**6. Conclusions**

This paper describes two major flaws in Brazilian academia—the pseudo-meritocratic public tender and the Lattes CV. The public tender, with its standardized written exam, makes the hiring procedures for faculty in Brazil unnecessarily complex, resulting in a system where one can study to pass the exam and have a good "grade" in the tender, and ye<sup>t</sup> is not immune for realpolitik within the hiring committees itself. We propose to replace the current hiring procedures by procedures similar to those used in an international context: a two-tier approach where the CV and application letter is first analyzed, and then the candidates are invited for an interview and short sample lecture.

A second particularity of academia in Brazil is the use of the Lattes CV platform. The Lattes CV is the only CV that counts when a candidate applies for a position, or even when applying for funding. Our proposal is simply to use a regular CV instead of the convoluted Lattes platform. If Brazilian universities find an online profile necessary, then popular online platforms such as Microsoft Academic, Google Scholar, ORCID or ResearcherID could be used.

With the recent budget cuts in Brazil, we consider that the time is right for change. The convoluted hiring processes in Brazil and their self-engineered, self-funded, and self-maintained Lattes CV platform may be eating away at a budget that could be redirected to scholarships for students, used for opening more faculty positions, or used for funding research. Meanwhile, the time is right to ask ourselves critical questions: what can we do to improve hiring procedures in such a way that minorities are not a ffected by implicit biases in academia and hiring panels? How can we use a ffirmative actions that have worked elsewhere in the world within the social context of Brazil? Ultimately, what type of faculty does Brazil need in order to be a reflection of its society, so that faculty members can address the needs of the Brazilian society on one hand, and have a voice in an international context as well.

Even though the lack of research funding in Brazil is the most discussed topic in the media, increasing funding is not the only solution Brazilian academia needs to thrive in an international context. We hope that we have provided a relevant contribution for Brazil to prosper academically and scientifically in the near future, and that the questions we address in this work within the Brazilian context will also help our colleagues internationally to think further about the hiring procedures at their institutions.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization and first-draft writing (preprint [25] only): M.A.; Validation, manuscript handling and revised versions: E.O.L.L.; All other contributions: equally distributed among all authors.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding. The APC was funded by the Open Access program of TU Delft.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
