hiring an NLP Researcher for Swiss Legal Tech Startup

We needed to fill a highly specialized role for a small Swiss legal tech startup, requiring a candidate skilled in both Natural Language Processing (NLP) research and Python programming.

The challenge was finding someone who excelled in both academia and software engineering—two fields that rarely overlap. Our innovative search strategy, which included utilizing Google Scholar to identify qualified researchers, led us to a PhD holder in NLP who also had programming experience. This unique candidate was successfully hired and remains with the company to this day.

I tell candidates to use the STAR model (no nothing to do with databases) to talk about past projects. here is how it would work for this hiring success story:

  • Situation:

One of the hardest roles we ever filled was prior to the AI trend in a small Swiss law startup. They needed an NLP researcher who could code Python, too.

  • Task:

We had to find someone who is both a researcher and a software engineer. The problem was that most researchers don’t even know how to “git rebase” (aka work in teams) and the programmers mostly have no clue about research.

  • Action:

We started with our own network, went over to LinkedIn, put up job adverts and then finalized the search using Google Scholar. The last bit was something we NEVER did before but this was what yielded the best candidates.

  • Result:

Based on email addresses in public research papers, we found many people. One person with a PhD in NLP had been working also as a programmer and wasn’t against relocating to Switzerland. The person was hired and has worked there ever since.