Théo Matricon

Théo Matricon

Postdoc

CNRS Application Guide

CNRS Application Guide in Practice

This guide was made with the help of two friends Corto Mascle and Clément Legrand-Duchesne. Shameless plug: I believe they have all the skills for a CR position, so if they were to join your team they would be great additions!

This guide aims to have information not already present in the following posts:

Other people kindly made their application files available online :

Do ask for more files, especially from people from your field who were recently recruited!

Note: you can aks for my files, they are not freely available because I believe they could be improved a lot. And I have yet to be recruited.

This document was last updated in January 2025.

Table of content:

General

Your application should not be done at the last minute.
Moreover it should take precedence over other tasks, this is your final goal, you can do as much research as you like if you have a permanent position.

Your best bet in how do have a good file is to ask around.
Typically people from your community will review your files and give you feedback, do note that not everyone has the same point of view and there will be disagreements, this is why it should be YOUR file.
Ask people that applied in previous years for their files, it will be a strong baseline, and they will have plenty of advice.
Most of the advice you get is given to you orally and depends on your community.

Don’t trust the list of elements in the guide of candidates, go to the portal to register and explore the list of documents, that is the true official list. There is the general guide and there is the guide from section 6, the guide from section 6 takes precedence obviously. Use it as much as possible since it is the main source of information directly coming from the jury.

One of the most important advice is to structure your documents. The structure should be visible that is:

  • use lists
  • use bold
  • emphasize words
  • make paragraphs (nobody wants to read your block of words when they have quite a lot of files to read)

Also remember that the reader will very likely be a person not from the domain, so ask for a review from a person who is far from your domain but can still fit in section 6.

By the way, since it is YOUR project, you should use I.

It is important to not lie or hide information, if your publication is in a workshop associated with a conference, make it clear that it is a workshop. Do not inflate your contribution in papers.

Either in the Resume or in the Activity Report you should report all the following things:

  • talks
  • long lab visit (2 months+)
  • supervision (include level, duration, co-supervision or not, and impact)
  • lab duties
  • review duties
  • participation in the organization of things like workshops, conferences,…
  • teaching

Selected Publications

You can select up to 7, however, if you have 8/9 publications don’t select 7 unless all of them are important. You should select at least 3 if those are not all your publications.
A reason to select them can be their impact, that they answer an open question but also because this enables you to easily vulgarize and reach other people, or because they translate a shift in your research interests. Some recommend selecting an A* publication if you have one, if you have multiple it is not necessary to select them all.

Try to write 2-3 lines about the link between the selected publication and your research project.

Resume

Even to me, it is not clear what should be in there.
But at least it should include:

  • a complete list of publications
  • a complete list of all your positions

Activity Report

You should offer a structured overview of the research that you have already done.
Try to link it with the research project.
Try to not make it linear.
If you have a lot of publications, group them.
Try to organize your work into research directions, and tell a story for each part in which you integrate your work (and other people’s when it is relevant).

Make it clear when this is your work or not.
You should also explain your contribution, while the section recommends the Credit system, I doubt its efficiency.
Do not lie about your contribution.

Research Project

Some recommend having a short abstract.
It should contain a short contextualization, explain what are the challenges, a goal, and then how you are going to reach that goal, and why you can reach that goal.
The “why you can reach that goal” can be inserted all over the project.
If it is not 100% clear what kind of team you want to join, you should write “I would like to join an X team because …”.
If applicable, you should include how you plan to check that you have reached that goal.
Furthermore, the goal should not be a point that you reach with nothing afterward, there should be something after it (in the sense of more research to do).
One important note, this is not a contract, it does not matter if you execute the research project or not, the section wants to know if you can write such projects to get funding and if you know where your research is going independently of others.

You need to show the reader that :

  • You have a high-level view of what has been achieved in the field
  • You have a long-term goal from which you can draw research questions

It is not useful to insist on the specific problems that you may solve. The ability to solve difficult problems will not distinguish you from other candidates while having a good global view of your field will.

Bonus points

  • Show how your project is integrated into the challenges (fr: grands défis) of CNRS
  • No “working tasks” these should be “axes”, two axes are great!
  • Try to follow the recommended lengths of the section 6
  • You can include figures (I don’t believe they count towards the length)
  • If you can guess who from your domain will read your work, try to cite the papers/authors they usually cite

Inclusion

Ideally, teams are interested in welcoming you because that is one more person for free, but you should go visit them and try to present your work and chat with them.

A good baseline for “integration into teams” is the following:

  • describe the team’s main topic (2-3 lines)
  • explain with whom you will collaborate and on specific parts of your research project, in doing so it is highly relevant to cite the papers of the people you want to collaborate with to argue that this is relevant. You can use PhD students and postdocs Don’t choose people who last published ten years ago, it is not convincing (around 2 lines per person)
  • the team has likely funding from some projects, which you can describe (scale, national/international,…), if you can show that you merge well with those projects, it is great if not don’t try too hard.
  • it should be somewhat clear how your research will integrate with the main topics of the team

When citing people to collaborate with, people known by the jury are much more relevant.

Support letters

When asking for support letters, you should join your research project. This is what the researchers supporting you will comment on. If you plan on asking non-french-speaking researchers for support, it is better to write your project in English.

You can ask your PhD supervisors for a letter, but their opinion will not have a lot of weight. But it is very important to have one of your supervisor (PhD, postdoc) give a strong recommendation for you.
Try to get support letters from researchers outside your lab, with good visibility, and minimize conflicts of interest. A strong recommendation is better than two middle-grounded ones.