On finding good help

One of the challenges of academia in Europe appears to be the inverse of the problem in the US: how to support an army of minions graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. In the US, finding good help is relatively easy compared to finding means of paying for them; in Europe, it appears it’s much easier to find the funding than to find the employees.

Or maybe I shouldn’t say it’s hard to find people—it’s just hard to find the right people. For a recent position I advertised, I’ve received applications from all sorts of people, including a bunch who would, on paper, appear to be entirely unsuitable for such a position. (For instance, why would someone working for more than two decades as a staff scientist want to accept a temporary post-doctoral position?) It rather boggles the mind.

As for who I ended up hiring, I’ve decided to take one post-doctoral fellow and one student. The search for a postdoc was fortunately quite easy; an extremely qualified candidate whose “degrees of separation” was only 1 applied relatively quickly, and no one else really compared well with that. (Experience as an experimentalist, and familiarity with the MD software we’re using, also helped.)

The graduate student search was much more involved, surprisingly. Most of the candidates came in with essentially no experience in the field. This is true of all the finalists, too, but they all had experience with computational science. Unfortunately, two of the candidates unintentionally hurt their chances during the application process, in rather different ways. leaving only one candidate without a serious black mark left in the running. It’s rather unfortunate that I had to make a decision through elimination rather than through a positive selection, but sometimes, you have to take what’s handed to you and make the most of it.