Decoding Job Descriptions: Tailoring Your Resume for Success

This week I'm taking you behind the.

Scenes of one of my office hours where we discuss how to actually dissect a job description to figure out exactly how you want to tailor your resume. And I also answer a few other questions while I'm at it. If you're listening to this and thinking, I wish I could be in these office hours, the good news is you can and we have made it super affordable for you. So head over to our website and learn how you can join our accelerator program for as little as $37 today.

Hi, I'm Karina Klingman, scientist turned CEO.

Of a talent strategy consulting firm.

I've helped over 85 biotechs hire and.

Develop thousands of amazing employees. So I know what works and what.

Doesn'T work when it comes to landing.

A job and then excelling in it.

I created the Biotech Career Coach podcast to give you simple, actionable, step by step strategies to help you land your dream biotech job, then move up the career ladder. If you are exploring career paths, looking to learn about biotech, or simply striving to be the type of person who makes an impact and gets promoted, your.

In the right place. All right, the first question is, after being interviewed for a lower position by a director and a hiring manager, but then not getting that position, should I apply for a higher position within that same company? The positions are for different groups within the company and the answer to that is maybe. So you want to do it in a, in a very specific way. So you're not going to want to apply for for it with the very same resume and cover letter. You're going to want to make sure you tailor your application. I'm going to talk about that a lot today. We have a lot of questions about specifically tailoring the application. I wanted to bring this question up first though, because that sort of leads into that theme when we are talking about tailoring an application. If you're going to apply for different jobs at a company, you need to call that out and you need to make it clear that you know that you're doing that and it is for a reason. And so that can be done in the COVID letter. Most likely that can also be done in the headline just by being sure that you've tailored the resume specifically to match the job. We got five or so questions about tailoring resumes. This is a really common theme and I want to back up and I want to talk about how you actually go about thinking about tailoring a resume before you even started. So the first thing you're going to want to do is have a base level resume that is your resume that is sort of your template that you can easily tailor from job to job. And you may in fact have a few different flavors of this type of resume because you may be applying to different types of jobs. So for example, we have some individuals in the community who are applying for academic positions. They're thinking about maybe doing a postdoc or maybe also going into industry. So in that case, they might have two different resumes ready to go and they can tailor the postdoc resume for the postdoc jobs and they can tailor an industry resume for the industry jobs. They may even have a couple of different industry resumes because they are thinking about perhaps a bench scientist role and maybe also let's say a alliance manager role, which an alliance manager, if you don't know that is, that is somebody who stands at the intersection between the bench and companies or academic organizations that a company is interfacing with. So they basically translate the science and they manage almost like a project manager, but they very much manage the science and the communication that happens between those two different scientific groups. That's a really cool job, but it would require a different resume than a bench position would. So I want to start by talking about the tailoring process. And this happens after you've got that resume, that baseline template resume ready to go, and you are now thinking about going for a position that is a little bit different than what your baseline resume is. So I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to go through the anatomy of a job description to begin with. So this is a job description. I just picked one on LinkedIn. They're pretty, pretty much the same. I'll go through a couple of different ones and show you. Most job descriptions start with an About Us section that's going to tell you about the company. Then it's going to go into a general. This one's called a general summary of duties. Some people just call this a summary, some people don't even call it anything. But it just clearly transitions from talking about the company to talking about the job and the requirements for that job. And then there's going to be a space then for usually a list, bulleted list of duties, responsibilities. Sometimes people just, I mean, you'll see all different, different types of terminology for this. But these are going to be what you will be doing. So not the requirements, but what you will expect to be doing. So in this case, in this particular lead scientist position, you would be overseeing and leading the testing of clinical trial specimens in accordance with study protocols. You might be looking down further and you might now see that there's a couple. In this particular job, there's a couple of different sections for more duties. This is an unusual job description, but don't let that trip you up. So it's just saying other things you might do will include, but not are, but are not limited to. And then they have more