Our track record

Since 2011 Kick Moors and Hermen Visser coached more than three hundred candidates who prepared for their interviews at ERC (e.g. Starting, Consolidator, Advanced, Synergy), NWO (e.g. Veni, Vidi, Vici, Gravitation, NWO-Large, NWA-ORC), and incidentally other national research counsils.

It is our goal to optimally prepare each candidate for their interview. If they look back on it in satisfaction, we count this as a success. At the same time, we are proud of our overall success rate of 46 percent for ERC grants and 49 percent for NWO grants. Which is around 10 – 20 percent higher than the overall success rates of the interviews. Still, the impact of our support stretches way beyond the outcome of the process. Lessons learned also improve job applications, inaugural lectures, key notes, and future grant interviews.

What our clients say about us

Ineke Sluiter

Leiden University

I worked closely with Hermen Visser in preparing for the interview for a Gravitation application. The interaction was quick, effective, creative, and cheerful. Hermen has enough broad scientific knowledge to ask the right questions and promote sharpness. Fortunately, he also knows little enough to quickly detect and help neutralize pitfalls and misunderstandings for non-specialists. It was a great pleasure to work with him.
Nicasio Tomás Jiménez Morillo

University of Évora

Following all of your advice allowed me to remain calm and focus throughout the ERC StG interview. I firmly believe I conveyed the importance of the project and the need and willingness to carry it out.
Miriam Melis

University of Cagliari

Hermen and Kick helped me to prepare for my ERC CoG interview. This process completely changed my vision on how to present both my project and myself. In fact, despite the fact that I had read a lot about the interview and I had talked with other scientists that went through this step in their careers, that I have been presenting and lecturing for two decades, their coaching was pivotal as they gave me many important suggestions for the slides and the pitch talk. I felt empowered by their coaching and I highly recommend their training.

Growing client base

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic we have continued our in-person coaching online and finetuned our methodology to optimally prepare candidates for remote interviews. Our unique approach results in a growing client base in our home country The Netherlands (in 2023 1 out of 10 Veni laureates and 1 out of 5 ERC StG laureates were coached by us). In recent years we work for more and more clients from other European countries (e.g. Germany, UK, Portugal, Italy, Slovenia, Estonia, Switzerland).