What is Hiring For Science?

Hiring For Science is an initiative where companies connect with the best talent from PIs' professional network, and contribute referral fees once they make hires.

Why are we doing this?

Funding is the life blood of science

In the US, PIs are expected to cover at least 75% of salary and lab costs through grants.

However, scientific funding has stagnated over the years, and there's not enough funding for every eligible project. This leads to low grant approval rates (<20%), fierce competition, pressure to publish, "safer" research, and PIs spending as much as 50% of their time on grant applications.

(Spoiler alert: our initiative doesn't solve all of these problems, but can alleviate some of them if we work together)

Companies will pay to snatch the best talent

For technology and life sciences companies, getting the best talent is critical to stay competitive. According to 58% of HR leaders and 46% of Hiring Managers, finding and attracting talent remains the biggest challenge they face.

At the macro level, the online recruitment market is valued at $29.3B in 2021 and projected to reach $47.3B by 2028.

At the micro level, the average amount companies spend on one new hire is $4,425, with senior and executive hires often costing more than $25,000.

PIs have always channeled talent into industry

PIs have a powerful network of current and former students, colleagues and collaborators, and have always connected people in their network with opportunities both in industry and academia.

The only difference is: so far, intros and connections are free and happen sporadically. We want to make them happen systematically and with payback to the PI/lab.

Talent is the most important thing

Talent is important. Most companies say it's the .. Companies like xxx

Referrals are the best, but hard to scale

Even if you put incentive structures in place, employees don't often exhaust their network to find you talent because it's not their job. Referrals from other sources are one-off.

Professors' got talent

Professors have big networks of current and former students and colleagues. Further, because they worked together in the past Professors often have unique knowledge about their skills and hence can make great recommendations. Professors love helping others advance careers too and doing it already, just not at scale.

PIs do this to..

Get extra funding

$1,500 for most roles. $15,000+ for Senior / Executive roles - that could be 1/3 of a postdoc's salary or 500 lab mice. The funding can add up quickly as you make more intros.

Help students and colleagues advance their careers

Warm intros to the right opportunities could be invaluable to someone launching their career or looking for a change.

Form relationships with companies

Introducing someone you know to work at a company is often the start of a relationship, and could eventually lead to collaborations, consulting, licensing and advisory board opportunities.

Companies do this to..

Get access to a big pool of scientific talent

Each professors have a few thousand which adds up to a lot.

Get high quality warm intros to the right candidates

Warm intros from Professors often results in high response rate.

Cost-effective and scalable talent pipelines

$1500 - $2500 for most roles, same as internal referrals. 15% for senior roles, lower than most agencies.

Contribute to scientific funding, show impact, and build a great employer brand.

Your recruiting expense becomes direct scientific funding. See the exact impact you are having on science in your public profile. Build a great brand among science-minded candidates. We'll work with you to show impact wherever you want.

How it works

Step 1. You upload network (10min)

It only takes a click of a button and 10 minutes wait to download a copy of your Linkedin connections data here. We automatically pull your co-authors and academic genealogy. If you are comfortable with it, we can process your phone and email contacts data as well, but it's not a requirement.

Companies request intros.

Companies browse a collective pool of profiles enriched from contacts data uploaded by everyone, and request a handful of intros at a time for their open roles.

Step 2. You make intros (5 - 30 min / week)

Every week, you will receive an email with a list of intro requests from companies. For the right opportunities, you can click a button to send personalized intro emails written by our team. Alternatively, you can indicate that you don't know the person well or it's not the right fit, and our system will remember that.

Companies interview and make hires

Companies will follow up with your intro emails and take candidates through the rest of the interview process, eventually making a hire.

Step 3. You get extra funding

You get extra funding from companies as a thank you gesture for the hires they made from your intros. Now you can go buy more lab equipment or rats.

Step 1. You upload jobs

We match candidates

Step 2. You select candidates

Professors make intros

Step 3. You interview & hire candidates, then donate referral fees to professors.

Getting Started

Book a time for your onboarding call (or just to learn more)

FAQ

How much funding can I get from this?

There's no upper limit on how much total funding you can get from this. It depends on how many intros you make and how many of them turn into hires. Referral fees are $250 for entry level roles (fresh graduates), $1500 ~ $2500 for middle level roles (usually less than 5 years of experience), and $15000 ~ $30000 for senior level (more than 5 - 8 years of experience) and executive roles.

How much time will this take?

The initial onboarding call will be 30 minutes. After that, you will spend anywhere between 5 - 30 minutes each week making intros. The intros can be really quick since we already wrote personalized intro emails, and you just need to click a button to send it. Of course, you can customize/rewrite each intro as you want.

I'm concerned about the privacy of the contacts data I upload.

That's a valid concern. The contacts data you upload are not visible to any other user of our platform. When companies search for candidates and request intros, they are looking at a collective pool of contacts uploaded by all PIs who use us. Companies won't see who each contact belongs to when they request intros (sometimes one contact can be connected with multiple PIs). It's only when you opt to make the intro, that the company can see who the person is connected with.

How do you prevent spam?

We believe that preventing spam and having high quality intros is key to making this model work. That's why there are limits on how many intros a company can request per month and per role. In addition, we monitor the percentage of a company's intro requests that turn into intros, interviews and hires to ensure quality.

On the PI & candidate side, we limit how many intros a single candidate can get to not overwhelm them. Also, we write personalized intro templates to make sure each intro feels personal and relevant to the candidate. Lastly, PIs can set a upper limit on how many intro requests they get every week.

How much does this cost?

For PIs, when your intros result in referral fees, we take a 7.5% platform fee and our payment processor (Stripe) takes a 2.9% + $0.30 processing fee per transaction. Other than that, it's free to start using the platform, and we only get paid when you do.

What's your business model?

We take a 7.5% platform fee when intros result in referral fees. In addition, we charge companies a flat fee for using the platform.

Tell me more about SciTok

SciTok is a platform for scientists to share their research via videos. Researchers can upload talks / demos, or use our AI tool to generate a video abstract of their paper. Our mission is to help communicate research both within academia and to companies, governments and the general public. We are a for-profit startup backed by Y Combinator and a few early investors.

Hiring For Science