The decreasing supply of qualified people ready to take up employment, observed for several years on the labour market, results in the strengthening of the employee’s position. The consequences of this process affect not only the companies but also scientific institutions. The employee’s market, which is shaped as a result of the following changes, forces employers to focus increasingly on activities aimed at attracting and retaining individuals who constitute their human capital. The aim of our article is to diagnose satisfaction levels of various job facets and differences in attachment to the workplace in groups of scientists with varied job expectation profiles. On this basis, it will be possible to indicate the job facets that scientific institutions should take into consideration in order to provide researchers with a high level of job satisfaction. To broaden knowledge about the subject, we used data collected by the National Information Processing Institute in 2017 in a nationwide representative sample of 840 scientists who were at various stages of their academic career, represented all areas of science and worked in all types of scientific units in Poland. By performing factor analysis and a clustering procedure on variables describing researchers’ job expectations we were able to categorize the respondents into three groups: 1)