidates aren’t necessarily the smartest or most confident people in the room, Ilana Wisby tells Julie Gould in the first episode of a six-part weekly podcast series about hiring in science.

Wisby, a physicist and former chief executive of Oxford Quantum Circuits, which builds quantum computers from its base in Reading, UK, says recruiters use interviews to gauge a candidate’s values, their emotional intelligence, and their growth potential. Asking someone how they received difficult feedback, she adds, is a test of their humility and willingness to admit mistakes, and what they learned from them.

The episode begins with Linda Nordling, a freelance science writer who led coverage of Nature’s 2024 global hiring in science survey, talking about some of the surprising things that caught her eye in the data.

Future episodes include insights from a careers coach about industry hiring trends, and how an academic research institute based in London is centralizing its postdoc hiring process.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.