Thoughts on doctoral student recruitment

Hello, I'm Mika Rantakokko, I'm professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Jyväskylä School of Business and Economics. We just completed the recruitment of a doctoral student and I thought that this would be a good uh moment to reflect a bit on how the academic recruitment market works and what you should consider when you are applying for a doctoral student or post-doc position. And to set some context, um I have recruited a student from an open call last time 5 years ago. So, we don't typically do open calls because it's very difficult to evaluate the person. Also, when we apply for funding we typically have a person in mind because unless we have the person in mind, then getting the funding is a bit risky because that means that the success of the research project would be contingent on a person who we have not even met before. So, getting these uh open calls and getting a student position from an open call is is very unlikely because the positions are few and the applicants are many. We have more than 90 applicants and we could only recruit one student. And let's talk a bit about what makes a good doctoral student application and what are the things to avoid. One thing in this application round that I could clearly see is that a lot of the applications in various documents showed AI use and this is uh a double-edged sword. I would say that using AI to write your application is actually going to hurt your chances of getting a job. Even if it allows you to write many, many applications, when we see that the application is AI written, then that's going to be counted against the applicant. So, let's assume that we have five applications that are clearly written by a human, a lot of effort have been put into those applications, and then we have 90 applications where we can see that they're mostly produced by AI with little effort from the candidate. We are not going to interview those people who provided these AI written applications. Of course, there's like it is not black and white. You might have some documents where you use AI for some purposes and that might be okay, but we value human written applications. Let's Let's take a look at some some specific issues and um one clear turn-off for me is a CV that is customized to the position by AI. And CV is supposed to be a neutral document that documents what you have done and if we can see a CV that contains references to the project, contains highlights that are clearly there to increase the perceived attractiveness of that CV from the perspective of the project director or owner no one does that. So, I haven't seen that done before AI. So, we assume that a human would have a neutral document that is the same document sent to every position. And if we see these two customer CVs, that is an indication that it was an AI written document. I wrote five applications to different positions at our university over lunch with AI just to show my colleagues how easy it is to produce this kind of document. So, don't use AI to do your CV. The CV is supposed to be neutral, it's supposed to show the facts and it's not supposed to communicate, for example, your fit or your motivation. That is something that the person who does the recruitment will judge based on the CV. So, that's number one, no AI CVs. Then another thing is is motivation letters and the motivation letters had a couple of issues that were kind of turn-offs, at least for me. One is that the motivation letter basically restates the CV. The motivation letter should not restate the CV, explain your background, ex- but they should explain two things. Good motivation letter should explain what is your motivation to apply to the position. And here I would encourage you to be honest. And by honesty I mean that if you're applying for any a doctoral student position where uh in management or in business school more generally in any university in Europe just say that you're casting a wide net because if you are just applying to many, many positions, then it's very hard to have specific motivation to a specific position. So, unless you have a specific position motivation to our position, don't fake that you would do because we read lots of applications, we will see if there's no genuine motivation to our position per se. Now, is it Is it necessary to have a genuine motivation to our position specifically? The answer to that question is no. If there is a candidate who is uh let's say very promising even if they were looking for other positions and it's clear that they're looking for other positions, we don't count that against them because it's natural that if there are only a handful of positions available and lots of applicants, it's rational to apply to multiple places. And we interviewed one candidate who was applying to multiple positions and we told that candidate that this is completely okay. So, we don't expect you to dedicate yourself to one position where uh the chances just based on the numbers is pretty low. Uh if you don't have a specific motivation to a project, then you should indicate your general motivation. Like, why do you want to do a doctorate in the first place? Uh why do you want to go for academic career? Because that's generally why people do a doctorate. And um these These candidates that we interviewed, all of them provided a very credible explanation of why they wanted to go for academic career. And um so, think about like, what is your motivation and should be honest about it. The second thing that you need to have in your motivation letter is to explain how you plan to contribute to the research project. So, our research project was about entrepreneurship and AI and we were looking for a person that does qualitative research and we were also open for for people who are have profiles that would make them mixed methods scholars. So, either qualitative or qualitative and quantitative. Uh Explain your background, like, what makes you a good person to do that kind of research? What makes you uh want to learn specifically that kind of research? So, don't explain in your motivation letter who you are, where you come from, but explain the motivation either specifically to the project or generally toward academic career. They're both okay. You don't have to be specifically interested in the project. I've done many projects that I do not because I'm interested in the topic specifically, but because I like the process of doing research. And that's completely fine, it produces good outcomes and that works. And explain how you plan to contribute. What is your basic training? If you lack training, then you might say that I don't have any much experience in qualitative research, but uh this is the This is the things that I would do to learn. So, indicate your readiness to learn even if you are not ready to contribute to the project from the day one. When we look for a doctoral student, then we're typically looking for a commitment between 4 and 5 years. And if that person has uh half a year of qualitative If one person