Théo Matricon

Théo Matricon

Postdoc

CNRS Application Guide

This guide was made with the help of two friends Corto Mascle and Clément Legrand-Duchesne.

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!

This document was last updated in October 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 about knowledge on how to 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)
  • figures, tables can be great but might use too much space, this is a trade-off

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.

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

  • talks
  • long lab visit (2 months+)
  • industrial partnerships
  • software contributions (that are not only for the paper)
  • 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 (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.)
  • 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. They look for candidate that can see wide and deep.

A good idea is to use the framework “what?”, “why?”, “how?”. It clearly makes you state the scientific challenges of your project (and also clearly enables you to distinguish what is engineering and what is research).

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!
  • Follow the recommended lengths of the section 6
  • You can include figures (I don’t believe they count towards the length)
  • The jury really like candidates who have seriously thought about their research project, showing that it is reachable and in the question part showing why some approaches are not relevant for example.
  • 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. You have to visit them, present your work and chat, they are recommending a future colleague for life.

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. You can have from one to three recommendations, two seems good enough.

Feedback

After a failed year, you might want to get feedback to improve for next year. It is near impossible to get any official feedback from the jury, I mean you will get some but not anything that will be useful to you. Instead, after the second week of September you can send a mail to the president of the jury to ask for informal feedback. They may will tell you orally more about your application and what were the strong and weak points. Though you need to remember that every year, you start from scratch again, for example you might not get auditioned even if you were auditioned the year before.

The Audition

This describes shortly how the audition went in 2025, it tries in this paragraph to stay very factual. You will receive a letter for the audition. It stipulates that unless exceptional circumstances with a doctor’s note, not being present or being late voids your application. You wait in a corridor until they call your name. You enter a room with the jury seated at desks placed in a U pattern. For objectivity, the members of the jury are very neutral and try to show the least emotion. When you enter the room, you have to sign a paper, your slides will already be prepared, you are given a remote. Visible to you is a tablet indicating a countdown of the time that you have left for the audition. The president of the jury will stop you at 20min exactly (I don’t remember exactly the time left for the presentations), you cannot go over the time. Then three different members of the jury will ask you questions, they will briefly say hello, then start with a question. The questions will be stopped when there is no time left. I don’t know what happens if you exhaust all of their questions. Unless you are first or second of the session, a few members of the jury won’t look at you because they are writing down the reports of the previous candidates.

Thi part is subjective. I was told that the audition is to test you, that is you should be able to talk the research talk. In other words, you should be able to have accurate understandable answers yet quick enough so that you can exhaust most of the questions fired by the three members of the jury. Typically, the members of the jury that are asking questions are the ones who fought for you to be there, so despite some questions that can put you off, these questions should actually be opportunities for you to score points with the other part of the jury.