How we help employers find PhD talent

We create customized engagement with high-potential candidates to match your team’s hiring needs

We provide access to a talent pool often not showing up in traditional recruitment settings

We expand your applicant pool by powering brand awareness to the right audience

“I need a reliable and sustainable pipeline to hire PhDs.”

Companies and academics both share the same firey passion: Solving the world’s most important problems.

This is why we take a different approach in connecting PhDs and employers. Both of you are excited about changing the world, so what better way to make new relationships by connecting over it?

Many HR processes are geared towards hiring undergrads or PhDs who already have years of experience in industry. We have heard from you that it is a time-consuming and costly struggle to find PhDs with the right skills on the right timelines to fill your needs. We will work with you to meet PhDs through events and to create a custom pipeline to source PhD talent for your team’s unique needs… by connecting over the problems you both care about the most.

Contact us today and we can start building something together!

“I want to create educational programming to help PhDs fulfill their potential.”

You know what skills a PhD needs to succeed in industry careers. And you know what will help them hit the ground running and thrive on your team. Who better for PhDs to learn from to know and develop the skills they need than their future employers themselves?

We want to help you connect to new talent and prepare them to thrive after they get hired. Collaborate with us to create career development workshops, internships, programs, and other valuable experiences for PhDs.

Let’s create something together!

“I would like to collaborate with university researchers.”

The communication and collaboration gap between academic researchers and industry problem-solvers is too wide. To solve this, we connect employers with graduate students and postdocs in academic research labs to foster collaborations and make new connections.

This way, companies have a chance to share about the amazing world-changing problems they are working on. This inspires PhD minds to make connections, learn about industry research, and learn about non-academic careers.

Chat with us today to make connections at a university near you!

Our principles

We believe that PhD talent needs to be approached differently.

And, you need different information about them than you would for undergraduates.

Current university career fairs are largely focused on undergraduates. PhDs often don’t attend these events because they know this. They also rarely make themselves visible on sites like LinkedIn or Handshake.

Being PhDs ourselves, we know what it takes to reach out to this demographic and help them learn about the exciting opportunities that wait outside of academia. We want to help companies approach them in a way they are excited about.

We will help you work with university career services, without the red tape.

University career services are often under-staffed and under-funded. We help them directly by connecting them to employers who are passionate about solving world-changing problems. This way, opportunities at your company can be shared with PhD students and postdocs through a source they already listen to. We know you’re excited about the problems you’re working on, and PhDs are excited to learn about them!

We serve as an interface between universities and employers.

We are dedicated to facilitating conversation, connection, and relationships between employers and universities. By doing so, we lighten the load of hiring teams and university career offices. As a result, universities can provide opportunities to interface with employers and PhDs have greater access to exciting opportunities.

Meet our current corporate partners!

Together, we’ve created exciting programming that successfully connected PhDs with employers who need them.

Our current partners

FAQs

  • Most graduate- and postdoc-serving Career and Professional Development offices are small operations that get institutional funding to serve specific populations exclusively. Some universities don’t have dedicated career education units and add career advising to the mentorship responsibilities of professors and staff in academic departments. There are significant flaws with these models.

    First, most offices do not provide enough bandwidth to adequately and evenly service their students and trainees.

    Second, programming from these models very rarely involves design, delivery, and evaluation inputs from the private sector organizations that will eventually hire the bulk of PhDs and postdocs.

    Our programming model is funded by deeper pockets with more immediate motivations and can serve many universities simultaneously. We can serve 40 or 400 and aspire to serve thousands of PhDs.

  • We offer current academics opportunities to develop and practice skills, connect and build relationships with those in industry, and learn from those who have been in their shoes. We design all our transferable skill development content based on your expertise and input, passing information from employers to future employees. This way, PhD members experience and understand private-sector recruiting and hiring practices. We go even deeper through experiential programming to provide trainees a preview of what career transition and work outside of academia will look like. Our programming facilitates a deep understanding of roles and functions, cultures, and work styles, all leading to better and more confident career decision-making.

  • Over 650, from more than 11 different countries around the world!

  • Controlling for all other variables, is a workshop on CV-to-résumé conversion better if a HR recruiter and a former postdoc hiring manager are involved in the design and delivery of the workshop? The answer is yes, but why is this not the norm in postgraduate career development education?

    Extra logistics with limited bandwidth are part of the problem, but there is also an incentive barrier. If I’m a program designer at a small PhD serving unit, I’m going to “save” my corporate connections for a more substantial event than a simple resume workshop. ProPhounD involves employers in everything we do by providing them opportunities to meet PhDs on a deeper level.

    Corporations participate in career development training that is designed by career educators and is accessible to anyone who needs it in exchange for data driven access to PhDs who might eventually come and work with them.

  • Our group came together in March of 2020 at the very beginning of the pandemic, when the world needed its greatest scientists the most. The common sentiment for our group was that we could not just sit around waiting for our labs to reopen. Like the families making masks at home, we wondered if we could use our training to respond to the massive crisis. We called our group the Bias to Action group and began ideating ways to help using techniques from design thinking.

    Collectively, we realized PhDs, writ large, lacked the career development skills needed to find ways to join organizations working on applied problems. We decided that we would be doing a great service to the world (and ourselves) if we empowered PhDs to think differently about applying their talents to problems outside of their labs. A career development organization founded by postdocs designed to serve postdocs was born. Three years later, we bridge the gap between an underutilized work force of PhD’s, and the organizations working on significant social problems like COVID-19 who need them.

  • Prophound was founded by five people with complementary skills, sharing a well defined purpose. We all want to make the world a better place by helping PhDs apply their rare training and ability to serious problems affecting our planet.

    Among us, we have emotionally intelligent and data-driven career development programming and decades of career counseling experience for PhD populations. On the business and technology side, we have proven private sector experience that comes from working at or with startups, Big Three consulting firms, and in-university employer relations units.

    Most importantly, we know from lived experience what it’s like to be trained in academia and use that training to be impactful in the problems we believe need to be solved. Read more about us here!

  • We provide career development training and exploration opportunities, focused on non-tenure track careers.

  • Andrew Cusick has been an accredited career development facilitator for several decades with seven years working with PhD students at the University of Wisconsin’s Office of Postdoctoral Studies. He collaborates actively with colleagues in the Graduate Career Consortium and the National Postdoc Association.

  • Reach out to us here! We want to help everyone in the best way possible. If we’re missing a service or something that would be helpful, then we’d absolutely love to hear about it!