In June and July, for the first time, Nature surveyed laboratory leaders across academia and other sectors about the highs and lows of hiring in science. These hiring managers answered questions about how and where they recruit, and what they look for in a cover letter. They also shared favourite interview questions, and described how they pick between candidates with similar qualifications, skills and experiences.

Hiring in science

“The academic job search can feel like a black box where applications go to die with no rhyme or reason,” says Karen Kelsky, founder and president of academic careers consultancy The Professor Is In based in Eugene, Oregon. “This data helps job seekers understand a bit more what search committee members are thinking and seeing, and how better to focus their job search energies.” For job-seeking scientists, the survey results provide a way to peek into that black box, so that they can tailor applications and interview preparations to increase their chances of a job offer.

In the first of five articles in 2024 and 2025 to delve into the survey results, Nature presents six key findings from the data. Some are surprising; others confirm what many already suspect. There are also eye-catching differences between hiring scientists in academia and hiring them in industry, from which one-third of the total sample of hiring managers came.

Candidate quality

Hirers in industry are more likely to say that the quality of applicants has improved compared with previous years, whereas academic hirers say it has worsened. The difference is striking: 44% of industry hirers say candidates are better than a few years ago, compared with only 20% of academic hirers (see ‘Sectors differ on the perceived quality of job candidates’). Meanwhile, 43% of academics say that candidate quality has gone down, compared with just 20% of industry hirers. “A lack of high-calibre candidates” was the most-common challenge both industry- and academia-based hirers said they faced in the recruitment process. But academics were much more likely to say this (58%) than were those in industry (38%).

There are many possible explanations for this trend in the data. In the past five or so years, Nature’s careers section has documented young scientists’ growing frustration with academic careers as well as calls to reform PhD training to teach a broader set of skills suitable for more varied workplaces.

Nature’s findings echo anecdotal reports from academic principal investigators who say that they struggle to find good candidates for jobs, says Neda Bebiroglu, a scientific adviser and coordinator at the Observatory of Research and Scientific Careers in Brussels. “Six years ago, if you asked a room full of PhD students about their career plans, they all wanted to become professors. Now, a minority does,” she says. That shows that young scientists are more aware of their career options, she notes. “But it raises the question, how can we retain talent in academia?”

How to make the leap into industry after a PhD

Kelsky says that the COVID-19 pandemic and deteriorating conditions in academia, such as pay not keeping up with the rising costs of living, funding cuts for research and growing anti-science sentiments in society, have hit young scientists’ psychological investment in a research career. “I see a shift toward a new level of disenchantment and alienation among those who apply for academic jobs,” she says.

Meanwhile, Javier García-Martínez, director of the Molecular Nanotechnology Laboratory at the University of Alicante, Spain, and co-founder of catalyst technology firm Rive Technology in Princeton, New Jersey, says that it’s plausible that many of the best candidates are opting for industry careers to access better pay and more attractive benefits. Industry jobs could also be moving closer to what PhD scientists train for, becoming more “science-based”, he says. Although without further data this remains “pure speculation”, he adds.

Worst candidate mistakes

Not knowing enough about the workplace’s research and putting in generic applications are the two biggest mistakes job seekers make, according to the Nature survey (See ‘Top five mistakes candidates make when applying for jobs’). Being overconfident, not understanding the role they are applying for and preparing poorly for interview questions are other common blunders applicants make.

Some of these lapses were reported more frequently in academia than they were in industry. Generic responses on applications were a ‘key mistake’ for 45% of academic hirers compared with only 26% in industry, and academics were more than twice as likely as industry hirers to say that candidates often lack knowledge about their research. “Research the position”, or role, was the most common response from academics when asked what applicants should do to stand out from the crowd — 25% of their answers belonged to this theme, compared with just 15% of industry answers.

Nail your tech-industry interviews with these six techniques

Applicants should ensure that they read a few recent papers from the lab’s scientists and study the vision and organizational structure of a potential workplace before applying, hirers told the survey. But it pays to be clever about where to look for information, says Casey Greene, a bioinformatician who runs a lab at the University of Colorado in Denver. “Lab websites can be notoriously out of date. So it could be helpful to look the principal investigator up on PubMed or arXiv or whatever the appropriate venue is for your field, and find some recent papers,” he says.

Making direct contact with an employer, even before applying, can also help candidates to get a feel for the day-to-day requirements of the job. “It is good practice to arrange a pre-interview phone call or virtual meeting with the hiring manager or someone from the team to get a better understanding of the team, how they work and what their priorities are,” says Emmanuel Adukwu, deputy head of the School of Applied Sciences at the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK. This also allows candidates to gauge the culture and values of the workplace, he adds. In his experience, applicants increasingly want to know about the diversity of the team they might work with, especially if they belong to a minority group.

Cold applications effective

Nearly every recruiter (94%) who participated in the survey said that they receive unsolicited job requests, usually by e-mail, at least once a year (see ‘Cold applications can be surprisingly effective’). Of those that do, 57% say that they ‘usually’ or ‘always’ respond to them, and 43% find them effective. Only 17% find unsolicited applications irritating, but this increases to 24% for those who receive one or more per week on average. Industry hirers are more likely (51%) than academics (37%) to view unsolicited requests as effective, and they are also more likely to say that they usually, or always, respond, than are academics (61% for industry compared with 54% for academia).

