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I became familiar with the hiring process from the standpoint of an applicant, most recently as a newly recruited Assistant Professor. Despite this lived experience, being at the leading edge of hiring my own team is much less familiar. Here, I share some tips and tricks for new group leaders to consider when building their research team. My recent lessons learned.

Some of these steps can be done well ahead of your official start date. If you have the bandwidth to start hiring before you arrive, reach out to your department administrator about how to do so.

1) Writing a job advertisement: I recommend beginning by reflecting upon the role you hope the employee you hire will fill in your group. Will they have managerial or administrative responsibilities? Will they train others? Consider what technical, interpersonal, and organizational skills this person needs to possess to be successful in this role.

Next, write the job advertisement. Begin by reaching out to relevant division and human resources administrators as there may be specific requirements and language that must be included in the job ad. In addition to the requirements, I recommend providing information about your research program. Listing expectations for successful candidates will help prepare applicants for what is to come should they join your group.

2) Advertising your position: While your institution can advertise your open position through institutional job boards, professional websites (LinkedIn, Indeed, Academic Keys, etc.), and society job boards (ASCB, SACNAS, etc.), group leaders can also contribute to this process. If you have a strong social media presence, advertising on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook accounts may help bring attention to the opening. If not, you may have collaborators or trainees who can endorse the position on Twitter to help spread the word. Attend recruiting events to put a face to the name of their laboratory. These could be internal events (i.e., graduate program events and departmental poster sessions) or external events (i.e., society-sponsored online career events and networking hours at conferences).

3) Interviewing and preparation: Once you have decided whether an applicant is a good fit for the position, you can begin to interview candidates. The type of interview may vary depending on the position. For example, for a postdoctoral candidate, I first perform a phone “screener” interview (~15-20 minutes, conversational but led by a set of questions I wrote). If this phone screener interview is successful, then I host a full interview with the candidate and members of my lab. During this full interview, I ask the candidate to present a 30–40-minute virtual research presentation to my lab. However, because my lab was just me when I interviewed my first postdoctoral candidate, I invited members of the hematology community within my Division at Fred Hutch to join the seminar along with research colleagues/collaborators from other institutions whom I trust. It was SO helpful to have supportive and inquisitive scientists join the seminar! My colleagues asked thoughtful questions, helped show the candidate the diversity of research at the Center, and provided insight that helped me decide whether to make an offer to the candidate.

After the seminar, the applicant and I met for a more formal interview where we could speak in-depth about their research and discuss projects in my laboratory. I also created a list of interview questions that I used to guide this conversation. For a postdoc, these questions range from “What do you believe are your strengths as a scientist? What do you want to improve upon or learn during your next phase of training?” to “What traits do you want in a postdoctoral mentor? What style of mentoring do you prefer as a mentee?”. I use this list of questions to guide the interview while also making sure to leave time for the candidate to ask me questions. Using a list of interview questions to direct your one-on-one conversation helps ensure upon completion of the meeting, you have gathered the necessary information to inform your hiring decision.

Along these lines, I have a set of questions for all types of positions I plan to fill in my lab, including postdoctoral fellows, research technicians, undergraduate researchers, and graduate rotation students. Being able to take notes directly on this set of questions is also hugely helpful for me when I go back to review my notes.

Conclusions

As a new group leader, taking care to hire individuals who have the skills and qualities to be successful is incredibly important for your own success. Being thorough in creating a job advertisement and interviewing candidates can help ensure you make the best possible decision to support the success of your group.

Whether you have a few hours a week of a lab tech paid for by your startup funds or you’ve been running your own lab for years, a high functioning team can help you achieve your research goals. Senior research staff often have greater insight into the details of executing research than PIs (they’re paid to attend to the details and free your time!), and at least one senior mentor says she learned everything practical she needed to know about doing research from her staff.

The advice below comes from senior lab staff at Vanderbilt working in a range of scientific areas from wet lab to clinical research to quantitative science.

