Job Application Strategies for Biotech and Beyond

This week I'm giving you a sneak peek into our live virtual event that's called Ask Me Anything I Do this monthly. So if you'd like to come to the next one and get your question answered, just be sure you're on our mailing list. I send out an email about that to everybody. You can find that@library collaboratorycareerhub.com or you can find that in our Show Notes and get on our mailing list. I send out the podcast invite and I send out all of our upcoming live events like this one. So enjoy. You get a little sneak peek into what we do in those live events and hopefully you get a lot of questions answered. I also wrote a column with a lot of these pieces in it, so I'll link that in the Show Notes as well. That was our November BioSpace Career Coach column. If you head to Biospace and you go to the Careers section and scroll down, you will see my Career Coach columns there. 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. All right, we have a ton of questions submitted today so I'm going to jump in. I want to make sure we get to as many questions as possible and hopefully also have time for Q and A from the chat. We're going to start first with a couple of questions about LinkedIn and networking. First question is hi, if I've applied to a job posting on LinkedIn but there's no hiring manager or HR rep listed, who could I potentially contact for more information about my application? Conversely, if there's a direct content on the job posting, should I reach out, what do you say and when is it appropriate to follow up with a message? We'll start first with if there's no hiring manager or HR rep listed with that posting. So this ties into the next pre submitted question we have. So I'm going to roll this into one and so I'm going to take these in a couple of stages. So the next Question is, when you're networking on LinkedIn, how do you decide who to connect to from a company you're interested in? So if you are applying to a job and you're interested in a company but you don't know who specifically to contact, you should look for people who will be your peers in that company. So you're not going to reach out to the CEO. If you are not going to be a C suite level person in that company, you're not going to reach out to the VP of Discovery. If you're going to be an entry level scientist, you are going to look for people who are at the same title you're applying for and maybe one title up and down. So if you're applying for a scientist position, you might reach out to other scientists, obviously research associates, and then also potentially senior scientists or principal scientists. These are going to be the people that you are rubbing shoulders with on a daily basis in that job. They're going to be the most likely to engage in conversation with you because they're going to see you as a peer and what you say when you reach out. There's a clear formula for this and you can find it in a number of the resources that I have on my podcast and in columns. But there's a clear formula for these outreach messages and it is. You start with their name. Names are magical. Your first name is the most important word to you. It's very well documented in human psychology. So start with hi, name, hi Karina. And then you want to compliment them and you can compliment them on their choice of company or the type of role they're in. So you can say something like, abbott is doing really exciting work in disease area indication. So you're complimenting them indirectly, right? You're not making some weird compliment about their profile picture or something like that. You're complimenting their choices, their place of work. And that's really powerful too. So high name, compliment, open ended question. So then you want to say something very open ended. You don't want to dive right in and say, I need your help with this application or can you recommend me for this? That will shut things down. When you come from a place of asking, people tune you out and they automatically go on the defensive. When you come from a place of curiosity about them, about their role, then you open the line of dialogue. There's a lot of ways you can phrase this open ended question and it might be something very simply, what's it like being a translational scientist? How do you like working in Cambridge So a nice open ended question that opens that dialogue and, and then a few messages deep. Let the exchange go on. A few messages without any asks, make that really clear. Do not ask them for anything. A few messages deep. When the conversation is going, you can say, thanks so much, you've convinced me. It sounds like Abbott is a great place and I'm going to go ahead and apply for this role I saw and then just leave it there. Because you know what, there's often incentives for people to refer people into their company and at that point they may offer to have a call with you or to take your resume or something along those lines. But the most important thing is that you open that dialogue with as many people in the company that are at the level, one above or one below and start those conversations. All right. Now the second part of that first question was if there is a contact on the job posting, should you reach out? And the answer there is absolutely yes. And that can be a little bit more direct. So again, you want that first name in there. Hi, name. It sounds like Abbott is a fantastic company. I've just applied to X position. I'm curious if you could tell me a little bit about and then have a very specific question. I'm curious if you could tell me about the projects that this role will directly impact or something along those lines. So you really want to