Fall into Success: The Best Time to Apply for Jobs, plus other tips from our Live AMA September

Last week I did a really fun Ask Me Anything event in the community where I actually pulled the questions for this month's column from that event. So if you've read the column which came out this week, you will see some of these questions, but here I actually chat through them. Live with our community. So this gives you a little bit of a flavor for what our office hours are like. And if you would like to participate in next month's Ask Me Anything, join our Community. Join our mailing list and you will be notified when that will be. I hope you enjoy. Let me know what you think. 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, you're in the right place. So the first question is, what are the prospects and chances for immigrants in the biotech, pharma or food tech sector in the us? And the answer is and always has been they're actually really, really good. So I know it really might not feel like it at this moment. There's a lot of upheaval obviously in the biotech sector and we've seen seen layoffs and have a bit of a slowed hiring period. But that said, we do not produce enough scientists in this country to fulfill the needs of the biotech and associated industries. So we have always relied really heavily on a strong immigrant workforce. And what you'll find is a lot of allies in this process because the hiring managers, the executives at the companies, all of those people are either immigrants themselves or they have been mentored by and shepherded through by an amazing population of immigrants. So it's a really strong sector. A lot of people come and do their Master's or PhDs here and then just stay and work. It's more challenging in the fact that you have to navigate a pretty unwieldy visa system and that takes a little bit of education on your part. And unfortunately, the people who are the most educated in this and really can advocate for themselves tend to do a little bit better and to land jobs faster to get their green cards a little bit faster, but it is something that is accessible for people. So my, my recommendation is to find some great mentors who have already done it and also go back to our career chats that we've had. We have a great library of career chats that we've recorded. And every time I speak with somebody who has navigated that process, they share their journey. And, and at this point, we've heard lots of different paths. There's no one way to do this. Another thing to do is reach out to those folks in the community that I've interviewed on those career chats and make sure you're connected with them on LinkedIn. They're really, really happy to share what they've done. They're happy to share resources like their immigration attorney. They're happy to help in this process. So you're not alone in it, even though it feels really daunting. Now, the other thing I should say is that there are some companies that are more difficult to get into if you don't have permanent residency or green card already. And those tend to be the smaller companies that maybe they've got series A funding or seed funding. They're really not set up yet to have the resources in place to help to navigate that process. It's not that they wouldn't, but you might have to advocate more for yourself in those types of companies and you might have to bring the resources with you, which is challenging. Whenever I go and work with a company, pretty much the first thing I do is I try to get them set up, at least to be able to take OPT candidates, because there's a great workforce there. And that gives us three years to navigate the process of getting their H1B. And it's usually just a knowledge gap. Actually, once I explain the process and how easy it is to get that set up on the client side there, almost every client is very willing to do it. When, when I first get there, they're like, oh, no, we don't want to deal with it. It's a lot. And, you know, we're just trying to get set up right now. So there is a bit of education and I do that for my clients. But you may have to do that if you're applying for a company where they're saying that they are not willing to support, let's say, an opt, if that's where you are from there. I'd say the other kind of class of companies that it's hard to get into are ones that are funded by defense grants. So the DOD and like DARPA grants, those tend to be a little bit more challenging because they. A lot of times there are requirements that people have a green card or are citizens to be able to work on those projects. So our next pre submitted question that I'll jump into is this is what I get so much. And so if you are in office hours with me, you've heard me tell you how to handle this in a job interview, if they ask you about a skill you do not have, I've heard it's detrimental to say no outright. What is the best way to field such a question? Yeah, it's a good question. And it can be detrimental to say no outright. You want to be really positive when you're having an interview. You don't know what they're going to say. And so that kind of puts you in a situation where you're going to have to field things. And so a really good technique to practice is the improv techniques. And so there's some great books in that space and there's some games that we play sometimes, whenever you say no, or. But in a conversation, those put the brakes on a conversation. And so that goes also for if they ask you a question about your skills and the answer is no, I don't have it, that actually does put the brakes on the conversation. But you don't want to lie, right? This, we're not going to misrepresent ourselves or be disingenuous. So how do you handle it? I've got a couple of scripts that I will throw out there. So let's just say that you are asked, for instance, about your leadership experience and you don't actually have any formal leadership experience. You're going to hear some similarities in the scripts I'm going to run through, so listen for them. But I would start personally with something like, that's actually something that really attracted me to this job. So I started positively right? I didn't say no. I said that's actually something that really attracted me to this job. I have a lot of experience mentoring undergraduates, teaching lab members how to use equipment or how to do various assays. So the prospect of leading a team is actually something I'm really excited about and I would love to dig into that area. So I didn't say no. So I did say the transferable skills. Right. I talked about mentorship, talk about training. I talked about the things that