Keep them in the loop: Have regular meetings with a running agenda. (Protip: Use something like a REDCap survey or Google doc to allow all members of the lab to add to the agenda.)

Include them in meetings outside the lab when appropriate. Defer to them when you’re not sure—they probably know your study protocol better than you.

Have them write down systems and processes. Especially as your lab grows, it will get harder to remember those passing requests to order this reagent or fill out this piece of paperwork. Having documented methods of doing things also helps with cross-training.

Encourage communication with other areas at your institution (e.g., if you expect a staff member to keep track of your funds, ask your budget officer to cc that staff member on emails).

Understand the difference between research staff and administrative assistant. A whiz at writing IRB applications may not be great at calendaring. Research staff may not have the access that admin staff do to an institutional credit card or account to purchase a book from Amazon.

Use your power and funds for good: Build up your staff by paying for or allowing time off for courses, workshops, or intensives that will make them a better employee. Pay for their membership in a relevant professional organization. Buy them useful books or software.

Include staff as authors when reasonable:

• Did they write your IRB application and study protocol?
• Did they enroll 100-1000s of participants?
• Did they run experiments?
• Did they clean data?
• Would you have a paper to write without their contribution to the work?

On Teamwork

If you have multiple staff members, team members should be aware of what’s involved in their co-workers’ responsibilities. Emphasize cross-training and having predetermined backups for sick and vacation days.

A team with members who all understand each others’ work provides several benefits. Multiple connections between team members prevents siloing and allows for collaborative development and optimization of processes and tools. It also creates staff-to-staff mentoring opportunities. Backup coverage for days off is easier; no one feels guilty asking for coverage because it’s expected and not done as a favor. Critical functions will always be managed by trained, experienced staff even if multiple people are out.

Thanks to Sarah Jones, MPH, CCRP and Tonya Yarbrough, RN, for their contributions to this post.

More Resources

A Guide to Managing Research Teams

Not that Kind of Boss: Tales of Team Management and Mentorship

Simple Steps to Validating and Managing Others: A Bedtime Story

Research training programs rarely teach management of staff and trainees. Particularly for those of us who go on to careers in academic medicine, our ability to effectively manage a team is critical to the success of our career. Graduate school, fellowship, and postdoctoral training provide substantial opportunities to develop scientific expertise, but very little structured training in management and team building. I discovered very early on that staff and trainees can respond to the same type of management and oversight in different ways, which often left me at the mercy of how well a trainee could operate under my management style. With the help of my mentors and colleagues, I have developed a training infrastructure for my group that tries to balance highly structured onboarding with loosening oversight as a staff member or trainee demonstrates independence. Importantly, the system we have established leverages several modern web-based platforms that allow for more seamless oversight of trainee activities and progress, even when traveling (or working from home due to a pandemic), and reduces the flood of email chains that can often result in items slipping through the cracks. I hope you find this structure useful as you launch your own team.

Structured Training Agendas. Early on, it became quite clear that trainees would engage with training content in very individual ways, making it difficult to evaluate the degree to which a given trainee was prepared to operate independent of oversight. To address this challenge, my colleagues and I at the Vanderbilt Memory & Alzheimer’s Center have established highly structured training agendas that we use for all new staff and trainees that include boilerplate onboarding, individual training modules that are consistent across the center, and additional training modules that are specific to a staff member or trainee’s job description. After each training module, trainees are required to populate a short presentation that provides an overview of what they learned and they then “teach” the content to their primary mentor or supervisor. This provides a structured environment where the trainee can receive direct feedback on where they missed critical information, and begins to set expectations about work products, timeliness, and professionalism. These training agendas often require a few hours of commitment from the mentor or supervisor for the first few weeks, but we have found that the result is a more rapid transition to independence for high capacity trainees, and appropriate continuation of supervision for trainees who struggle a bit to get on their feet.