ask them a question that's going to make them understand that you've read the job posting, you're excited about the company, you're passionate about that disease area and that's going to open the line of communication to that person. All right? So I hope that really helps. When is it appropriate to follow up with a message? I would follow up or I would send that initial message right after you apply. So make sure your application is in the system so that they can go and look for your name in the system right after you have sent that message. All right. So we get so many questions about LinkedIn and people get really nervous about it. But let me just sum up LinkedIn like this. Too many people come at me asking for my help and I can tell you that turns people off. LinkedIn is not a place to go and demand for help. If you can come from a place of curiosity, from a place of wanting to form genuine connections, you are going to be so much better off there. So just know that it's difficult. You're going to have to practice that a little bit. But you are also welcome to come into the community and drop notes into the LinkedIn questions. Section, maybe you rough out an introduction invitation or something that you want to send and get feedback from us. See how it lands with other people in the community before you hit send. That'll help a lot. All right, the next bucket of questions. I have three here. The next bucket is getting entry level positions. So basically breaking out from academia into industry. And obviously we get a lot of questions here. This is a hot button issue right now. There are several themes in these questions. Many of the questions have multiple parts. So I'm going to paraphrase here. One person said that they actually did make the switch, but they got laid off right away and now they're having trouble. They had just barely gotten their feet wet in industry and they got laid off. They're having trouble getting that. What would be their second job. Because everything seems like it requires two years of experience. This is a really common thing right now. We are seeing this often. So they have academic research experience, but are not having much success with the job applications. How do they improve their chances? There's a lot of things to unpack there. In general, if you are applying for jobs and you're not hearing back, your resume is not good enough. And this is a hard thing to hear. And I need you to hear me, okay? I see hundreds and hundreds of resumes a week. My day job is I am the fractional head of talent acquisition for five different companies right now. I am absolutely steeped in candidates. Every day I look at resumes and as a rule, most of them are really bad. And I'm telling you this out of love and candor, okay? If you're not hearing back, if you're not getting interviews, it's because your resume is not good enough. We are getting a lot of applications, yes. But the number of people who take the time to actually tailor their resume such that I want to know more about them is so small that anyone who does it gets an interview. When I'm looking at hundreds of resumes, I am not able to sit there and read a block of text. I'm not going to do it because I don't have the mental energy. And no recruiter in our industry does right now. It's just the nature of the job. So what I need you to do is to create a resume that immediately, when I open it up, I can understand what job you applied to and why you're qualified. What is your value proposition? Okay. Not what do you want, what do you bring to the company? A good resource for you is a couple of weeks ago, I released a podcast called 10 Resume Mistakes. And I also released a column in Biospace also called 10 resume mistakes that is a really good resource for seeing where my head is at when I'm looking at resumes and what is wrong with them. I also invite you to email me if you want our resume template. And the biggest mistake that I see when people come and they grab our resume template is that they still hold onto the idea that they're trying to fit their old resume with all that information just into the new template. And that's not it. You pretty much are going to trash your old resume and it's going to feel really uncomfortable. You are going to hate it. And that's okay because that's how we grow. Because most resumes are terrible. And if you talk to anybody who has been actually implementing our resume template, they're getting interviews really consistently. So this is a point where you put aside the ego and you say, you know what? Yeah, I went to school for molecular biology, not for writing resumes. I'm going to admit that my resume is probably terrible. I'm going to just go ahead and trash it and start over with this new resume template. Do that, please, and you will absolutely find more success. Now, there are a lot of jobs out there, and we are seeing a lot of applicants for jobs. But these aren't necessarily unemployed people. A lot of people who apply for jobs are happily employed elsewhere. They're just looking for other opportunities. They're looking for the next step up, to level up, et cetera. So one of the questions we got here within this is that this individual feels there's a really high unemployment rate in biotech. That's not actually true. The unemployment rate in biotech is not outpacing the national unemployment rate. In fact, it's slightly lower. So what that means is that there are a lot of applicants, but we end up hiring a lot of people out of other companies that are happily employed, just looking for the next step up. And those individuals typically have more experience writing resumes, and sometimes their resumes are a little bit better, and that's why