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25 Undergraduate students Hiring undergraduates may be best done a er you have things up and running because they require the most amount of training time. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have them or that they're not important. Among the benefits, more experienced members of your lab, like postdocs and graduates, can learn leadership skills by mentoring undergraduates. If you decide to recruit undergraduates, try to assign a very short project that won't take more than several months. Lab technician The lab technician is commonly the first hire because the position's versatility can help a great deal with some initial and time-consuming tasks such as getting equipment ready, ordering supplies and even setting up experiments. Offering good salaries and acknowledging their work as paper authors are good incentives to not just recruit good technicians but to retain them. A lab technician will be the knowledge base for methods, technologies and lab organization for your group, so think about this as a long-term position. Postdocs A postdoc's experience can be very helpful in getting your research program under way. However, most postdocs look for more established labs, therefore recruiting them at this initial stage can be difficult (we'll talk about recruiting strategies later in this chapter). Although you may benefit from hiring a postdoc right away, take time to find someone that meets your expectations. Managing time is extremely difficult at the beginning. You have to do a lot of things yourself and basically there are not enough working hours. You're working all the time. Since you can't be physically in the lab and in the office at the same time, hiring someone with experience to help you start a lab, such as a senior technician, is the best scenario. Nikolina Sekulic " Graduate students Graduate students are a great labor force: smart, eager and most of them are funded. While mentoring grad students will give you experience as a leader, it takes time to train them. Consider investing time in their training or making sure someone experienced can help you with this.