INRIA and CNRS “chargé de recherche” positions offer unique conditions of freedom to do first-grade research: lifelong contract, no teaching involved. The application process is challenging, but it’s definitely worth it! The goal of this guide is to make the application process as easy as possible.
It only reflects my particular opinion and limited experience of going through it, and helping people with it for the last 3 years. Feedback is most welcome!
INRIA has issued a very useful guide: Advice for Applicants for a Young Graduate Scientist Position at INRIA.
The key points are:
Those selection processes are very peculiar and very different from what you’ve been used to in your PhD and postdoc. You need to talk to as many people as possible! There are three categories of person to contact:
Gather as much advice as possible, even if they end up disagreeing: you’ll make your own choices when the time comes. Negative (but constructive) feedback is very precious: the auditions are very selective, and your project needs to be perfect. Negative feedback will help you improve a lot, but hearing negative stuff about projects that you care deeply about is unpleasant and takes its toll, so being surrounded by kind people is also very important.
Do not be afraid of contacting people, even if you don’t know them. Most people are happy to help. Worst can happen is people don’t answer your email. If they don’t, send at least two follow-up emails, waiting around 2 weeks between each. This is typical practice and will not be interpreted as pushy if you are polite in your mail (and concise! go to the point to save people’s time).
Have your PhD and postdoc advisors help you too; beware though that they are very familiar with your work and are not representative of a typical jury member.
Laying out a full research project for 5/10 years requires several months of intensive work. The CNRS deadline is usually around the beginning of January (in 2024 it was more end of January, we’ll see if it’s a permanent change), the INRIA one is end of January/February. You must contact the potential hosting teams around October of the previous year, not after. The teams will ask you to come do a presentation to evaluate your compatibility and discuss a common project, and they will give feedback on your research project. All this takes time, so do not wait for December to do it. A team may be interested by your profile, but already have candidates.
If you read this soon enough, I encourage you to start writing a rough draft of a few pages as soon as you start your postdoc, and begin working on it research-wise right away: it’s much better if, the day of the audition, the jury sees that your project is grounded in concrete work, that you have already started working on. Starting as early as possible will make it easier to get publications on the topics of your research project, which helps tremendously.
Disclaimer: I know INRIA better.
Show that there is coherence in your past works, that you took initiatives, that all your works interact nicely in a grand scheme that defines your identity and uniqueness as a researcher. It should not be perceived as a sequence of unrelated works that were proposed by your PhD advisors. Do not be too technical, summarize in layman’s term. Show that you understood what were the big challenges of your field, and how you contributed to solving them.
Writing the research project is the hardest (but also very interesting) part of the application. Ask at least 3 successful candidates from past years their research project, to see what worked.
Writing the research project is a very different exercise from what we’re used to in PhD/postdoc research statement. Understand that CNRS and INRIA chargé de recherche are lifelong positions. In your project, you must show that you have research ideas for your whole life, and not just for the next 3 years. The difficulty is that your project should:
Ideally, you give big directions in which you want to go, and descriptions of concrete ways with which you would start (even better: how you have already started). People usually divide their project into 3 linked axis; each axis should start with something simple (one research idea that you could start working on as soon as you get the position), and then aim for something more distant, that has the right to be less precise. The jury knows that research is hard to predict (you won’t probably do everything in your project), but they want to see that you have a plan.
You should avoid at all cost giving the impression that you’ll continue working exactly on what you did during your PhD. This would make the jury fear that once this line of work dries up, you’ll be left without ideas. You should show thematic mobility, while remaining coherent with your past research…
On the other hand, to avoid giving the impression that your project is just wishful thinking, show the jury that you have already started tackling some of the first steps in your research project (ideally you have already published it, but if not, it could be by contacting other researchers, by knowing the related literature, by organizing reading groups, etc). In general, if you have only worked on continuation of your PhD project, it sends the jury a very bad signal regarding your autonomy in terms of generating new ideas and directions.
Your application will be read in details by 1 or 2 expert reviewers, that know your field very well. But, beware that the rest of the jury will be much less familiar with your line of work, and most probably only skim through the introduction. Having a look at the composition of the jury (it is public, for example here for Section 7 of CNRS and here for INRIA in 2024) is a good idea to realize the diversity of your audience - and to guess who your reviewer will be. The reviewer is usually the one that asks the first questions during the audition, so knowing their interests helps you prepare.
In short: be precise, for the specialists, but be understandable, for the rest of the jury. We tend to focus on the first part and ignore the second.
