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How to write a great science job ad

With over 10,000 jobs posted on jobRxiv, we know a few things about what makes a job listing successful.

Here are our top tips to get more views and applicants for your jobs.

So, you’ve got an open position in your lab and you’re putting together an advert? What should it include? How should you format it? Which parts actually matter to candidates? In this post, we’re going to answer all these questions and more so you can write the most effective job ad to hire scientists.

Of course, you’re scientists, so you’re not going to be persuaded by arguments based on assumptions about the ways job seekers might behave! Fortunately, at jobRxiv we have a lot of data that can help us interrogate various characteristics that might impact how candidates respond to your job postings.

And if you don’t care about the details and just want an easy-to-browse bullet point list, no need to scroll down to the end, we’ve got you covered in the next section!

The short version

Follow these simple guidelines and you’ll ensure that you get as many qualified applications as you can, while showing candidates that you would be the kind of mentor that will put time and effort into them, their research and their career development.

Click on a title to read the detailed version.

 

  1. Give your job listing an informative & interesting title
  • Do include the position/role in the title, just not on its own!
  • Do NOT include the organisation name & location,  PI name or department name.
  • Give an idea of the field of work/study
  • Try to highlight something exciting about the job/team/environment that will make it stand out. What would get YOU excited about the job?
  1. Make your listing social media-friendly
  • Use an informative title (see previous section)
  • Include user handles (eg. @username)
  • Add a picture
  1. Make your listing easy to find
  • Include all relevant disciplines and job categories
  1. Get the job description right
  • Briefly introduce the job
  • Describe the job in detail including duties, focus of the research and expectation
  • Describe the environment
  • List specific requirements
  • Devote a section to what YOU offer the candidate
  • Give some practical information on expected start date, salary, health care, housing.
  • Finish with clear application instructions.

It starts with the title

 

Think about the last research paper you published. Did you spend some time figuring out a good title for it? Did you by any chance consider entitling it ‘Scientific research article’ ? Of course not! That would be boring, uninformative, unhelpful when searching the literature, and would not entice anyone to actually read it.

So, what do we think of listings with titles such as  ‘Postdoctoral researcher’, ‘Bioinformatician’ or ‘Lab Technician’?

It’s pretty intuitively obvious those are bad titles, but we still went ahead and crunched the numbers for you. Using job listings on jobRxiv, we categorised titles broadly as being “informative” or “uninformative”, based on whether they gave more information about the position than is available in the other key immediately visible and filterable details (i.e. the country, city, institute/organisation, job category, or discipline). 

We found that informatively titled ads on average get 20% more views than uninformative ads and indeed that 44 of the top 50 most viewed ads across the entire history of jobRxiv have informative titles, whereas the majority of the bottom 50 have uninformative titles.

Can you get away with an uninformative job title if you’re at a well-known institution? Unsurprisingly, jobs advertised at top 50 ranked US universities and colleges get more views than those at institutions ranked outside the top 200, when titles aren’t considered. However, when split up based on how informative their titles are, we see that our users spend less time on uninformatively titled ads from big name organisations than they do on informatively titled ads from lower ranked institutions. This is also mirrored by the success each job listing has when shared on social media: tweets sharing informatively titled adverts from lower- ranked US institutions are seen by more people than tweets sharing uninformatively titled adverts from top-ranked organisations (~17% more) and are on average retweeted ~56% more.

So, unfortunately, only naming your prestigious organisation isn’t going to be enough to get people to read your job posting. On the bright side, the data tells us that by working on your ad title you can reach great candidates through jobRxiv wherever you are!

 

 

What makes a good job title then? Here are some recommendations:

  • Do include the position/role in the title (eg ‘Postdoc’, ‘Assistant Professor’, ‘Staff scientist’), just not on its own!
  • Do NOT include the organisation name & location (those already show up next to the title),  PI name or department name.
  • Give an idea of the field of work/study (‘Postdoc in quantum mechanics’)
  • Try to highlight something exciting about the job/team/environment that will make it stand out. What would get YOU excited about the job?
    • ‘Lab Tech in epigenetics wanted to help get a new lab started’
    • ‘Staff scientist in environmental engineering – 120K/year’
    • ‘Postdoc in marine biology – work on the beach!!’ 
    • ‘Join us for a PhD in bioinformatics and design your own project’

Write a social media-friendly listing

Jobs get shared on social media, often by job boards (every job posted on jobRxiv is shared across multiple social channels) as well as by the hiring institution and/or the recruiting manager or PI. In order to take full advantage of the leveraging potential of a social network to increase views, and therefore applicants, to your job, there are a number of simple but important steps you can take.

Have a good title!!

Have we mentioned yet that the job listing title is important? It is. 

