A key part of training postdocs, according to Fred Alt, is preparing them to eventually run their own labs.

Frederick Alt, an HHMI investigator at Children's Hospital Boston, remembers being impressed by an applicant whose one-page cover letter projected where certain projects in Alt's lab might be headed and positioned her skills within the lab team. "Wow, she's really taken some time here," he recalls thinking. He hired her and she recently landed a faculty slot at National Jewish Health in Denver.

When probing applicant references, veteran investigators put little stock in letters of recommendation. "Letters of recommendation are very tricky because there is never a negative letter. I like to say they are 'interpretatively ambiguous,'" says Green. He prefers to e-mail references with specific questions.

Bardwell and Luger call references to get a faster, candid assessment. Bardwell also likes to call candidates to quickly gauge their enthusiasm and personality. "I like a lab that is fun, where people inspire each other to higher heights."

Jean-François Collet vividly remembers that call and how it sealed his decision to join Bardwell's group. Collet, then at Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, sent an e-mail application and two hours later the phone rang. Bardwell opened the conversation in Collet's native French, which impressed upon the young researcher that Bardwell was a world-class communicator.

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"I had a young daughter and my wife would have to quit her job to move. He cared about that and wanted to make sure they would be happy in the States, in part because he knew that would make me more productive," recalls Collet.

He then did a unique calculation to confirm the match. For each of the protein folding labs he wanted to join, Collet divided the lab's recent publications by the number of people in the lab. Bardwell stood out with a higher ratio of papers to people. "I thought it was better to go to a smaller lab that publishes a lot, rather than a big lab that is like a lottery, where you don't know if you will be the lucky one."

Everybody's got an individual interviewing style. But they all have the candidate meet current lab members to check the fit. "The cohesiveness of your group is critical to having it hum along as a functional unit," says Stephen Elledge, an HHMI investigator at Harvard Medical School.

Karel Svoboda, a group leader at HHMI's Janelia Farm Research Campus, is very selective. He never hires a postdoc without two interviews, mostly as a way to gauge how much the candidate really wants to be in his lab. Several drop out and find another lab between the first and second conversation. He says playing hard to get pays off. In 13 years, he's trained roughly two dozen postdocs, 18 of whom are now in tenure-track positions.

Luger dines with candidates the first night for small talk, saving the science for the next morning. The more relaxed discussion gives her a better sense of a candidate's social and communication skills and how well the lab fits his or her long-term plans.

She also probes personalities with questions like, "What's the biggest challenge you had to overcome in your Ph.D.? How would you deal with a messy bench mate?" she says. "Let them talk," she advises. "I made the rookie mistake as a new PI to talk and talk to fill the void."

Nobel laureate and HHMI investigator Richard Axel at Columbia University doesn't waste his time sitting through applicant job talks or thesis seminars. He gets right to a lengthy one-on-one conversation to probe the candidate's grasp of science and whether the two will click. "The trick is to surround yourself with postdocs who are smarter than you and with whom you have a good personal rapport," says Axel. Several of his former postdocs have become icons in neuroscience, including HHMI investigators David Anderson, Linda Buck, Catherine Dulac, Leslie Vosshall, and HHMI alumnus Richard Scheller.

Photo: Jeff Barnett-Winsby

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