actually make a great leader and I expressed my enthusiasm for that as the next step in my career. So in a scientific example, let's say it's an assay. I've picked out flow cytometry a lot of the time. In undergrad or in your PhD, you might have done flow cytometry, but the equipment's not always the best in our academic labs. So if they want multicolor flow, which is a very common request in jobs applications and you don't have that. So let's say they ask about that multicolor flow experience. You can say, again, listen for the similarities. That's something that really attracted me to this position. I love flow cytometry and I've really enjoyed designing, performing and analyzing single color flow assays. We didn't have a multicolor flow machine at my research institution, so I've been dying to expand my skill set in this area. That's one reason I'm so excited about jumping into industry. I'm a bit of a tech nerd and I really enjoy the idea of using cutting edge instrumentation. I've always picked things up really quickly and I'm excited to dig into this area. Do you hear that? I. I said no, but I didn't say no. And I think it demonstrates some of those transferable skills that you'd want to get in there. So the typical way I hear this answered when I'm interviewing candidates is no, but I have single color flow experience. I said the same thing. I just said it way, way more positively. So that's the script you're going to want to adapt and you're going to know what those things are because you will have read the job description closely and you're going to know which skills are the reach skills for you and you're going to want to paint those as exciting things you are dying to learn and that's why you applied for this job. Okay, I hope that helps. The next question is a bit of a philosophical question here, so I will handle it as well as I can. Are you seeing any signs of the market turning around? I hear this a lot. Right. I got this question actually in a couple different, different variations here. The answer is yes. And I've been trying to handle that in the newsletter. So our weekly Friday newsletter. I've been dropping some news stories in there about what the economy is looking like. And what I want to say is that our, our media in almost every area does us a disservice because if it bleeds, it leads and nobody reports on the good news or if they do, it's like a sidebar. It's not that that's the main focus of the news. So when a company does layoffs, that is newsworthy. When a company is hiring, that's not newsworthy. And I can just tell you that many of my clients are quietly ramping up their hiring. And there was just a report last week that I highlighted in the newsletter. This year we did see growth in the biotech sector in Massachusetts. Now, was it as strong as in previous years? No, it wasn't. But we are growing. And so despite the layoffs you're seeing, there are actually more jobs being added. So it's not overwhelming and it's not like it was in 2021. But I'll be honest, 2021 was a very unusual year, and we're having a bit of a correction from that year. But what we are seeing is steady hiring. And this leads me into. So I'll just say if you're not on our newsletter, be sure to subscribe to it, because every week I try and find something that kind of points to the economy and what we're seeing in the job market so that you can stay updated as well. So it's not all doom and gloom, I promise. That sort of leads me into another question that I got that's really interesting. And this person says, I heard that fall is a really good time to apply to jobs. Is that true? And. And what is the best time of year? Fall is a fantastic time to apply for jobs. August is the worst month of the year. Probably it's even worse than December. So the problem is that everybody, when I say everybody, I mean my hiring managers. I mean the people making decisions in the companies. Everybody's on vacation. They're all trying to get that last trip to Disney with the kids or whatever before the fall madness starts. And the last week before Labor Day in particular, I just take that week off. Like there's no point in any recruiting activity whatsoever. I can't assemble an interview team. I can't get a hiring manager to have a phone call with a candidate. I can't get candidates on the phone half the time. They're all on vacation, too. So what happens is that we get back from Labor Day and people in companies realize, oh crap, I have a job that I need to hire for before I lose it at the end of this budget cycle. And the annual budget meetings happen around Thanksgiving, so usually in November, they start to set the budgets for the next year. And if you haven't hired for your 2024 job, sometimes you lose it at that time because they'll determine that it's no longer relevant and so it's a use it or lose it sort of a thing a lot of the times in these biotechs. So you will get a hiring spree from September through October. It's a great time to apply. More jobs open up during that time than any other time of the year. And the other great time of year to apply is in the January, February, March time period. That's another really good hiring boom. What we start to see going into summer, again, people lose steam. It's just like hiring sort of follows the school year a little bit, I noticed. So as people get closer to summer, they sort of lose momentum. And then going into summer it gets a little bit slow and then we pick back up in fall. So you've got kind of, I'd say through April, it's pretty strong. So like January through April, that's a good time. If you are thinking about switching jobs, if you've got a job and you're thinking, oh, you know, my new year's resolution this year is to maybe level up and get that next job, get a different job, go for it right away. Don't wait till summer. That's my advice there. 