Developing the individual training modules can also be a bit of work, but we have found that the development of a module can actually be a fantastic training opportunity for new staff as well. Many of our current modules were developed during training by a new staff member, which provided them an opportunity to learn the material while also giving us an opportunity to provide feedback and help formulate the module in line with our expectations.

Evernote for Lab Notebooks. While lab notebooks are certainly the norm in many basic science laboratories, particularly when working in a wet lab, they are not as common in dry labs. We have implemented a system for lab notebooks in which I build an Evernote notebook for each staff or trainee that is owned by my user profile and shared with the trainee. Importantly, this means there is no risk of losing the notebook when the trainee moves on from the lab, and also provides an incredibly useful way to quickly check in on trainee progress without having to set up a meeting. Trainees’ notebooks include notes for training agenda items, and then eventually for individual projects and tasks that are assigned. At the top of the note the trainee records the location of all files (more details on the file structure below), details about the dataset being leveraged, and a short summary of the goals. Then, each project includes the down and dirty details of analyses, including bits of code, summary of results, basic figures, and any roadblocks. During mentorship meetings, I can just pull up the lab notebook, evaluate progress, and provide some feedback. Importantly, I can also easily see at any time exactly where a trainee is in terms of their progress, which means when I think to myself “I wonder where so-and-so is on Project A and why I haven’t received an update in a couple days?” I can easily hop on the note and check where things stand. This often results in either shooting a quick message or dropping by their desk to talk through an issue. It also allows me to do quick checks on progress very quickly outside of office hours by pulling up their notebooks on my phone.

At first, it took some time to get this off the ground because not all trainees fully embraced it. However, by being consistent in asking about the notebook, and having a few staff and trainees who could model strong notebooks, it has become part of our culture.    

Box for File Management. A major hurdle in providing feedback and helping to troubleshoot code is access to proper scripts and raw data files. Moreover, copying and moving raw data files can result in major data version issues that can easily be missed. We have established a lab Box directory where all raw files and all staff and trainee files exist. Most of our data analysis is performed in R, and the Box structure allows for easy cross-checking and troubleshooting by referring to centrally stored files. This means that I can easily hop on any script written in my group, run through it to find the broken piece, and troubleshoot if needed. It also means that manuscript “code” checks can be completed quickly without pushing data back and forth. Importantly, this also means that we only need to point to file locations in Evernote and never actually store any data within Evernote (which would not comply with the data use requirements for the datasets we often leverage in our work).

Asana for Project Management. The Vanderbilt Memory & Alzheimer’s Center is an interdisciplinary research center focusing on risk and resilience of Alzheimer’s disease. Many investigators within the center infrastructure have large-scale collaborations with faculty and staff biostatisticians that require constant communication and carefully documented progress reports. Asana is a web-based platform that allows project tasks, communication, and results to be tracked within a single space. Projects are built in Asana and individual tasks within that project (e.g., building an analytical dataset, performing primary analyses, performing sensitivity analyses, developing manuscript quality figures) can be assigned to team members. This has streamlined our collaborations and dramatically reduced confusion over missed emails or unwieldy email threads.

Slack for Communication. After a year of working remotely due to COVID-19 and onboarding several team members who have never met in person, our lab has found Slack to be an effective communication tool. The web-based messaging tool with a channel structure helps the team ask individual questions, share interesting publications to a central location, discuss shared hardware issues or computational bottlenecks, and celebrate wins among the team. Slack’s storage and search features also allow team members to locate and refer to past conversations, as needed.

Other programs and techniques can certainly be leveraged to help navigate the challenges of team management; these are just the ones that have worked for me! When you prepare to launch your team, I recommend taking the time to think about and organize your workflows so that your system can easily scale as the team grows!

More Resources

How to Manage People as a New Investigator

Go go go…read The Progress Principle

Not that Kind of Boss: Tales of Team Management and Mentorship

Got your R and the realities of budget management sinking in?  Want to prepare yourself financially to get to that R?  Three newly independent investigators at Vanderbilt shared their wisdom with Newman Society members today.

