Last week at the CHI conference in Barcelona, a postdoc I didn't remember meeting before walked up to me during the coffee break and asked if I was hiring. She briefly introduced herself and went straight to the ask.
I'm a professor who runs a research group. I've supervised 20 PhD students and sat on more hiring panels than I can count. She'd just finished her PhD. Her cold open, sight unseen, was four words long. Are you hiring postdocs?
I didn't take it personally. She was running the playbook every job-market candidate gets handed. Be direct and don't wait for permission. The advice is fine. The execution killed her in eight seconds.
But hey, this happens to me every conference. PhD students and fresh graduates skip every step that builds trust and lead with the ask.
You can smell the desperation across the room. Desperation is the fastest way to kill a potential collaboration before it starts.
I've been the version of her, too. Twenty years ago at a games workshop in Germany, I cornered a senior game developer whose work I admired and asked him, in roughly the same number of words, whether he was hiring. He smiled politely and never replied to my follow-up email. I deserved that silence.
So yeah, I've burned the same opening and I've lost the same opportunities when I was young. I wish somebody would have told me what I'm about to tell you.
Professors aren't vending machines
There is just this bleak misunderstanding underneath everything. You cannot approach a professor (or hiring manager) like a vending machine that just needs the right coin, because then you've already lost that conversation. A research group (or similarly a start-up) is a small economy of trust, taste, and shared questions. A coin slot is none of those things.
Nobody invests in a stranger on the street who walks up and says invest in me. The same logic stops a professor from hiring a stranger who walks up and says hire me. They just don't.
The mindset behind that opening is scarcity. The job market in academia right now is brutal, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. A June 2025 Nature news analysis laid out the arithmetic plainly. Doctoral graduate numbers have grown steadily for decades and, in some countries, are exploding, while tenure-track openings have not kept up (Kwon, Nature, 2025). On the postdoc side specifically, an April 2024 Nature correspondence flagged that the number of biological and biomedical postdocs at US institutions dropped more than 10% between 2020 and 2022, from 21,902 to 19,585, based on NSF's Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering (Maher & Sureda Anfres, Nature, 2024). Fewer postdoc slots chasing more PhDs means more applications per person, more rejections per applicant, and a tighter knot in your stomach walking into any hiring conversation. Numbers like those do something to your nervous system. They turn every hallway interaction into a last-shot transaction. They fill you with anxiety. You broadcast that scarcity in your posture and in your opening sentence. The listener feels it before you finish your first clause, and it repels them.
Don't fall into this trap. The harder you push from a position of scarcity, the more clearly you show that you have nothing else to offer.
Discover before you pitch
I'm also an entrepreneur. I spend a serious chunk of my week thinking about how to create value for clients before I ever ask for a sale. How to build a relationship where the other person walks away feeling like they got more out of the interaction than they put in.
That isn't manipulation. That's how relationships work when you respect the people inside them.
The principle has a name in sales literature. Mack Hanan, an ex-McKinsey consultant, coined consultative selling in his 1970 book of the same name (Hanan, 1970, AMACOM; now in its 9th edition). The book flipped the whole discipline. Before Hanan, sales meant pitching product features and closing hard. After Hanan, sales meant diagnosing a customer's business problem and positioning yourself as the path to a better outcome. Hanan's central line still applies. Vendors ask for an order, which is a cost to the buyer. Consultants offer improved outcomes, which are a gain. The conversation starts in a different place, and that changes the whole direction that it will head into.
For you on the academic or expert job market, consultative selling breaks down into four concrete moves. First, research the hiring unit deeply. Read their strategic plan, scan recent hires, note gaps in their teaching roster, and track the grants they are chasing. Second, meet potential collaborators and ask questions about what they are building and where things are stuck. Third, map the gap between their current state and their stated goals, then articulate how your specific expertise closes part of that gap. Fourth (and only fourth), let the pitch emerge, usually in the form of them inviting you to apply, visit, or submit a proposal. It's paramount not to skip the first three steps because this will just turn you into just another postdoc, who is mass-mailing CVs, wondering why they never hear anything back from anyone.
The empirical backing arrived in 1988. Neil Rackham, a behavioural psychologist out of the University of Sheffield, spent 12 years with his Huthwaite team studying 35,000 sales calls across 10,000 salespeople in 23 countries, funded in part by Xerox and IBM. He published the findings as SPIN Selling (Rackham, 1988). The acronym covers four question types top performers use in sequence:
- Situation questions establish context. → "How is supervision currently split across the faculty in your group?"
- Problem questions surface specific difficulties. → "Which of those supervision loads is starting to falter under the new intake?"
- Implication questions walk the buyer through the consequences. → "If that bottleneck holds for another year, which grants or papers slip through the cracks for you?"
- Need-payoff questions articulate the value of solving them. → "If someone took the HCI methods supervision off your plate, what would that free you to write next?"
The finding hinges on question type. Top performers asked a similar number of questions overall as their average peers. The mix was heavily weighted toward two categories. Top performers asked roughly four times as many implication questions and more than ten times as many need-payoff questions. The comfortable fact-gathering Situation questions (org charts, headcount, budget) barely correlated with success and often annoyed the buyer when overused. Top performers sold by making the other person articulate, out loud, what was wrong and what solving it would be worth.
The same principle applies the second you walk into a conference reception. You aren't a salesperson. Nobody in your PhD program ever told you to think like one. I get that. Neither am I. That doesn't make the principle less true. Translate it into your informational coffee with a chair or hiring manager. You already know the situation from their website, so skip the small talk about enrolment numbers. Ask what is currently breaking down in their graduate supervision load, their curriculum coverage, and their research capacity. Ask what that costs them. Fewer grants. Students they cannot supervise. Papers that do not get written. Ask what a new hire with your profile would make possible over a three-year horizon. By the time they circle back to what you are working on, they have built the case for hiring you inside their own head. You did not pitch. They pitched themselves on you. You are solving their problem.
