3. Hiring and Retaining Your Science Team: Interviewing, Selecting and Orienting Scientists, Technical Staff and Managers.

Note: All of our workshops are sponsored by client organizations for their employees, staff or affiliates. At this time we do not offer “open enrollment” workshops. Please contact us for details.

Available for on site delivery and online via Zoom

Read our “News” post about how this workshop uses the same approach to hiring as that recommended by the latest social science research.

Some of the most important decisions we make involve selecting and hiring the members of our team. Yet despite the fact that our research success depends on the choices we make, most of us go about this process in an ad hoc manner, relying on “intuition” and “gut” feelings more than on data.  

In this workshop, you will learn how to organize the selection and hiring process so that you get the data you need to make informed hiring decisions.  You will learn why over-reliance on selecting for technical qualifications can lead you to make poor hiring decisions.  You will learn and practice using  a simple question-based approach to assess a candidate’s all-important “personal characteristics,”  such as their ability to hear and use feedback, to navigate setbacks and adversity, and to manage disagreements and conflict. You will learn how to conduct candidate phone screens and face-to-face interviews and how to ‘listen between the lines’ during interviews and phone reference checks. Finally, you will learn how to make sure you retain good people once you hire them. 

This is a highly interactive workshop using case studies and examples from the world of basic and applied scientific research and development.  Interactive discussion and role playing will allow participants to experience and practice  specific techniques.  By the end of the workshop participants will have acquired a suite of skills enabling them to confidently identify and select the best possible members of their science research team.

Workshop Highlights

  • Cognitive biases that lead to poor hiring decisions and how to overcome them.

  • Using data from the past and present to guide your selection of new hires.

  • How to conduct candidate interviews that identify personal characteristics and attributes associated with productive researchers .

  • How to ‘listen between the lines’ when interviewing candidates and their references.

  • Common hiring mistakes and how to avoid them.


Target Audience: This workshop is intended for scientists in managerial or leadership positions.