Hi,

I am aiming to have my thesis submitted by the end of this September. I started looking into postdocs recently and came across one that suited my skills and interests very well. As part of the application process 3 papers were required to be submitted. I emailed about this beforehand as to meet that requirement one paper would be at draft stage, I was advised that would be okay. The deadline for submission was 10 days ago and I haven't heard anything. As this is the first postdoc application I don't know what to expect. For those who have had experiences of applying for and securing these roles what have you encountered in respect of timescales?

I will also add that due to having encountered bullying in the first year of my PhD, and the University I am at not resolving issues or supporting me in any way, I have had to work very independently on my PhD with a little external support.

Hi Cat123

You will probably hear soon. It's still not too late to rule out interview - sometimes they take a while to shortlist and I think things might be slower due to lockdown. Good luck!

Ps. I am curious about the stipulation for 3 papers. I have never seen this quantified before. Was it an actual requirement?

For this particular university it was the only Postdoc advertised that required papers to be submitted as part of the application, others just required that the CV contained a list of publications. I have only been looking for a few months but I have not seen this on any other advert I have looked at. This was listed as a compulsory requirement for the application process for this particular post. This post is directly relevant to my PhD research and the first I have seen which has been.

I also had to provide an academic CV and 1 page statement of interest, which from research online is a bit different to a cover letter. All in all seems the bar was set high at the application stage for this one.

Thanks for sharing. Hope you hear soon.

Hi Cat

It does sound like the bar is quite high for that one. I hope you hear back from them soon. Good luck!

Tudor

Anecdotally I've been hearing at my university, that application levels for the small number of postdocs that can be advertised during a hiring freeze are very high and that the HR side is very slow as their systems don't work too well away from the university network. I'd give it a month to 6 weeks before writing things off at the moment.