TABLE 3.

Faculty member affiliation according to the 2015 Carnegie Classification (see Supplemental Table S2) and illustrative quotes for each of the Final ACRA qualifications identified only by RT faculty as being significant contributors to hiring decisions in the qualitative study (n = 18)

Institution	Illustrative quote
Verbal communication of research
R2-1	A. “There was always a fair amount of like the ecologists would have a voice and they’d have something at the table. They would be at the table in the discussions and so they needed to understand what was going on. If they said, ‘I have no idea,’ it was a concern.”
M2-1	B. “What we’re mainly looking at is being able to explain it to undergraduates. (...) I think part of it is in an organization, that helps scaffold the information for the listener, so they’re not jumping right to these acronyms and these concepts that some people start out that way, and they start out even in their summary, they feel like they have to get all the big words in there. (…) just being aware of the audience and maybe explain things more than you would think is necessary.”
Research feasibility with available resources
M1-2	C. “The vision, feasibility have to really be tied together there. They might have a great vision, but if they can’t do it here, they’re not going to be hired.”
M1-1	D. “Research feasibility definitely involves resource constraints.(...) We have some really odd, amazing resources, so I think it’s always in the best interest of the applicant to do their research. (...) I think [they would] have to email the chair because we have a really bad website. I’m sure that that could be potentially true for other places. You wouldn’t want to depend on the internet.”
R2-1	E. “What I had in mind was more the institutional resource constraints. It was more like extremely expensive boutiquey instruments that might end up being like a five million dollar piece of equipment or something. (...) Then, concern about having that thing run and be serviced, and all of the sort of just support community that might need. Yeah, organisms, it was like anything would work and really same with microscopes. They were very open to any kind of microscope that was needed. It was a struggle sometimes if somebody needed the super duper, duper fancy two photon yaddah, yaddah that was $1.2 million, but usually they got that. It was more the super high end stuff.”
R1-1	F. “Sometimes people who come from HHMI labs, giant labs, then they might have the wrong idea about how life is going to be. (...) how many postdocs would you need to do that? No, you’re not going to have 25 postdocs in your first year. Do not think this is your boss’ lab.”
Inclusion of undergraduates into the research plan
BAC-2	G. “We get about 100 applicants. Right off the bat, about 50 of them can be tossed because they didn’t read the ad, or they don’t know [our institution]. They say they look forward to working with our graduate students and postdocs, so we toss those.”
M1-1	H. “We ask that question, we basically say: ‘how would you involve undergraduates in your research?’ Then we’d look at what they say. That’s definitely one of the phone questions. It has always been. We don’t dock them if they’ve never done it before, but we listen to how they would do it, and if it sounds like they’ve really thought it through carefully than [sic] they’re good. (...) We definitely hire people who have thought very thoroughly on how they would involve undergrads, and they were convincing. (...) It really is there thoughtfulness based in reality. (...) Do they kind of realize that undergrads come and go?”
R3-1	I. “Some of this comes up in the phone interview, one of the questions may be along the lines of, you have your research program, how would you define a Master’s [student] project versus an undergrad research project?”
Experience conducting research with students
R2-2	J. “To some extent, people care that you’re interested in what the undergrad is trying to get out of the experience, and you’re trying to meet that need. (...) I meet with my students weekly and we make these goals for the next week. We don’t need to hear everything, but I like people to recognize that not one style works for every person. You might need to change your mentoring style.”