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 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 want you if. All right, back to our show, let's circle back to that Breaking into biotech from an academic background. So again, it's a, it's a bit of a tough year. Last year was worse. This year we're seeing things pick up. So that's great. And anytime you're trying to break into biotech from an academic background, you are always going to need to highlight your transferable skills because you don't have actual industry experience. And you're going to see lots of job applications that say they require, you know, one to three years of industry. If you see that, don't let that scare you off. Okay, go for it anyway. And start to think about the format. I already told you about answering questions and how you might actually bring that into your resume because your transferable skills are the skills that are going to make up. If you know they want a year of leading a team in industry, well, you don't have that. I get that. So what have you done in academia to make up for that? What have you learned there? One thing that I think people forget about and I would highlight on your resume is people in industry worry that people in academia are not going to understand the fast paced nature of biotech. And the thing is, in academia, you're hustling, right? You don't always know where the next grant is coming from. You don't always know how long you're going to have funding. You might be racing to finish a paper before that funding runs out. There are a lot of things there that actually are very deadline driven. They're just different types of deadlines. But what we need to highlight is that, yes, we are deadline driven, we are motivated, we are disciplined, and that all transfers really well to industry. And so there's some techniques to do that. But it does take a little bit of practice. And I would say that as you get good at identifying what the pain points are in a job description. So I do have a podcast episode about identifying pain points. And if you're in any of our courses, you'll see that as a major focus for how to tailor your resume. Because you cannot tailor your resume until you've identified the pain points. When you've identified those pain points, that's when you get to craft your transferable skills into bullet points that really address those pain points and why you would alleviate that pain point. So that's what you want to have in your head as you were thinking about creating a resume or interviewing or even networking. As you're going to a networking event and asking questions and hearing what those pain points are, that's when you're going to start to formulate, okay, how would I address that? How would I answer that from my past experience? And your life is rich with experience, so you just have to find the pieces and pull them together. So one good way to do this is to think about stories that would answer these questions as well. When I interview candidates, I love to ask behavioral based questions. So tell me about a time when you overcame a challenge on a deadline. I don't care if it's an industry story or if it's a story from your undergrad or if It's a story from your childhood. I really don't care if you have a good story to tell me. And I'm riveted by your story. I'm going to walk away from that interview feeling like you're a great communicator. You articulated the problem, the solution, solution really well. So you have a lot to offer even if you don't have industry experience. So I hope that helps. I'm going to go through a couple of chat questions here. Go ahead and keep dropping questions. Okay, let's see. What's the overarching goal of the interviews with HR and recruiters that happens before the one with the hiring managers? Do they always understand the technical requirements of the role? I'm going to take these one at a time. What's the overarching goal? The overarching goal is to establish if you meet the minimum requirements so that we can bring you into the next step of the process. That's the goal. There are also some goals, depends how embedded a recruiter or an HR person is with the company, to understand if you would be the right fit for the company. And so when I say fit for the company, there are a lot of considerations there. For example, I work with a non profit and they require people to work on site in Manchester, New Hampshire, which is not a normal place. Right. It's not Cambridge. And so part of the interview process is, yeah, I want to understand their technical skills, fine. But I also really need to understand are they going to be happy actually working on site in Manchester, NH and if not, it's just a no. And it doesn't have anything to do with their technical skills. And so there are some things like that that we're also assessing. The other part of that is the nonprofit piece, we simply do not pay as well as Takeda. And so I have to understand what their salary requirements are. Again, it's a non starter if they're expecting. If they've been working at Takeda, for instance, I bring up Takeda because Takeda is one of those historically, it's a hard place to pry people out of because they have really good compensation. That's not just base compens. Way beyond that. There are bonuses on bonuses there. So it's really hard to even calculate somebody's compensation at Takeda. And so I have to understand a couple of things about this person as well. So that's what I'm interviewing for. It's a 15 minute conversation. Typically I am in and out. I know what I'm looking for. I know what I'm going to ask and it doesn't need to be drawn out. So you need to be prepared to be concise in those calls. We typically do a lot of calls because it's a funnel. When I look at the data for this, I'm going to interview for any given role, maybe 20 candidates so that the hiring manager can interview seven. Okay. So I'm, I'm a little wide up here. I'm going to talk to anybody who on paper is looking like they're going in the right direction and then I'm going to bring it down for the hiring manager. So that call is going to be like a 30 minute call because they don't have to interview as many people, there's more time. So be prepared to be quite concise in those interviews. And I think that leads into the next question. Do they always understand the technical requirements of the role? Most do not. That is why you need to be an excellent communicator and you need to really understand what you are trying. Again, going back to the job, what's the pain point? How are you going to address that pain point? In layman's terms, you should not use technical jargon in these. This is a chance for you to give a big picture and that's really all the recruiter typically is going to be looking for. Now, my team are PhD level recruiters for the most part, so we do understand the technical, but we're still not looking for you to give us a dissertation. We do not have time for that. So that just means that we may be able to get to the point a little bit quicker and to sort of dig in on a couple of little areas. But we are still expecting you to come to these with a really concise, well thought out way of answering these questions. The next piece of this is do they aim to find out what's not already in the resume and cover letter if you've done your job? No, because nothing should be left out of the resume and cover letter that isn't directly