they get the interview. Also, of course, networking plays a huge role in this. So it's a lot of information right now. But this all just goes to say that your resume is your entryway, especially if you don't have a network. But if you do have a network and you have a good Resume, you are 10 levels up from other applicants. So get into LinkedIn network, get your resume in order, and I'll take the next question here. How do you then start applying for entry level internships and positions. So now that you have your new resume template and you are ready to go apply for these jobs, you have to tailor your resume and that's absolutely essential. You may not have traditional industry experience, or you may have very little industry experience, but you have fantastic translatable skills. You have worked in labs, you have run experiments, you have mentored people, you have trained people. There's a lot going for you. We just need to put that into your resume in a marketing way. So how are we going to market that experience that is transferable so that people look at that and they're not comparing the number of years of experience, they're comparing how you have positioned your experience. So that's really key. So for example, the first case here, we had this person who just worked a couple of months and got laid off. You can look at it two ways in they're applying for entry level positions, they've got months of experience on any other candidate. Right. That's great. If they are applying for jobs that need maybe two years of experience, well, they do have that biochemistry experience from their undergrad or their grad degree. I can't really tell from this question. So how do we translate that? You'll want to do a bullet point that specifically says something along the lines of developed 5 assays for, for gene editing or something like that. So you want to pull out what's important from the job description. Pull that out and don't put any context in it. You don't need to say whether it was in your undergrad, your master's degree or in industry. I just need to know you've done it and I need to know that you can articulate it. So you're going to look at the job description very carefully and you're going to take your experience and frame it with the language and the intent of industry. And industry gets things done. So you want to be very action oriented in those bullet points. So I do teach how to do that with our resume template. It's really important that you learn how to frame your experience because that's the only way you're going to be able to tell me why I should continue looking at your resume and scroll down at all. Okay. How do you find entry level positions? This person applied directly to companies on their website, but no replies. Again, I'm going to just cite the resume. The resume wasn't good enough. And that's why if there are internships posted, people are getting interviewed for it. So you just need to make yourself one of those people. Let's go back to the resume networking. So if you want to go onto LinkedIn that some companies have internships, you're going to want to actually network with people that are in those departments and that might feasibly be the ones mentoring those interns. So that would be likely scientist level people. Because when most of my clients hire interns, part of the reason we hire interns is to give management and training experience to people that we're evaluating for promotions. So we like to promote people into senior scientists, principal scientist roles who have some demonstrated managerial experience. And that's really hard to get in small companies especially. But even in traditional teams where things are layered with hierarchy, we typically need to bring in interns to, to give those individuals that experience. So start to look for scientists that are within the group or the group you think the internship will be in and start networking with them. Those will be the soft entry points into that job. Look at past interns, you go to the company page and at the top it'll say the number of employees and you can click on that and then you can see all the employees there. And then you can run some basic searches, but you can search by keyword and you could search for intern and you, you can find the interns that were there before and you can network with them, ask them how their experience was, who did they work with, what was the overall impression of the internship, and they may be able to provide you some soft entries there. There's a lot of ways you can leverage your network there. And then the final thing that I'm going to say here is in response to a question that was along these same lines, and again, I am coming at this conversation with you with absolute honesty and candor. So, so this is not meant to be harsh in any way. If you are sending me questions that are, let's just say, not worded well, grammatically incorrect, have spelling errors. If you're sending messages to me like that, are your applications, your emails, your networking messages, are you checking those with something like Grammarly? Are you ensuring that you are not ever in your process presenting yourself as someone without attention to detail? This is so important. So from now on, I want all of you to just absolutely ingrain this in who you are. Every communication matters, even to me, right? Practice on me. Every communication you send matters, whether it's an application, Whether it's a LinkedIn message, an email, I don't care. We have many times in my history with clients, we have eliminated a candidate from an interview or even at the offer stage because of an email they sent, because of a way that they presented themselves. I don't want to