Page 45 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

hiring of postdoc candidates provides PIs with a large amount of autonomy. Our analysis shows that in all countries postdoc hiring happens at the discretion of PIs, and they are hardly held accountable for their hiring decisions. They do not have to formally report on their decisions that therefore remain unquestioned. As a result, individual PIs decide on who enter and / or remain in the academic system and who are excluded.
The role of networks
Our analysis shows that respondents in all four universities agreed that the most widely used way to recruit postdocs is through informal networks. Also when an open call is published, such as in Italy, informal channels are used to recruit candidates. In all countries, local or international collegial networks are used to get direct access to candidates, to distribute vacancies, and to obtain information and judgments on the quality of candidates.
The fact that most countries do not have a formal procedure installed for the recruitment of postdocs might facilitate the reliance on networks, but our analysis also reveals other reasons for informal recruitment practices. One of these reasons is the time pressure that PIs experience for assembling a project team. This is because research projects usually come with a starting date and an end date. PIs explain that therefore they need postdocs whom they can employ for that period of time and in most cases, they need postdocs who can start at short notice. This limits their possibility for an extensive recruitment process and triggers the dependence on informal networks as these networks can quickly provide information on and access to possible candidates. This differs from non-project positions for which the recruitment and selection can take up to a number of years (Herschberg, Benschop, & Van den Brink, 2016). The focus of PIs tends to be on the short-term because of project-based hiring, yet, their decisions have long-term consequences for science.
The second reason for recruiting postdocs informally is respondents’ preference for candidates whom they already know compared to unknown candidates. Our analysis shows that this argument holds throughout the four countries.
If it’s someone you know, someone who you know works hard, is easy to get on with and so on, I won’t say you hire him [sic] without question, but if something is needed to make a difference when two applications seem equally good, I think it can be important all the same (CH, SSH, F).
This quote reveals the benefits of selecting a candidate already familiar to the PI: it
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