Interviewing new PhD candidates

For our new project, we have three open positions. It turns out finding suitable candidates is not as easy as we initially thought. We have officially announced the positions via Euraxess and started receiving a lot of applications, particularly from Iranian and Indian students. Among these, we found some candidates worth interviewing.

Following the suggestions from Prof. Babuska and Jan Zahalka, we have developed a straightforward yet effective interview process:

1. Initial 15-Minute Meeting: This is to ensure the candidate is a real person, can speak English, and to learn about their interests and current activities.

2. 1-Hour Detailed Meeting: The candidate presents their previous research in depth and, in a quick 5-minute, 3-slide presentation, explains where they see themselves fitting within our project. We follow up with questions to assess their understanding and depth of knowledge regarding their work and the relevant problem.

3. Reference Check: If the candidate performs well, we contact their referees for a brief call to discuss the candidate’s abilities and rank them among other students they have encountered.

4. Final Interview: We request the candidate to provide a piece of their own code and prepare for a final meeting where they review and discuss three relevant papers we provide. During the interview, we engage in a discussion to identify remaining research questions, gaps in the work, potential evaluation methods, and the challenges associated with the problem.

This process is demanding for both the candidate and the supervisor. However, it has proven to be an effective method to thoroughly evaluate and understand each other. Pity that we do not have a specialized HR department to manage our hiring process. Consequently, all these steps fall upon us, necessitating careful time management.

For our new project we have 3 open positions. It turned out it is not as easy as one would guess to find suitable candidates. However we made the positions officially announced via Euraxess and started to get loads of Iranian and Indian students. But among loads of these there were also those worth an interview. Following the suggestions from prof.Babuska and Jan Zahalka, we converged to the simple but efficient interview process:

1. Quick 15mins meeting with the candidate to check whether he is a person, can speak English, which topic he is interested and what he is currently doing. 

2. 1 hour meeting where the candidate presents in depth the research topic he worked on, going to some reasonable depth of the problem and afterwards also on 3 slides within 5 mins presenting where he sees himself within the project. Afterwards we have follow up questions to find out more details about his work and his level of understanding of the problem.

3. If this goes well, we try to also contact his referees and have a quick call with them about the candidate, where they should also rank him among the students they have already encountered. 

4. Finally, we ask the candidate for a piece of code which is their own and also ask them for the final round of interview, where we have kind of 0th supervisor-candidate meeting.  Before the meeting the candidate should read some (e.g., 3) relevant papers we send him and then on the interview we have a discussion with him to find out what are the remaining research questions, what is missing in the work, what might be good, how it could be evaluated, why is the problem difficult, etc. 

This process is demanding for both the candidate and the supervisor, but it has proven to be an excellent way to get to know each other. Pity that we do not have a specialized HR department to handle hiring. All these steps fall on us, which makes time management crucial.