scare you, but that is the reality. So I highly recommend a tool like Grammarly. It is a free tool, but I think they limit your use on the free tool. I have the paid version and it's very affordable and it actually follows me around everywhere on my computer, even in my mail client that an app on my computer. So not in my browser. It's in Google Workspace, which is my workspace. I can pretty much edit anything on my computer with Grammarly and I don't take all the suggestions, but it's very helpful and it definitely calls out anything that is egregiously bad. In what I'm writing, I usually catch all the grammatical issues, even if I'm going quickly. This is an important tip, so I just want to highlight that because when I see somebody saying they're not having any luck with their applications and there are at least 10 issues with the two sentence question they sent in, I am telling you right now, that's probably your problem. Okay, we have to be presenting ourselves as the impeccably detail oriented person that we are, because that's biotech. We have to be that detail oriented. 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. One person here is asking, where can we even find jobs if companies aren't posting them necessarily on LinkedIn. So Google Jobs actually crawls individual websites and so you should be able to find almost any job that's been posted online. If it's online, it will end up on Google Jobs. My one caveat there is that Google Jobs indexes everything, which means that sometimes they index jobs multiple times. Because if there's a recruiting firm working on a job, it may show up from their website and the company's website. So always try and go directly to the company website to apply if possible as opposed to applying through a third party website. So I see on Google Jobs, I'll see the company's version. I'll see one from Indeed. It's a little bit all over the place. So go to the company website when you find a job you're excited about about. And to access Google Jobs. Google changes their interface all the time. Their UI changes often. Go to Google and simply Google the job title that you're looking for. Let's say you want a molecular biology job. I'll just stay there. Let's say you're looking for a senior scientist, molecular biology and then you'll put job and then Boston, something like that. You'll just have to scroll down, you'll see job listings and you'll be able to click on jobs and then you'll go into a different interface with all the jobs. And there you can really break things down. You can search. It's a nice place to figure out where to find jobs that are maybe not indexed on LinkedIn. Okay, the next question here we touched on a little bit, but this person was concerned about the unemployment rate in biotech. Like I said, it's not higher than the national unemployment rate. It doesn't mean people aren't unemployed, but it's not egregiously high. So just know that you can edge out the other people who are looking for jobs so simply by presenting yourself better at the application stage. Because so few people do it. I usually interview 10% of the applicants for jobs. That number can vary if I get a wildly high number of applicants. But out of every hundred applicants for a job, we try to pick eight to 10 people to have a conversation with. All you have to do is be in the top 10%. And I can tell you right now, if you tailor your resume, you will easily be in the top 10% because nobody does it. So it's not that hard. But it is some effort. They are asking about trends for next year. We're seeing things picking up. I talked to a lot of people on the funding side and investors are putting their money back to work. We're seeing a turnaround in that. We're seeing more IPOs. It is looking up, so go ahead and keep pounding the pavement. But we are seeing that the trend is trending upward. I think 2025 is going to be a much better year for us. And my clients are looking that way. They're all thinking about doing next funding rounds next year and it's looking up. So rest assured that this market correction that we've been experiencing feels like it's starting to ease. And then the last question that was pre submitted last week I did a panel discussion with BioSpace. You can actually go and watch that panel discussion. It was a really good discussion and we actually talked about market trends there. Chantal, who's the moderator, she went over their jobs report that they do every quarter and that was really great. So go back and watch that if you. It's a totally free webinar. You can just go onto bio space on the careers page. You'll see it right there. But one thing that I mentioned in that was how important bringing the energy is when you have a zoom interview. And a lot of candidates come across as very low energy in their interviews and it's because zoom steals some of your energy. It's really true. And so I mentioned that you need to hype yourself up to be really effective in zoom interviews and to leave your interviewer feeling like you were enthusiastic. And so the question here is, what if that feels forced? How can I make that feel more natural? I get that. I've had speech coaching and honestly, it will always feel forced to be high energy. I don't care if you're doing presentations from stage, if you're doing job talks or if you're doing zoom interviews. The best speakers actually have had training on how to bring the energy and there are some great books out there. You don't need to go have expensive speech training or anything like that. I certainly have and I don't begrudge it because it's made me a much better speaker. But I do hype myself up beforehand and it just takes practice to make it feel natural. So for a little