If you want to work with a professor, your first job is to become genuinely curious about what they're doing. Curious enough to read three of their last five papers and spot the question they haven't answered yet. Curious enough that the conversation has somewhere to go even if no job ever materializes.
Curiosity is your lever
Curiosity is powerful. And I mean real, demonstrated, specific curiosity about the work. A polished CV won't move the needle here, and a flattering email moves it even less.
Read their recent papers because you actually want to understand where they're heading. Walk into that reception knowing what they're publishing and how their thinking has changed in the last 12 months. The boss move, where you drop a citation into the conversation to prove you've read them, gets caught instantly. Brownie points for you.
Then talk to them from that place. Skip I'd love to join your lab. Try I've been following your work on X. Your last paper hinted at a connection to Y, and then you stopped. I'm curious why. Mean it.
You'll notice that they talk to you differently all of a sudden. Because now they don't treat you like a stranger that's just opening the hand, hoping to receive something. But now you're acting like a true colleague that has a shared interest in their work, somebody with which they can bond and that they feel like they're having a categorically different interaction with. In this moment a professor does not process you as somebody requesting a job from them. Their brain just sees you as a peer at this point. Even a junior peer is still a peer and a peer is much more likely to get hired.
If the conversation goes well, don't make the ask right away either. This is the part most people get wrong. Offer something first. Co-author a short commentary, volunteer to review a draft, or share a dataset that complements their current question. Contribute value to the group for two or three months before you ever mention that you're looking for a position.
I know how this sounds. I know what you're thinking. I don't have two months. I’m stressed. My funding ends in June. I get it. I've been there. The math will still work in your favour.
Two months of contributing to a group's work moves you from unknown applicant to known collaborator. Known collaborators don't apply for postdocs. They get offered them. That's how most postdocs I've hired came in the door. Not one of them led with the ask. They all offered value first.
Relationships precede the ask
I told the postdoc in Barcelona most of this. Not all of it. Some of it works better in writing than at a coffee break with a mariachi band in the room.
I know it's hard to hear when you're on the market and every conference feels like a networking sprint timed to your funding deadline. The instinct is to fit everything into one transaction. Here's who I am, here's what I need, yes or no. Move on.
I understand that instinct. I had it. It cost me, and it's costing you. Overcome it.
The best outcomes in hiring, in collaboration, in any kind of business, usually come from relationships that exist before anyone needs anything. The ask, when it finally arrives, barely feels like an ask. It feels like the next logical step in a conversation that has been running for months.
Put your detective hat on. Profile the five people you most want to work with. Understand their open questions and the assumptions underneath them. Bring something useful to the table. Have a conversation worth having.
The position you're trying to reach, whether a postdoc or a funded partnership, isn't the opening move. It's the outcome of doing everything else to establish a relationship and show your value first.
Get ready in 14 days
Two weeks is enough if you actually run this.
Days 1 to 2. Pick five professors whose questions match yours. Big names are optional and often a distraction. Pull their lab pages, their last two grants, and a photo so you recognize them in the hallway.
Days 3 to 7. Read two recent papers from each. Take real notes. Write one paragraph per paper on what you think they got right, what they didn't push hard enough, and where their argument quietly contradicts itself. Five people, ten papers, five paragraphs worth keeping. That's your week.
Days 8 to 11. Find one small, useful thing you can send each of them before the conference. A dataset they'd care about, a counter-reference they probably missed, or a short write-up of a related study from your own work. Then wrap it properly, because a two-line email from a stranger gets deleted before the coffee finishes brewing. Nature's 2023 guide to cold-emailing and every professor who has ever written publicly about their inbox agrees on the same skeleton. Subject line that names the paper. Greeting with their correct title. One sentence introducing who you are and where you sit. Two or three sentences showing you actually read their work and naming the specific idea you are responding to. The useful thing, with one line about why it connects. A sign-off that does not ask for anything. Here is the template:
That is the whole email. Under 150 words, specific enough that a professor knows in four seconds it is not a mass mailer, and wrapped politely enough that they will actually open the attachment.
Days 12 to 13. Draft the question you want to ask each person in person. One sentence about something specific from their recent paper. Practice it out loud until it sounds like you, not like a script.
Day 14. Walk into the conference with five primed conversations. Five people who already know your name and the thing you sent them. The cold approach goes in the bin.
The real work happens in the two weeks before you land. Once you are there you are just showing up to conversations that have already started. Relax, enjoy it, and let the positioning do the work.
You pick the role
This is about identity. You have to see yourself as someone with options, someone choosing where to spend attention instead of asking for permission. Abundance shows on your face before you open your mouth.
Ask a professor for a job and you are a supplicant before your sentence ends. Walk up with a real question about their recent paper and they answer you like a colleague. The opening words decide which one of those you are.
You choose the role with your opening sentence. Every time.
The postdoc from Barcelona is not yet in my inbox. I'm waiting for her email. Hopefully, she'll send it. I can't hire her now. But I might in the future. If she doesn't ask for a job in that email, she'll be in the running. She's probably playing the longer game now.
That's the move. Build something worth being part of, then let the position find you.
Don't ask for the job.
The Write Insight subscribers with an AI Research Stack premium account this week also get a print-ready PDF worksheet, 3 AI prompts (one to score a cold-email draft against the supplicant-to-peer rubric, one to generate a wrapped useful-thing email, and one to extract open questions across a professor's last five papers), 5 curated resources on cold-emailing, consultative selling, and the real postdoc-market numbers, and a full 14-day pre-conference checklist you can run before your next hiring-season event.
