Closing the career equity gap for PhDs and postgraduate professionals, globally

Author

Dr. Rosalie Clarke; Founder of Minerva Recruitment Ltd.

Topic

Preface: In this interview, we speak with Dr. Rosalie Clarke, Founder of Minerva Recruitment Ltd, the world’s only global career equity platform built exclusively for PhDs and postgraduate level professionals. Operating since 2022, the platform serves over 23,000 users across 140+ countries, with a mission to dismantle the structural barriers that prevent marginalised scholars from accessing the careers, resources, and recognition their work deserves. It is entirely bootstrapped — no paid advertising, no external investment — and has grown through organic community-building and the conviction that doctoral expertise deserves better than the current labour market offers.

What is the mission and vision of Minerva Recruitment Ltd?

Minerva Recruitment Ltd exists to close the career equity gap for PhDs, and postgraduate level professionals, globally. We are the only platform in the world built exclusively for this community — not as an afterthought or a niche filter on a generic jobs board, but as a specialist infrastructure designed from the inside out, by someone who has lived every barrier the platform exists to address.

The vision is a world in which doctoral-level expertise is recognised, valued, and appropriately compensated — whether that expertise stays within academia or moves beyond it. We provide the tools, resources, community, and connections that allow PhD researchers to make genuinely informed decisions about their careers, on their own terms, without having to accept exploitation as the price of participation in professional life.

The movement I founded alongside the platform — #AcademicsAgainstFreeLabour, now independently recognised by Google Search as a named movement with reach across 140+ countries — names the structural conditions the platform was built to address. It is not a slogan. It is a description of what thousands of doctoral researchers experience every year, and a refusal to treat that experience as inevitable.

What motivated you to build this platform?

Lived experience, primarily. I completed my PhD in Social Sciences and spent years navigating a labour market that had no adequate infrastructure for people like me — researchers with advanced expertise, interdisciplinary skills, and a genuine desire to contribute beyond academia, but without the institutional support or professional networks that would make that contribution legible to employers.

I looked for a platform that understood the specific challenges of transitioning from doctoral research to non-academic professional life. Something that spoke to the skills translation problem, the imposter syndrome, the gatekeeping, the systematic undervaluation of Humanities and Social Sciences expertise. It did not exist. So, I built it.

The academic labour market is in structural crisis. Fewer than 15% of PhD graduates enter academia in any sustained capacity. The majority are navigating career transitions without specialist support, often while managing financial precarity and the psychological weight of having invested years in a path that offers diminishing returns. Minerva Recruitment Ltd exists because that community deserves better infrastructure than it currently has.

Tell us more about your academic background and how it shaped the platform.

My PhD is in Social Sciences, with a focus on feminist International Relations, peace and conflict studies, and the politics of knowledge production. My peer-reviewed publications address women and conflict (Elsevier Academic Press, 2022) and the structural conditions of scholar-activism in higher education (Routledge, 2021). I also hold an LLM in International Criminal Law and have a background in EU policy research through the Jean Monnet PONT Fellowship in Brussels, where I worked on security governance and contributed to multilateral policy publications distributed to global leaders.

That background shapes everything about the platform. The analytical framework — understanding career inequity as a structural problem rather than an individual failure — comes directly from my research training. The commitment to intersectionality, to naming the specific barriers facing women, disabled scholars, and researchers from underrepresented communities, comes from the same place. I did not build a generic careers platform and add an equity layer. I built an equity platform from the foundation up.

In 2026, the UK Permanent Mission to UNESCO nominated Minerva Recruitment Ltd for the UNESCO Prize for Girls’ and Women’s Education. I was also selected as one of two UK nominees for the Eisenhower Fellowship Innovative Entrepreneurs Program and confirmed as an Expert Mentor for the European Innovation Council Women Leadership Programme for researcher-entrepreneurs in DeepTech. These recognitions are early external validations of a platform that has been doing this work since 2022, without institutional backing or marketing spend.

What does the platform offer researchers in practice?

The platform has several interconnected components, each designed to address a different dimension of the career equity problem.

Our specialist jobs board lists opportunities specifically relevant to PhDs and postgraduate level professionals — roles that require or value doctoral expertise, across academic, industry, policy, public sector, and third sector contexts. We are also developing an AI-powered matching engine to connect members with relevant opportunities more intelligently, designed from inception around equity principles and EU AI Act Article 22 compliance.

Our digital career guides address three distinct audiences: the researcher navigating their own career transition, the employer/recruiter seeking to understand and attract doctoral talent, and the HE stakeholder developing institutional support for their postgraduate community. Guides are priced at £10, £20, and £30 individually, with a bundle available at £50. They contain proprietary frameworks developed from my own research and practitioner experience — including the ‘MVP Employee’ and ‘Swiss Army Knife’ candidate frameworks — that are not available anywhere else.