Include user handles (@username)

On the jobRxiv job submission form, there are specific twitter and mastodon handle fields and you can also include additional handles in the hashtag suggestion box. We suggest including the user handle of the PI and/or hiring institution/company for best results. 

How does tagging a user in a job ad increase visibility? Well, we  found that tweets containing appropriate tagging were seen by more users on twitter (+58%), were shared more (+46% ), and indeed that the associated adverts on our site received more views (+44%). Those are pretty astounding numbers and you might be tempted to think that it’s down to the tagged accounts retweeting the ad to their huge networks. 

So, is this still relevant advice if you’re not very active on the platform and only have a small network? Yes, because we found that tweets containing appropriate tagging that were not retweeted by those tagged accounts were still seen ~50% more and shared ~22% more and the associated adverts on our site still received ~36% more views. 

So make sure to include at least one relevant handle when submitting your job listing.

Add a picture

People are more likely to look at, read, and share a social media post that includes an image. It’s also a great additional opportunity for you to show off your team, lab or city. 

On jobRxiv, we offer the option to include an image to be associated with your job listing on social media and we see that the majority of our tweets that receive the most engagement have an image associated, whereas our least engaged-with tweets are almost all image-less. 

You know what to do.

Make your job easy to find

Every job board includes filters that candidates can search by to narrow down the list of jobs to those they might be most interested in.

One of the strengths of a niche job board like jobRxiv is that filters are specific to the needs of the specialised community it serves. Job-seeking scientists can filter jobs by location, discipline (chemistry, physics, life sciences, …), category (bioinformatician, postdoc, lab technician,…), type of employment (full/part-time), and further target specific jobs through city and keyword searches.

What employers don’t always understand is that because candidates can save searches into job alerts or simply save the URL of the job search with their chosen filters, active jobseekers don’t browse aimlessly through jobs and you cannot count on them finding your job if it is not categorised accurately. 

 

So, how should you use the filters/metadata when submitting your job? 

Select every option that even remotely makes sense for the position you are offering. This is not an encouragement to spam the PhD student category with your postdoc job adverts, but rather an encouragement to put yourself in the place of a candidate looking for a job.

Let’s take the example of a job for a Postdoc in a computational biology lab. Disciplines should include: Life Sciences definitely, and possibly Data Science and/or Computer Science depending on the focus of the work. Mathematics is also a possible option. The job Category should list Postdoc, Bioinformatician, Researcher, and Scientist.

Think about all the ways candidates you might be willing to consider could describe themselves and you’ll be fine.

Get the job description right

Whether you’re a new investigator starting a small group, or a tenured professor with a 40-strong super lab, you’ve got an exciting position available to work on topics you are passionate about. You need to make that passion and everything you have to offer obvious in your job listing.

Obviously, you’re also looking for a new team member that will be the right fit in terms of technical expertise, scientific interest and team culture: some of these will take some face-to-face time to completely figure out but if you make the effort to paint an accurate picture of your team, scientific goals, and culture in your job listing, you will make it that much easier.

So how do you ensure that candidates reading your ad know if they would be a good fit for you and, crucially, if you and your group would be a good fit for them?

  1. Briefly introduce the job
    “We’re looking for a Lab Technician with experience in animal studies  to join our newly-formed lab as soon as possible”
  2. Describe the job in detail
    Duties, responsibilities, expectations in terms of output, specifics of the project if known, your vision for hours worked,…
  3. Describe the environment
    Yourself, the team, the institute, close collaborators, equipment, regular seminars, available career development resources, fun things to do locally outside of work, …
  4. List specific requirements
    What are you looking for in a candidate: degrees, technical skills, previous achievements (e.g. publications, funding), visas and language skills if relevant, etc..
    Don’t overdo this section and focus on what is truly essential. Listing nice-to-haves is fine but make that distinction explicit.
  5. Devote a section to what YOU offer the candidate
    What can they expect from you in terms of supervision, meeting availability, support for fellowship applications and career development? How have your past trainees fared and where are they now? Are you the right mentor for someone hoping to continue in academia towards tenure-track roles? How about industry positions or spin-off companies?
  6. Give some practical information
    Expected start date, salary, health care, housing. This does not need to be super detailed but reassuring someone who will be moving across the country or the world to work with you that their basic needs will be met is essential.
  7. Finish with application instructions.
    On jobRxiv, there is a specific field in the submission form for you to include the application link or email address so please do not include that in the body of the job description. You should, however, include the list of documents that you expect applicants to provide.
    We urge you to keep it very limited in the first round of selection to encourage as many applications as possible.
  8. Do not ask for references upfront
    It’s a waste of everyone’s time, and will severely limit the number of candidates who apply.

And that's it!

Follow these simple guidelines and you’ll ensure that you get as many qualified applications as you can, while showing candidates that you would be the kind of mentor that will put time and effort into them, their research and their career development.

Now you're ready to post the best job ever!

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