PhD afterlife: 51 applications, 6 interviews, 1 job. Numbers from 1.5 years of job hunting in the Basel region.
I tracked every application during my postdoc. Now that I've signed, the full funnel seems more useful than another "just network" post.
- 51 applications, almost all targeted. There are around maybe 10 that I did just for RAV and were not exactly sth I am interested in.
- 6 first interviews (~12%)
- 3 final/on-site rounds
- 2 offers
- 1 accepted, starting in two weeks
So 45 went nowhere, and many weren't even rejections, just silence. If that's where you are: it's the normal shape of this, not a verdict on you.
Regarding the offers: Worth saying, because "2 offers" sounds tidier than it was. One was a biology teaching post at an international school, genuinely not my thing, but by then my postdoc was about to end and I was registered with the RAV, so I started considering it as a part time bridge. I turned it down to stay pointed at industry. The other, the one I took, is a Scientist role in IVD development. So the search that produced a "2 offers" line also produced a gap with unemployment benefits in it. That part doesn't usually make it into these posts.
Regarding the referrals: I was internally recommended for 6 of the 51 (friends, ex-colleagues, people I'd met at conferences or networking events putting my CV in front of someone).
- Referred: 6 applications → 2 interviews (33%)
- Cold: the other 45 → 4 interviews (9%)
- Offers from referrals: 0
So a referral looks like it made me nearly four times more likely to get past the first filter. Caveat: n=6, so don't take that percentage too seriously, it's my search, not a study.
But the part I do trust is this: the job I got was a cold application to a company where I knew nobody. No contact, no intro, just a CV that fit. My read is that a referral gets you read. It doesn't get you hired. Once you're in the room it's back to fit and evidence. The practical consequence: don't let your pipeline shrink to only the roles where you know someone. Six referrals produced nothing in the end, the forty-five cold ones produced the job.
Three advantages I had, because this post is dishonest without them:
- My postdoc was in the same lab as my PhD. Reddit will tell you that's bad for you, and for a faculty track, maybe. For me it was the biggest reason this worked. No relocation, no new group to prove myself to, no learning curve. So I had energy left for applications instead of just surviving. And I searched the whole time while employed, so I was never applying from fear. That's luck, not strategy, and it did more than anything else here.
- I worked in diagnostics for 3 years, before my masters. The offer I took is in diagnostics. Interviews clustered hard where I had real domain history, not where I had transferable skills and enthusiasm. That decade-old experience you think is irrelevant may be the most employable thing on your CV.
- Time. Eighteen months of applying steadily rather than panicking.
Regarding german: mine is B1 at best, and I got the job anyway: the working language is English, as in much of Basel life science. But honestly, I don't know what B1 cost me among those 45 silences, and I doubt it was nothing. "You don't need German" is too strong. "You can land a life-science job in Basel without fluent German" is true.
P/S: I am a EU-national with C permit.