Our grant strategy and readiness guidance service supports researchers and early-stage founders in identifying, preparing for, and successfully applying for research funding, fellowships, and grants. Given ScientifyResearch’s own focus on making funding accessible and navigable, this is perhaps the most natural point of overlap between our two platforms.

Our bespoke consultancy services range from individual researcher career consultancy and executive CV review to workshop delivery for institutions and organisations. Sessions and workshops are available online or in-person, and our institutional packages support universities, research offices, and employers in understanding and engaging with the doctoral talent pipeline.

We also have a merchandise range, designed by me. Many of our items feature the #AcademicsAgainstFreeLabour branding. This is a small but meaningful way for community members to visibly signal their support for the movement and the values it represents, while supporting our ambitious plans to create our own grant/funding and Scholar’s Foundation in future.

You also have a community discussion board — tell us more about that.

Yes – the discussion board is one of the platform’s most underutilised and potentially most valuable features! I am keen to see our member community engaging with this section of the platform. It exists as a peer support and professional development space where members can connect, share experiences, ask questions, and build the kind of informal network that institutional researchers take for granted but independent scholars often lack entirely.

One dimension I am particularly keen to see develop is its use as a space for sourcing international and interdisciplinary collaborators for consultancy and research pitches. In my own experience — including as lead consultant on a current multi-person team bid — team pitches consistently outperform individual proposals, particularly for institutional and organisational clients. A community of over 23,000 PhD researchers spanning 140+ countries and every academic discipline is an extraordinary resource for building those teams. The discussion board is the infrastructure that could make those connections happen, the optional private messaging function could also further facilitate that for members.

Consultancy is an increasingly popular career choice for PhD researchers precisely because the traditional academic job market has contracted so severely. But most researchers enter consultancy without a professional network, without experience of bid writing, and without colleagues to team up with. The platform is working to address all three of those gaps — and the discussion board is central to that ambition, alongside our popular Help and Advice articles.

Are there other platforms doing similar work in this space?

There are excellent organisations working on adjacent problems — researcher development programmes within universities, academic union advocacy, general careers platforms with postgraduate filters. Each of these does important work. But none combine a specialist jobs board, digital career guides, bespoke consultancy, grant strategy support, and a global peer community in a single platform designed exclusively for PhDs and postgraduate level professionals.

The gap I identified was total — and it disproportionately affected the scholars least well served by existing infrastructure: Humanities and Social Sciences graduates, women, disabled researchers, and those operating outside institutional frameworks entirely. Minerva Recruitment Ltd was built to serve that specific community, not as a secondary audience but as the primary one.

In an ideal world, how do you see Minerva Recruitment Ltd positioned for real-world impact?

A world in which every PhD researcher, regardless of discipline, institution, geography, or personal circumstance, has access to the career infrastructure they need to make genuinely free choices about their professional future. Somewhere that does not allow doctoral expertise to be systematically undervalued by the labour market. A place where the structural conditions that currently trap researchers in exploitation — unpaid work, precarious contracts, institutional gatekeeping, appropriation of intellectual property without reciprocity — have been named, challenged, and are proactively changed.

Minerva Recruitment Ltd is building toward that world practically. The platform currently serves over 23,000 users across 140+ countries. We are developing an ethical AI matching engine, a suite of AI governance guides addressing algorithmic bias and digital rights from a researcher perspective, and expanding our consultancy and workshop offer to institutional clients globally.

The #AcademicsAgainstFreeLabour movement provides the advocacy infrastructure alongside the commercial platform — naming the structural problems at scale while the platform provides the practical tools to navigate them. Together, they represent a model of scholar-activism that is both analytically rigorous and operationally effective.

The goal is not simply to grow the user base. It is to deepen the impact for every scholar who finds us, and to use that community’s collective voice — across 140+ countries and every academic discipline — to drive the structural change that individual career advice alone cannot achieve. Our international diplomatic recognition – via Prize and Award selections coming through in 2026 – is showing that we are well on our way to the impact and change we are seeking for the global community of scholars!

Ready to explore career opportunities beyond academia?

At ScientifyResearch, we believe researchers deserve equal access to opportunities that recognize their skills, expertise, and potential. However, navigating career paths beyond academia can be challenging, and many PhD graduates face barriers when translating their research experience into new roles.

If you’re considering your next career step and want to explore how your skills can take you beyond academia, we’re here to support you.

Book your introductory call today.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Rosalie Clarke for sharing the vision and work behind Minerva Recruitment Ltd and the connected hashtag movement for labour rights of highly skilled talent. We wish her, and the platform, every success in advancing career equity for doctoral researchers and postgraduate professionals worldwide.

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