In October, a professor from Switzerland interviewed with a top private university in Malaysia that retains Axe Talent to recruit its professors. He was one of three. In the same 30 days, professors from Australia and Hong Kong interviewed with the same university, and two offers came out of those conversations.
Hiring teams in Asia tell us, usually in the first meeting, that overseas candidates will not relocate. Some have advertised the role for months. Some have brought in outside firms and heard the same answer from them. I wanted to set down why these three searches went differently, because the reason has little to do with Malaysia and can be repeated by any hiring team.
Why do overseas candidates say no?
The usual first message to an academic abroad is the job description with a short note. A job description is written from the university’s side of the table. It states what the hiring panel requires, down to external grants held as principal investigator and PhD students supervised to completion as main supervisor, and it says almost nothing about what the person gains by coming. A recruiter carrying dozens of open roles has no time to find that out. So the candidate is asked to weigh a move across the world against a list of requirements, and most of them decline or do not answer.
We work in the other order. Before I wrote to the professor in Switzerland, I knew what my client was strong at: what the school was building, which research groups he would join, and what the university could put in his hands that his current one could not. At Axe Talent this step is built into how we operate. Our AI tools assemble the research on the client before a search begins, I read it and correct it, and no letter goes out on a role until that file exists. It is the first part of the Axe System, the method we built to recruit highly skilled researchers for our clients.
What do you ask a candidate before you describe the role?
On our first call I asked him what he was looking for. He told me there was not enough challenge in his current job. He wanted to have an impact, and he wanted to grow as a leader. That is not something you can easily do in Switzerland, where a life can feel architected 300 years before you were born. I know this from the other side, because I lived in Switzerland and left it for Singapore to open my own business for the same reason.
The position my client had open was a leadership role with room to build. Because I knew both sides, I could tell him so in specific terms, and he agreed to meet the panel.
These are the questions I ask every candidate on a first call, before I say anything about the role.
- Why would you consider a move now? The answer shows whether this is a real search or a curious conversation.
- What is missing in your current job? Whatever the candidate names here is what the offer has to answer.
- What would you want to build in the next five years? If the role can hold that plan, we say so with the facts.
- Who moves with you, and what do they need? A move like this is rarely one person’s decision.
- What would make you say no? Asked early, it saves both sides a month.
What decides whether a professor relocates?
The salary in Malaysia was lower than a Swiss one, and I said so in that first conversation, together with what life there costs. A senior researcher can accept a lower salary he was told about early. One he discovers at the offer stage tends to end the conversation.
In our searches the questions that settle a move come from the family: where a partner will work and which school the children will attend. The pension and the tax position come next. In one search the children said they would not agree to anything until they had seen the school.
Most overseas professors we write to do not answer the first letter. That is why we write several, each about one thing: the role, the school, the country, the life a family would have there.
How can a hiring team repeat this?
If your team is about to open a search abroad, the first part of the Axe System can be run without us. Before the first message, we write down what the organisation is strong at and what it can offer this candidate that the candidate does not have now. We also write down what it cannot offer, because we will have to say it later. On the first call we ask the five questions above before we describe the role. Then we put the answers next to the strengths. Where the two meet, we build the message around that point, and where they do not, we tell the candidate.
The prompt below walks you through the first step with ChatGPT or Claude.
At the end of that first call I asked the professor in Switzerland what would make him say no. He said he would need to see that the university meant what I had described. In October he met the panel.
The cases in this article are composites of searches we have run; identifying details are changed.