has half a year of qualitative research experience, another person doesn't have that experience it's not critical difference because during the four or five years that the student is in the program, they will be trained to do the kind of research that we hire them to do. Um so, what we are looking for more is is genuine interest and being able to explain how you might fit into the project based on on what you know and what you're interested in. So, that is the motivation letter. Then we ask for research plan and there are there were a couple of of errors or couple of not errors, but things that really turn me off in terms of research plans. And we don't ask for research plan to indicate that that person has a plan that is ready to implement be implemented when they arrive into the program. Why we ask for research plan is that that is a way of of showing some commitment to the process. If you submit a research plan that is completely irrelevant to the position that we apply. So for example, if you submit the research plan about human resource practices in in multinational corporations and we look for a researcher in a position that is about AI and entrepreneurship, then that is not a relevant research plan. Another thing that is a disqualifier is that if you have an AI written research plan. And uh we had a one plan that cited a document written by uh Sufian who was uh who is the the leader of the project. And uh the problem is that while it's a good idea to cite the person's study who you are work with, that was a hallucinated reference. So uh the plan was citing a non-existent paper uh from a person who is doing the recruiting with me. And that means simply that uh uh we will we will see that the person who applies to this position is not careful enough that they notice that they have basically falsified references in their research plan. We didn't of course check them all, but this is something that we noticed. So the idea of a research plan is that you uh you do yourself because uh we can see when it's AI generated and it just tells that uh the student doesn't have a motivation. Now the challenge for this then is uh what why this is challenging is that if you have a general motivation, but not a specific motivation for this position, uh how should you deal with uh the research plan? And uh my I have a couple of things that I I would like to say about that topic. Uh be open about it that you're applying for multiple uh multiple places. Just say that you read two references and then include those and then say that because you are applying for 30 different positions, uh the outcomes are uncertain. You just explain like general research principles. But tailor it to the position. So and and do it by hand because that shows some commitment. For every Let's say that uh you can be pretty much sure that every position that you apply with with an AI generated research plan, there will be a person that has similar qualifications to you who has written the plan themselves and show commitment to the position that way. And they will be uh the things that we we state in the uh job advertisement, but we also looking to uh do uh a low risk recruitment. And uh low risk recruitment means that when we hire a person, we know that that person will come when they are hired and not take another position. And we also know that that person uh has some familiarity with how the education system works here. So uh indicate for example, if you This applies particularly to uh people applying from different countries, indicate that you have some understanding of the environment where you're applying to. And discuss how you would adapt to a new environment. So how easy would it be for you for example to adapt to the Finnish study environment if you come from for example uh India. We had some Indian applicants. Uh if we have a person who comes and faces lots of difficulties in adjusting to the Finnish system, then that is something that the person who does the recruitment would like to avoid. So try to uh indicate that you're familiar if you're not familiar with the Finnish system then that you're familiar with the European system. You generally know how things work. Try to make it appear that when you are recruited, then things will proceed smoothly with you. You can for example talk about how you have adjusted to different environments in the past. So this is something that usually is not listed in recruitment advertisements, but this is another kind of like passive factor that might make a difference when we consider uh whether we screen the applicant in or out for interview. When you get to the interview, then uh it doesn't make that much of a difference anymore. In the interview, um one most important thing is uh is uh or two most important things are uh be honest which doesn't mean that don't lie, but honest means that if if you go for a doctoral student position, you might be interviewed by two professors who know about the topic a lot more than you do. If they ask you a difficult question, just say that well, you don't know the answer. That's much better than trying to improvise something on the spot. So acknowledge your limitations and show readiness to learn and that is uh the most important thing. The second most important thing is that you have 30 minutes to begin an interview, stay on topic and keep your answers short. If you don't know an answer to a question that you're being asked, for example, if we ask you uh what is abductive research? Maybe we've read that uh word in your research plan, you don't know the answer, just say that I'm not sure what that means and then proceed instead of going in circles for multiple minutes uh on a topic that you might not be fully familiar with. Uh if you spend 5 minutes talking about topic that you don't are not fully comfortable, then that is 5 minutes less than you could be talking about topics that you know more about. So that is my final advice. And uh I would the just thinking about the the person who we ultimately decided to hire and the person I hired the last time when I recruited a doctoral student from an open call, what is common between these two people? What is common is that neither of these persons were applying to multiple places. Uh they were or they were to many places. So the student that I recruited um 5 years ago who is now graduated, uh he applied if I remember correctly to three positions uh in the EU area and he just picked positions, did his homework, uh looked at what these people who were recruiting had been studied in the past and then indicated that they knew where they were applying to. And this candidate that we now recruited also knew where he or she was applying to and and that really showed in the interview. So that is uh my my final tip. And uh unfortunately, we cannot recruit every person. So I would really uh I I don't One thing that I really like about recruiting is that uh you uh you get lots of promising candidates. You get many people who you could hire, but then you can't offer the position but to just one person.