The importance of grant success in professorial recruitment

External funding is becoming increasingly important in science. Researchers’ experience and success with grant applications is also an important evaluation criterion when researchers apply for academic positions. However, few studies investigate how experience with attracting external funding and prior grant success are evaluated in academic recruitment processes. The literature also scarcely covers how the importance of prior grant success in academic recruitment varies over time and fields. Part of the reason for this literature gap is because what happens within academic recruitment is kept confidential and seldom open for systematic investigations. With access to confidential recruitment documents from four fields (economics, sociology, physics and informatics) at one Norwegian university between 2000 and 2017 combined with interviews with evaluators who have participated in these recruitments we have however been able to document how experience with attracting external funding has been evaluated in professorial recruitment. The analysis showed that the ability to attract external research funding was more salient in the STEM field than the social sciences, but that the importance of attracting external funding had increased in all fields over the last years. The importance of attracting external funding and prior grant success were, however, not all about money, but also importance because of the academic prestige that follows grants. Finally, we showed that the increased importance of grant success over the last years was not only stirred by department leaders who encourage the researchers to apply for fund, but also driven by the academic themselves that saw grants as means to accomplish their research ambitions.