stuff. And then also you're going to perform support and educational training duties. So they put that into a different section. Where you want to get down to business is all the way down at the bottom. They have a whole bunch of things that you will do in this job. Uh, if you're watching on, on YouTube, you'll see what I mean. If you're not watching, just imagine they've got this broken into like five different sections of things you will do for this particular job. Then all the way down here. Knowledge, skills and experience required. This is now where the list of things that they want you to have before you apply for the job. Now this is a wish list. I repeat, this is a wish list. You do not need to have every single thing on this list to apply for a job. This is what you're going to want to speak to when you do start to tailor your resume. So I'm going to go into another job. Let's go find one that maybe is a little bit more normal in terms of. Okay, this one's a little bit more of a normal format. So here we've got about us at the top, a short little section and then what you'll do. So that's a little paragraph about sort of the, the role and then they list that out in specific responsibilities. Now you've got bullet points about what you will do. And then you should have. This is their qualifications section. So you should have bachelor's or master's degree, basic understanding of T cell biology, blah, blah, blah. So that is the general anatomy of a job description. At the top you're going to have usually about the company. Then you're going to have a section about the role and the responsibilities you'll have in that role. Then you're going to have the qualifications below that you will often, and this is state by state, you'll see different things. You'll often have information about the compensation structure, an EEOC statement, benefits, something like that. So you, you might see some stuff down at the bottom as well. Okay, so those are just some general anatomies of a job description. What is most important here. And what I'm going to teach you to look for in jobs is in the top section. And that is the language that they're using to describe what you will do and what the job is. And the reason that's important is because if you read closely, you're going to figure out exactly what the pain points are. Why did they write this job description? When a hiring manager is thinking about hiring somebody, it's because they have a need, they are in pain, something is not getting done or it's not getting done right. So when they're writing a job description, that will come out often in the language they use within the top sections. Not usually the about us section, that's usually stock for every job at the company, but in the section about what you'll do and the responsibilities that you will have. So in the paragraph about, you know, this is the job and then the bullets of these are the things you'll do, that is where the language will come out about the pain points. You'll also see a little bit of that in the qualification section, but less than you would think. It really is in the top section. So I have a few tricks. When you are close reading jobs, it is really worth your while to start to let your eyes pick out words that are repeated and humans like patterns. So you're going to pick up on these. You can also use some tools to do this. So I'm going to stay with this job here. This is at CTLR Therapeutics in Chicago. They are looking for a senior research associate. So I'm just going to take this section from what you'll do. So I'm not. I'm skipping the about us section at the top. I really am not interested in that for what I'm going to do next. I'm going to take what you'll do through the specific responsibilities. If you're on the go and listening to this, just know that I am eliminating all of the qualifications. So from where it talks about degrees and all that stuff downward, I am not including that. I'm only including the things that they are telling me I will do in this job. So I'm copying that and I'm popping over to a cool tool that actually one of our accelerator members brought to my attention. I. I've been doing this with a combination of my eyes and chatgpt, but this is called Free Word Cloud Generator. Totally free. It's Free Word Cloud Generator dot com. I'll link that below and you can paste something into a text box and Hit Enter and it will generate a word cloud. So you will be able to pick out keywords here based on how often that variations of these words are used. So team is one of the major features of this particular job description. And in fact, and so I'm seeing some other things here. Motivated. So I'm looking for not. I'm looking for words that are not specifically qualifications. So cell is another one. But this is a, a cell biology position. So maybe not surprising. I am looking for things that are more the soft skills. So team motivated developing is one I would say. The things that really folk that, that jump out at me are team and motivated. Those are really the two words that are jumping out. So I'm going to go back to the job description and I'm going to let my eyes relax. I'm going to look at this. So here we go. We're seeking a highly motivated. There's that word motivated. An experienced candidate to assist in the execution of our IND enabling studies. In our first clinical candidate. You will play a key role in developing the company's research pipeline. Working closely with a research team, you will collaborate collaborate as a team word with internal and external team members