To speak to everybody: why is your problem important? which locks do you unlock? how is this different from what everybody does in the field? what are the current barriers in the field and why are you, with your experience, drive and ideas, the perfect person to lift them? You need to display maturity, global vision of your field: basically that you’re ready to be an independent, permanent researcher, no longer someone following a mentor. Show that what you’re working on has impact, that it’s not a small niche that you plan to exploit all your life: your work should unlock new research venues, be important to others too. Show that these questions are interesting for others, beyond you (using citations for example).
People not so familiar with your field should understand why you’re unique. As a personal example: all optimizers (me included) tend to mention that they want to develop faster algorithms, with better guarantees, and less data-hungry. But do some people look for slow algorithms that don’t work and need more data? This does not characterize you at all. Be more precise.
In your project: why are you legitimate for this? What have you accomplished that proves you’ll be able to do all this? Which tools do you master that others don’t?
Give illustrations, give orders of magnitude, do periodic recaps in your talk. Never underestimate how quickly someone, even expert, can lose track of what you say. It is not the time to be subtle: write stuff in bold for members of the jury that will cross-read your research project while you’re talking.
Do not write too much maths, it’s very hard to parse in a short presentation. Show that you are able to popularize your research, to speak to many. Technicality is the enemy here, you’re not writing a research article, not even an abstract.
Presentations are short (15 min for CNRS section 7, 20 min for INRIA). There is no room for approximation or hesitation, your presentation must be meticulously prepared.
The usual plan is:
The research project is the critical part of the presentation and should take around two-thirds of it. On the contrary, the summary of your career and past works basically only serves to justify why you are the ideal person to carry on this research project. Be quick on these parts, don’t brag too much. See it as a stepping stone for the real deal: your project.
For CNRS: the jury gathers for 1 week, hears roughly 35 candidates (7/8 per day). Then the weekend passes, and they meet for 3 other days to rank the candidates. That is a lot, and draining. When they meet on day 6, one week has passed since they heard the first candidates. They do take notes, but your goal is to help them remember you.
They should think: “ah yes, X is the girl who wanted to do this, with those tools, and had done Z in the past”. To achieve this, it should be very clear for you who you are as a researcher (which problems you like to work on, what is your methodology to solve them, do you like theory, or practice, or both? Do you want applications? How do you summarize your project in one sentence?). Then, your goal is to communicate that to the jury.
You need to tell a story, that should be reflected in your research project’s name. This is a step back on your research that is probably new, but mandatory.
The composition of the jury is very important. Out of roughly 15 persons, maybe 2 or 3 only work in your domain. Even more than in the research project (that, I think, many members of the jury do not read), it is very important that you speak to everybody, at least in the introduction and in your first 2-3 slides. You should aim at getting questions from more than 5 persons in the audience, not just the 2-3 experts.
In order not to lose the other members of the jury:
Various stuff:
You should know your presentation by heart, especially because you’re likely to be stressed in the beginning. Then hopefully after a few seconds you get into the presentation; knowing the intro by heart helps getting through this hard phase. Be prepared to speak exactly for the amount of time you’re allowed; if it’s too short you missed an opportunity to convey messages, if it’s too long you may get interrupted and appear unprepared.
Do not try to force as much content as possible; on the contrary, taking breaks to summarize what you just said (e.g. after your past works, and before diving into your project) allows jury members outside of your area of expertise to catch up. Remember, you can lose them more easily than you think.
The questions session lasts between 15 min (CNRS) and 20 (INRIA). Answer precisely and concisely. It’s very frustrating for the jury to not be able to ask all their questions for lack of time, because the candidate took too much time to answer some questions. It’s OK to say that you don’t know, don’t lie.
Some frequent questions:
This is a major reason why you should discuss with people: there are many little unwritten things to know. For example, the year I applied to CNRS, in addition to section 7, I applied for section 41, but in the “mathematics” track. Little did I know that, as an optimizer, I belonged to the “mathematics and applications” track (I did not get auditioned in section 41 :).
For some projects, it’s important to show that you handle applications; for some it’s not, etc. You can only learn of all this by talking to experienced people.
For CNRS, know the different culture and expectations between Sections 6, 7 and 41.
For INRIA, know that the jury likes to see that your project has an applicative part, and a methodological part.
Show that you have been proactive in your preparation: instead of saying “this is something I plan on discussing with member of X of the team”, do it before the audition. If, when you arrive in the team, you plan to go to somebody to obtain data, contact them before the oral. This way you can show the jury that you’ve already done stuff.
Thanks to all the people that gave me advice when I was preparing: R. Gribonval, P. Goncalves, A. Gramfort, J. Salmon, L. Rosasco, S. Villa, F. Iutzeler, A. Garivier, J. Malick, R. Flamary, O. Cappé, I. Waldspurger, S. Barthelmé, N. Le Bihan and apologies to anyone I forgot.