Several researchers Nature interviewed said that they had successfully hired people off the back of a cold introduction. Unsolicited requests can even “shake loose” a position, says Greene. He says that this can happen if a strong candidate comes along when a research group is about to get a grant, or when there is money for a position remaining on a grant, but not enough time left to advertise a post from scratch.

But unsolicited enquiries need a personal touch to garner a positive response, says García-Martínez, who gets them every week. “I don’t pay much attention to the ones that don’t talk about my own research project, as I don’t feel the message is addressed to me personally,” he says. A forthcoming article early next year, based on Nature’s hiring survey, will take a closer look at how to craft the perfect cold e-mail to impress a potential employer.

Network recruiting

When asked which channels hirers prefer to use when recruiting researchers, they overwhelmingly say personal networks. More than half (51%) said that they used professional networks to recruit, a proportion that increased to 65% among academics (see ‘Hirers prefer to recruit through personal networks’).

Professional networking platform site LinkedIn was the most popular channel for industry hirers overall, with 50% picking it as a ‘preferred’ channel. LinkedIn was also a popular choice for survey takers in India (55% of 85 respondents) and the United Kingdom (53% of 114 respondents). Global jobs site Indeed was relatively popular with industry hirers (32% said it was a preferred recruitment channel), but it was unpopular with academics (6%).

In interviews with the survey team, several academics said that they liked to use public talks and other networking opportunities to publicize their team and attract top talent. “I recruit mostly by giving talks at conferences, it helps give people a better understanding of the essence of my lab,” says Antentor Hinton Jr, a molecular biologist and lab leader at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Because four of the top five answers for preferred recruiting channels were professional networks, LinkedIn, face-to-face and personal invites, candidates would do well to sharpen their networking skills.

The role of AI

Using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to screen applications or respond to candidates is currently rare among recruiters, especially in academia (See ‘How AI is being used — or not — in hiring’). Most academics (89%) say that they don’t use AI in the application process, and more than half aren’t thinking about using it in the future. Industry is more open to the use of AI: almost half of industry hirers report using the tools either to design interview questions or to screen and manage applications.

One-quarter of all recruiters (25%) worry about applicants using AI for writing their cover letters and CVs. Hirers expressed frustration with being inundated with generic, AI-generated applications, which many said go straight into the bin. “I’d much rather receive an e-mail with grammatical errors that tells me something concise and personal about them, than an application that has obviously been written by ChatGPT,” says Fernanda Adame, a wetlands ecologist at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. In such applications, the text is “very fluffy and doesn’t have any substance”, she says.

But it’s not always possible to identify applications that have been AI massaged or written, especially when a chatbot such as ChatGPT has been used to polish text that’s been written with personal input. Those applications are still vulnerable to common problems associated with AI editors, such as their tendency to exaggerate and fill in gaps with made-up content. So, hirers beware and it’s a risk applicants might want to avoid.

Candidates whose true abilities don’t match their AI-written applications might still interview well enough to get a job offer but could lack the skills to follow through afterwards, says Douglas Anderson, a chemist at life sciences company Thermo Fisher Scientific, and based in Eugene, Oregon. “It means that you must continue to be sceptical even with a candidate that looks great on paper and interviews well.” Dig deeper with a rigorous skills-focused interview, he suggests.

Tipping the scales

Candidates who possess ‘soft’ skills — perhaps they are deft at making presentations or work well in a team — are highly sought after, the survey reveals. Soft skills, along with factors such as personality and fit, were high on the list when hirers were asked to describe what factors would tip the scale if two candidates presented for a job with the same levels of technical ability and experience. Communication and interpersonal skills ranked highest, followed by personality, fit with the team, and teamwork or collaboration skills (see ‘These factors tip the scales in close hiring decisions’). When hirers were asked to choose the most sought-after skills at the interview stage, communication skills again came out on top: 66% of hirers selected this option, a larger share than those who selected research experience (60%) or field expertise (61%).

“If I could give one piece of advice to candidates to help their application stand out, it would be to polish and highlight their transferable skills,” says Eur Ing Hong Wai Onn, a chemical engineer in Kuala Lumpur, who works with Danish biotechnology company Novonesis to develop green solutions for the palm-oil industry. Demonstrating strong communication, teamwork, adaptability, problem-solving, leadership, emotional intelligence and time-management skills can set candidates apart from others with similar technical abilities, he says.

Personality and overall fit with the team are other key factors that help hirers to decide between candidates. Recruiters in the United Kingdom and Germany were significantly more likely to say that this played a part than were hirers in other parts of the world. “I don’t care how skilled someone is if they appear toxic or are not going to be able to work with others,” says Ed Emmott, a biochemist at the University of Liverpool, UK.

Passion and motivation are two of the qualities that candidates most commonly lack in their applications and interviews, according to the survey. Nature will discuss how to show passion and dedication while avoiding overconfidence or exaggeration in the next article in this series.

Soft skills, hirers say, are becoming more important for candidates to demonstrate than they were in the past. They were a close second to computing as the skill type hirers most often said they were looking for. This trend fits with the changing nature of science work — especially in universities — says Kelsky. Increasingly, scientists must justify their research to sceptical audiences and share resources in the face of funding cuts, while teams are also increasingly made up of people from different backgrounds. “For all these reasons, the ability to communicate and collaborate effectively becomes ever more valued,” she says.