and consultants as we execute on various research milestones to build and advance our pipeline. Additionally, you will be a key team member that will deliver on our corporate objectives. You will possess strong technical skills and the ability to execute proof of concept experiments in IND enabling studies for drugs development in cell therapy. Okay. Specifically specific responsibilities. So you're going to be doing experimental support. They talk a lot about the, in this first bullet point about the actual technical skills that you'll be doing. Technical assays, things like that. And then it moves down into collaboration and communication is big collaborate team members. So they're definitely looking for somebody who is a team oriented person that is something. And motivated. I do see that word a couple of times here. So motivated and team or collaboration words that mean team words that mean that you're a team player. Those are going to go strongly into your headline section and your highlight section in your tailored resume. You will then move down to the bottom where it says what you should have and you will look at these bullet points. Now the first bullet point is usually the degree requirement. That's usually a bit of a throwaway when it comes to actually tailoring your resume. The next bullet point is a basic understanding of T cell biology and cell culture techniques to expand them functionally and phenotypically to characterize them. Okay. Our very first bullet point in our highlights section. And if you grab our resume template, you will see that we have a headline which is one, one sentence about why you're the perfect fit for this job. And then below that we're going to have five bullet points. Five strong action oriented bullet points. You are going to want to take the words team or synonyms to team and motivated. And you're going to want to pepper synonyms to those words throughout those five bullet points and you're going to want to do them in order of what you should have. So the very first thing they're looking for is T cell biology. So you are going to speak to your specific T cell biology experience in that bullet point number one. Next, bullet point experience with primary cell culture, aseptic techniques and flow cytometry. So you're going to want to get that into your second bullet point from then on. They're talking a lot about soft skills, attention to detail, organizational record keeping. So you might have a bullet point next about how you created or maintained or advanced a record keeping system in a previous position. Something that's going to show, not just say. It's going to prove that you are detail oriented and you have good record keeping skills. Think about that deeply. Next is problem solving skills and then communication, interpersonal skills. So now you're going to be pulling in examples of how you have worked collaboratively with a team to solve problems and to present data and things like that. So that's how I move down a job description. I look at it in order to, but I'm pulling the language and the feelings and the sentiments, the pain points from the top. So to me when I read this, it's not really screaming that they have a pain point. Some of these job descriptions you're like, oh, I feel for you. I really am getting this strong and clear. This one is not. But they are telling us that they want someone who's self motivated and who is a team player. Whether they're missing that on their team or that is just the culture and they want to make sure they find somebody that's like that because that is going to be key in order to work with their team. Either way we are going to speak into that. We were doing a resume review in the previous office hours and the job description was interesting but it was, it, it said that they needed to be client facing and customer care like 10 times. It was so clear that the pain point, the pain point they really, really were missing or that this team was missing was somebody who was a customer facing customer advocate. So that is the type of thing you're going to be looking for to pick up on. Now, once you identify those pain points, you're going to thread that through everything you do with this job. It's going to be threaded through how you are tailoring those top five bullet points. And when you start to have your interviews, you're going to pull your answers back to those pain points. So if you notice in that last job that we looked at was very team oriented, you're going to continually be referencing how you worked within a team, you successfully drove forward a team initiative, et cetera. Every time you answer a question, you're going to want to pull it back to that so that it is coming through for them loud and clear that you are a collaborative team player. With that, I want to talk about how to use now ChatGPT in that same vein to tailor a job. So let's go back to our CTRL job description. And now I'm going to take the whole job description again, not the about us section, but I'm going to take from what you'll do all the way down to through the qualifications. I'm going to leave off the bottom section, which is all about the compensation package and the benefits. But I'm going to take the meat of the job description and I'm going to take that over to ChatGPT and I'm going to use a very simple prompt, so I use a lot of voice to text. So here we go. I'm applying for a job. I will paste the job description below. Please create 10 bullet points that I can use for a highlight section that will speak to my skills and abilities for this job. Please