applicable to the job. Again, if you are struggling to get interviews or you're struggling with those first interviews, we have a set of really concise courses that teaches you how to pick apart the job description so that you know going in what they're going to ask you already, the recruiters, since they don't really have a deep technical knowledge, for the most part, they're not going to be able to ask you lots of wide ranging questions. And you know, the best, the best interviews I have are when somebody did a fantastic job tailoring their resume. And I'm really now just having a very polite conversation with them because they actually tailored their resume and I know what they are going to say. So in that case, it's really straightforward where I'm having to pick things out and I'm like, well, they kind of mentioned this or this is sort of close. And I then I have to kind of get down to do they actually have the skill I'm looking for? So make my job easy and just put it in the resume. It'll be a nice conversation, I promise you that. Okay. I'm still working on my PhD, so this might be a naive question. Sorry about that. There is no naive question. Honestly. Nobody teaches you this. Nobody teaches you this, so it's fine. And that's why I'm doing this. I was also a very naive PhD at one point. Next question. Any good keywords to use when job hunting for someone with no graduate education? Yes. Read the job description and use the language of the job that's actually in the same podcast episode. So you're going to want to look for a podcast episode called something along lines of how to truly decipher a job description. That is the podcast episode for you. There's no keyword for graduate education or anything like that. You can put that to rest. We're looking for the skills and the way you should be tailoring your resume. I don't even want to see your education at the top. I want to know why you're the right candidate for the job up top. So you get to move that all the way to the bottom of your resume. And you get the opportunity to steer the conversation by creating a really, really, absolutely impactful top third of your resume. That's what I'm going to see when I open it up. And that's where you get to tell me what I'm looking for. So that's where the keywords live. And so two jobs that are identical, you could have two molecular biology jobs. They could have different language in them, and they will, because two different people wrote them. So that's where you are tailoring your resume. You want to make sure you're including the language from those two different jobs in the appropriate resumes. It doesn't take very long. But it's a technique that we use in conversation too, called mirroring. When you are having a really good conversation with somebody and you're driving with them, you actually humans just do this. We mirror each other's body language. You might lean in A little bit. When they lean in, you might lean back a little bit. You might smile. When they smile, you can do that in a resume, too. Mirror the job description. Whatever they're saying in the job description, put that in your resume. If they use certain terminology, if they use certain abbreviations, use those. That immediately triggers the person reading it to think, oh, they're like me. They understand this really well. And that's going to make your resume stand out to them. So those are the keywords. I'm going to try and squeeze in another question here. We can do it. If you're finishing your PhD, when is the best time to think about applying? Honestly, we do not plan ahead more than six weeks. I have never worked on a job where they're like, oh, well, let's, let's start hiring now because we might hire for this six months from now. That's not how this industry is. It's very reactive. It is very driven by the immediate research need. And so, unfortunately, starting to apply six, eight months out, that's going to be really disappointing for you. You're going to have a lot of conversations. You might find a job you're really excited about. It's probably not going to be there in six to eight months. Now, if it's a bigger company and it's something where they're kind of always hiring for a certain type of role, you could absolutely start networking into that space. And in fact, that's what you should be spending your time on right now. Six to eight months out. Build your network. Definitely dig into our LinkedIn course, because that is all about putting coins in the piggy bank for what comes next, which is when you are ready, you're going to now have a network of people who are working in those companies you're interested in. You can go to them and get your resume handed to the right person as opposed to applying into the applicant tracking system. So that only comes though after months and months of work, really years sometimes. But eight months is a good window. You can make a good start at this. All right, everyone, thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. I didn't get to everything. I'm going to take a quick screenshot of the rest of the questions and see if I can pop them into the chat in our community. Community. Because there are good questions here. I hope this was helpful for you. And if you have questions, I'm always in our community, so just drop them in there, too. All right, have a great day, everyone. Thank you so much. You're so welcome. There you have it. We had a really fun ask me anything event. The participation was great. I think everyone got some things out of it. So if you would like to be there next month, you know how to do it. Jump on our mailing list, join our community and stay tuned for when those events will be. Thanks so much. I had a lot of fun with this episode and I will see you next week. Thanks so much for listening to the Biotech Career Coach Podcast by the Collaboratory Career Hub. To join our free Slack group and to get access to other great free resources and materials, head over to CollaboratoryCareerHub.com and be sure to connect with me on LinkedIn. Pro Tip when you connect with me on LinkedIn, you get instant access to my entire network of biotech folks, which is powerful for your career. If you found this podcast valuable, please subscribe or follow us on YouTube so that you never miss an episode. And if you leave us an honest review, screenshot that review and send it to helloollaboratorycareerhub.com we'll give you totally free access to our popular LinkedIn course so that you can learn all of the secrets behind creating a magnetic LinkedIn profile that drives your career forward. Have an amazing week and we'll see you back here next Friday.