Budgeting Before You Get Your R
Dr. John Stafford

• Have a budget to start with.
  • As a new investigator this means negotiating a good startup package
    • 3+yrs support
    • ask for support for postdoc
    • funds to be unrestricted
    • not to be reduced for grants obtained
    • not to expire
• Apply for all of the CDA awards, early career awards, P&F awards you can. These have a high payline for early investigators, and add up to a lot. You won’t be able to apply for them later.
• Get your salary fully supported if possible. This frees up your research money for research.
  • Get your trainees supported by training grants, or their own grants.
• Collaborate with others and get effort on their grants.
• Aim for other non-clinical effort that is aligned with your career goals.
• Don’t use your startup funds as a savings account.
  • Spend this money to get your science off the ground and get papers. Papers are the currency you need for grants (and nearly everything else).
  • Don’t buy expensive equipment that a colleague has. $25-30K might be useful in years 4-5 of your faculty time.
• While getting grants (R01, VA Merit) is critical, in the first 2-3 years it is more important to get papers.
• Don’t do too many things that don’t support your salary. You need to stay focused on research .
• Be of value at Vanderbilt, be part of the team. You might need bridge funds.
• Know your value at Vanderbilt and elsewhere.
• Consider industry sponsored studies that leave unrestricted money, but be wary not to get off of mission-central.

Budget To-Do’s
Dr. Meira Epplein

• Your budget will very likely be cut an unknown amount (in my experience 2-17% the first year and anywhere from 0-6% thereafter). You need to figure in this wiggle room not only in your own costs & FTE but for your subcontracts.
• Monthly tracking of expenses once awarded your grant is necessary and difficult, and may differ from the official records, depending on your division’s administrative policies in terms of cost center accounting (and often lack of details in the spreadsheets).
• There can also be a lag/difference between your accounting, your institutions’s accounting, and NIH’s accounting, which can be an issue if you want to apply for an administrative supplement, for example.
• For grants with subcontracts, establishing a regular invoicing process (monthly, for example) up front will help enormously.
• Again for grants with subcontracts, a new agreement will have to be established with each collaborating site every year, and the amount of the subcontract can vary based on actual costs and actual work.
• The time lag for paying contractors and collaborators (even those with established subcontracts) is much longer than you expect, and must be figured in when needing to spend down 75% of that year’s budget before the progress report is due (6 weeks before the end of the grant’s year).

Budget Items To Remember
Dr. Digna Velez Edwards

• Budget for staff and trainees.
  • There is often the tendency to use all of your budget to pay for experiments, but you need people to do the work.
  • Contact your institution’s office that deals with grad students and postdocs to get specific grant text information and budget details on how to properly budget for graduate students and postdocs.
• Plan your budget with good timing for completing experiments and getting your papers published.
  • You need papers to get new grants and to get your grant renewed so you can’t have all of your experiments budgeted to be complete at the end of the grant.
  • Try to plan budgets with published projects throughout the life of the grant rather than at the end.
• Have regular meetings with your grant support once your grant is funded as well as during the planning stages.  They have good insights to help you prepare budgets and will let you know what seems reasonable with regard to effort distributions.
• Set up your subcontract budgets well in advance of a grant submission and begin the paperwork to start subcontracts as soon as your grant is funded.
  • Subcontracts take a while to finalize and set up and often have significant delays.
• Get letters of support from everyone.
  • There is a tendency to forget to get letters of support from both those you have budgeted such as subcontracts as well as from resources you will be using.
• “Rollover” funds may be used as bridge funding but do not rely on those to be there for you.
  • Plan the end of grants and where you will get new effort from.
  • Foster collaborations that may provide co-investigator support when you need it.
  • Pace new grants submissions ahead of your grants ending.