ensure that each bullet point speaks to either my high level of motivation or my team player attitude. Please make each bullet point specific and measurable, comma, use fake data points if necessary, so that I can put my own impact in each bullet point. All right, now I'm going to paste that whole job description and I'm going to go for it. So ChatGPT does a shockingly good job of helping to brainstorm this. Now, am I saying you should copy and paste these? No, you should not. You should not do that. First of all, you only want five, so I always ask for 10. Sometimes I ask for 20. This is about brainstorming. This is about getting your mind thinking about what you want to say. So I've already told you that T cell culture should be one of your first things. So you're going to want to. You can also ask ChatGPT to say, you know hey, brainstorm three bullet points about my specific expertise with T cell culture. You can also paste your resume, that template resume that you've created in here, and say, this is my resume so that it knows what you've done. And then help me to tailor these bullet points specifically. But here's what I love about these bullet points. First of all, they start with a power word. What I see often is a weak start to these bullet points, like contributed to or helped with things like that. That's not strong. Those are not strong ways to start bullet points. Lead cell isolation. That's strong. Spearheaded, collaborated, maintained, analyzed. These are strong words. They're action words, they're active words versus passive words. So you really want to take ChatGPT's advice there and think about how you are structuring these sentences so that they start with a really strong beginning. Then ChatGPT is also really good at helping you to visualize how these sentences should be put together. So with that, we are getting numbers. So a 30% increase in efficiency, 25% reduction in assay, turnaround time. Now, people often ask me, how do you come up with these numbers and the way we come up with these numbers? Because of course, you're probably not actually tracking these numbers in previous positions. Now that you know what you should be doing, maybe start to track those numbers as you are having impacts in your next roles. But you know, for example, in my company, we, we've placed, in the past 10 years, we've placed 4,000 plus candidates. I say plus because it's more than that. But I'm not going to give an exact number because we've changed applicant tracking systems a few times and I can't actually pin down that number to, to the head count. In a little while, I know it's going to cost 4,500, so I'm going to say 4,500 plus. But you can get a good estimate of something that you've done. You can get an estimate of your impact and you can generalize it in that way. You can say a number plus or at least or more than. If you're doing a percentage, you know, more than a 30% increase. If you know it was really closer to 40, you know, you're still having a really 30% increase is a very strong increase, but it's conservative. So this is where you can estimate these numbers. Go a little bit lower, be conservative, and then you can use words or language like more than or at least or plus behind it. That's how we get those numbers. And they are very impactful. So instead of just saying, let's reframe this how I normally see it. This one is lead cell isolation and expansion processes. What I typically would see on a resume is expertise in cell isolation and expansion. And that would be it. How much more impactful is it that they led these processes and they contributed to a 30% increase in efficiency? What if they told me that instead of the increase of inefficiency, let's say the number was how many they did. Let's say they led cell isolation and expansion processes for more than 40 types of tumor cell lines, something like that. That would be really impactful. Then you're proving it to me. You're not just saying you've done something, you are showing me that you've done it and it's a measurable thing. So that's how we use ChatGPT to take the job description, the pain points from the job description, and put them into really impactful bullet points. Hey, I just want to cut in to say that if you are enjoying this podcast, you may enjoy the Building Biotechs podcast from our sister company Recruitomics Consulting, which is a talent acquisition strategy firm that specializes in helping small biotechs hire exceptional talent. In that podcast, we interview amazing people who are building biotechs. They are industry leaders in all different verticals and it will allow you to explore career paths in biotech and to get to know companies that maybe you've never heard about. So if you are a biotech fan, you are exploring careers in biotech. I highly recommend the Building Biotechs podcast. We'll link that in the show notes or you can search for it on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts. All right, back to our show. The next question that we have is about asking questions of your interviewers. So we I think a big fear of people going into the interview is the dreaded do you have any questions for me? Question when the tables turn. And now you're supposed to ask questions of the interview team. Luckily for you, we have an amazing resource and you can find this in the interview modules. I think it's under module 2 of the interview course. There's a whole bunch of resources in there and one of them is called 50 Questions to Ask your interviews or something like that. Those 50 questions are really good and we