During the past 30 years, the landscape of higher education in Europe has changed considerably (Musselin & Teixeira, 2014). This new academic landscape” has had a strong effect on academic professions (Henkel, 2000), and has shaped the development of ideas on career and recruitment strategies (Strike, 2010). In the context of higher education in Sweden, the policy change sketched above has had considerable effect on the field of Education Sciences. New policies are promoting an increased focus on competitiveness, while pointing at the importance of reducing inefficiencies in mass-education. These policies are also given legitimacy to specific recruitment strategies and career paths in academia, and claim certain determinants for how to accumulate career capital. The aim of this study is to describe how early career academics in Education Sciences experience recruitment strategies and positioning processes in their careers. More specific, we try to understand how they gain career capital and symbolic value to get recognition in career. The concept of career capital is at the center of the study to describe and analyze different aspects of recruitment in this specific career field (Harris & Ramos, 2013). Accordingly, we are particularly interested in how a group of early career academics describe their paths in careers. These respondents (40) are studying or working in the field of Education Sciences. In an attempt to understand their actions we tried to get information, during interviews, about their dispositions and competences, but also by their individual locations within the field and by the career strategies they have developed. They are all active at universities (4) and departments (8) that were chosen using purposeful sampling. This to enhance a variation in the institutional settings they are active in. The institutional settings vary in terms of their predominant focus: teacher education, research or mixed teaching and research. The analysis illustrates three recruitment strategies and career paths, identified in relation to these academics career positions, as "the invited," "the useful" or "the uninvited". Thus, the present article describes a Matthew effect appear in how these academics are recruited, where early career academics as well as PhD students e.g. are positioned early on as either promising researchers, teachers, or as substitutes. Through this some get sorted out early from both research and education. These career positions, accordingly, condition how early career academics possibilities to advance and how they are able to move and chose in doing academic career.

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