I did not start reading postdoctoral-researcher job adverts because I wanted to analyse academic-labour hiring practices. I started because I needed a job.

As my postdoc in forestry at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, neared its end in October, I found myself looking for another position. Some evenings, I would sit with too many browser tabs open: one job in the United Kingdom, one in Canada, another in Germany, all of which promised exciting science. I was looking for a project that matched my training, a laboratory group whose work I admired and a city that I could imagine living in.

But after a while, I began to see a pattern. The adverts were often clear about what institutions wanted from me, but remarkably vague about what they were offering in return. This was never just a professional puzzle. My wife and I have four children, so salary, contract length, relocation costs, visa issues and childcare are not abstract details — they determine whether a move is even possible.

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To better understand this imbalance, I started systematically collecting data from the ads. In 2024–26, I compiled 7,846 research-job adverts from seven international job boards (LinkedIn, jobs.ac.uk, Times Higher Education Unijobs, Nature Careers, EURAXESS, Science Careers and EuroScienceJobs). From those data, I identified 2,896 postdoc-equivalent listings across 53 countries. What had felt personal looked different at scale. (Nature’s Career columns are editorially independent of the Nature Careers jobs board.)

Around half of those nearly 3,000 listings were in Europe and roughly one-quarter were in North America. Asia, Africa and Oceania represented much smaller shares of the postdoc pie. I also scanned each ad for seven practical terms: salary range, contract length, pension, health insurance, visa support, parental leave and relocation assistance. The amount of information that each region was willing to share with applicants differed starkly (see ‘Says little, asks a lot’). Ads from Oceania disclosed these details most often. European ads, despite dominating the job boards, revealed much less on average. Ads from Asia and Africa divulged the least.

That does not mean postdocs are necessarily better supported in one region than another. It means that the information available at the point of application is systematically uneven. For someone considering an international move, that matters. My family and I were genuinely weighing up different futures: returning to Asia (I am from China and have been in Canada since 2018), moving to Europe or staying in North America. When a listing omitted salary or contract length, I was not just missing data — I was lacking the information needed to assess rent, childcare, immigration and whether a move was truly practical. In my own job search, this was immensely frustrating.

For each serious opportunity, I made a one-page comparison sheet. I began with the advertised salary and contract length, then checked the university’s published pay scale and, if I could find it, the relevant collective agreement between the institution and a union. Housing needed a more-local comparison than a city-wide average: I first looked at whether the university offered accommodation for staff or postdocs, then compared its price and availability with rentals close to campus and in nearby non-university neighbourhoods.