recently had a member just get a job. She actually had. She was hired the same day she interviewed, but it was a small company, so that that happens sometimes. It also, I should mention, was not a scientific position. Um, so she didn't have to give a, a scientific presentation or talk, but she had a, an interview. And she chose two questions to ask from that list to ask everybody on her interview panel, which was only four people, but she asked the same two questions to everybody because they were culture related questions and she wanted to get people's takes, different people have different impressions or insights when it comes to culture and things like that. And then she chose two questions for that were unique to each interviewer. So she had four questions prepared. She said she didn't get through all of them, which is normal, but she had them ready to go. And she was told by each of her interviewers that she asked the best, most insightful questions of any candidate they had spoken with and she got an offer later that day. So that is how important those questions are. They are really, really key. So study those questions, think about how you might apply them. What you want to know, and this is going to be the reason we have 50 of them, is that companies vary widely. There are big companies and small companies and there are all different funding stages. I think if you are interviewing with an earlier stage company that is not public yet, a really fair question to ask is around the Runway and the way I would phrase that is what is the funding Runway of the company currently and what is the growth outlook for the next six and 12 months? You can go 12 and 24 months. That's pushing it. A lot of the time they're not going to know what that growth is looking like. Typically smaller biotechs are going to try for one fundraise every 12 to 18 months. So that's kind of the time horizon that they're thinking of in terms of funding and raising. So that's fair for you to know because you will be getting paid out of that Runway. That's really key. So as a savvy job seeker, you should ask those types of questions as part of the questions you answer. If you're in an earlier stage company, if you're at a publicly traded company, a bigger company, if you're interviewing it to cada, that's going to be less of an important question to ask. But you could ask things in that case like what does the growth trajectory of this department look like? Or how does this department's plans or goals fit in with the larger goals of Takeda as a whole? Things like that, where if it's a bigger company, you're going to want to choose questions that are going to be geared more toward how your role would fit in with the large organization vision, you can still ask those questions at a small company, but make sure you get your finance questions asked as well. The other thing to ask in smaller companies is also around the compensation package. And you might not ask this in the initial interview, but it's also fair to understand if you're package includes equity, how that's structured. And so we can have a deeper dive if that's of interest. But one question that we often get around compensation packages as people are negotiating their offers is, well, I'm getting offered common stock, or I'm getting offered, you know, shares, or I'm getting options. What does that all mean? And the answer is, it can be different for every company. We can certainly help you to understand what, what a certain type of package is, but the actual value of those shares is something that you'll have to ask about. So a really savvy job seeker might ask questions like, how many shares are outstanding in subsequent rounds of funding? Are we expecting that to be. Are those dilution rounds meaning that the number of shares is going to grow and your shares will become worth less money? That's probably likely and that shouldn't scare you off. It's just good to know. It's just good to have the understanding. And that's a savvy thing to ask because ultimately you're basically, when you're joining a small company and you're getting some sort of equity, some form of shares or options, you have skin in the game, you're, you're a part owner. That's exciting. And you should also understand it fully. It can be very lucrative. I know a lot of people who have had, who used that equity in a startup to buy a house because the startup had a. Either we called it a liquidity event. The startup might have been purchased by a larger company, they might go public, they might license technology. There are many ways that those liquidity events can happen and those end up being payouts for the folks in the companies. And I've seen research associates buy houses with that. So maybe not the whole house, but a good down payment, let's say, um, that is a real, a real key to your compensation package and something you have a right to understand. And so those are questions even as you move through the interview process, the questions you're asking may change a little bit. So what I would encourage you to do is ask in the ask a recruiter room. If you are moving through an interview process and let's say you have a first interview with a recruiter, you may not ask those questions. That one. But let's say now you've gone through the interview process and you're about to have a discussion with HR about compensation or negotiating your offer. That's the time to ask those specific questions about how the compensation is structured. Thanks so much for listening to the.

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