Hiring a team: an integral selection procedure for inter- and transdisciplinary PhD candidates

In the inter- and transdisciplinary (ITD) research project WildlifeNL, we hired six PhD candidates through a selection process that explicitly valued ITD competencies and aligned the process to hire a balanced team of PhD candidates. The approach included (1) a rubric with individual and team assessment criteria that we used across positions; (2) selection procedures that were aligned in their timing; (3) alignment meetings to discuss candidates and approaches across positions; and (4) overlapping supervision teams and selection committees. In this Comment, we describe our approach and share our experiences in implementing it. We argue that designing an explicit and intentional process to safeguard the ITD character of a project in PhD hiring procedures helps to make well-grounded choices that shape the individual PhD candidates' experiences as well as the overall ITD project and thereby supports ITD research in which PhD candidates play an important role. We experienced the rubric to be particularly valuable to mediate negotiation of expectations, values and assumptions across supervisors and selection committees. Moreover, we argue that ITD research requires not only considering the merits of individual candidates, but also their fit with the project, the consortium, and with other candidates. We argue that the central role that PhD research plays in many ITD research contexts necessitates intentional hiring which includes explicit assessment criteria for team composition, diversity, and ITD competencies. We invite others to translate our experiences in ITD PhD hiring processes to their context, including the rubric that we make available in this article.