while you are going to feel uncomfortable. You're going to feel like you're like, ah. And you're not. I promise you that you are going to just come across as more natural when you feel like, oh, I'm really amping this up. So my advice is to practice with a friend and take note of how you naturally interact, maybe a little more animatedly with a friend. And how can you just bring that up a little bit and then they can tell you if you seem totally over the top. But I bet they're just going to tell you that you seem enthusiastic, you seem excited and interested. And that's what we want from candidates. We want a candidate who comes and feels like they want to be there in the interview with us. So we do gosh this week, I think we have 40 phone screens scheduled with candidates across the different companies that I'm working with. And probably half of those, my recruiter that helps me with the phone screens comes back and says the person felt a little low energy and they probably weren't. But that's just the perception when you don't actually bring the hyped energy. Okay? So it's practice, practice, practice. That's how you make it feel natural. And it will pay off because eventually it'll become natural. And then in all of your company meetings going forward and all of the meetings you have and all the presentations you have, you're going to be able to turn on that energy and engage your audience a little bit more easily. All right, let's jump into the chat. We've got some chat questions here. How can I detect scam job posts, positions that are not hiring right away, or a courtesy post that's hiring internally? Scam posts. I'll just say this. Scam posts might be not attached to a company. You might see a posting that is just through a recruiting firm with no mention of the company. Those may be scam posts. They may not. I always say, try not to apply to jobs through a recruiting firm if they don't mention the client's name. Sometimes those people are just getting resumes. They're just gathering a bunch of candidates so that in the future they'll have people to reach out to for jobs. If you're applying directly to a company, it's probably not a scam post. However, it may be a post that they're not hiring for right now. And it may be a post that they're posting because they have to, because they're also interviewing an internal candidate and they need to go through the motions of hiring in order to satisfy the board. Usually they'll actually interview two other candidates in that case. So you may even get interviewed and not get the job. There's really no way to detect that. One thing you can do when you have a conversation with a recruiter is you can say, what is the timeline for this position? And do you have any other candidates that are far along in the process? And they can then choose to say, yes, we do have another candidate, we're about to make an offer, or something like that, just so you don't get your hopes up. They can also choose not to say that. I don't have a really great answer for that because it's difficult to detect. And this is why you have to apply for multiple jobs. If you're doing a good job of tailoring your resume and you're applying for jobs that are well suited to you and your skill set. You should be getting interviews about 40% of the time. So those other 60%, they may not be real posts, some of them. You may just not be selected for some of them because your skill set's a little bit of a mismatch. But there's some percentage that are not going to be really hiring right now. And I don't know what to say about that other than that's why you apply to multiple jobs. All right, how do I find good recruiters for entry level positions? So I am a little biased against recruiters. I'll be honest here. A lot of people think they need to work with a recruiting firm to get jobs. That's actually not a good way to do it. So recruiters are not out to help you. They're out to get paid by the companies. So first of all, never pay a recruiter to help you. That is not a thing. That is not a business model. And if you ever see something like that, bring it to me. I want to know about it. Because there are still scams going on out there. You should not have to pay a recruiter to help you. We get paid by the companies. So there's a number of ways we get paid by the companies, but we never take money from the candidates. We never ask the candidates to give us money in return for. We'll make sure you get. We shop you around and we're going to get you into this company or that company. That's not how it works. And so you can submit your resume to recruiting firms directly just to be in their database. And that's great. But what you're really going to want to do is look for jobs that you actually want to apply to and target networking into those jobs. Target really nicely tailored applications for those jobs. That's what's going to really, really help you. Okay, so just, just a big caveat there. Never pay a recruiter to help you. Okay. Even though I have academic research experience, I'm looking into alternatives to R and D such as clinical research, quality control, et cetera. Yeah. So there's so many positions you could go into. And one thing I'll just say here is, and this ties into your. Should I get a master's? One really good tactic for entry level people who are having trouble because they don't have a lot of lab experience yet. Look for academic labs where you might spend a year as a paid research associate. And it's not going to pay the same as industry, but it's not that far off for an entry level position. And we really need people in the academic labs. So that's a really great place to think about getting some experience and cutting your teeth a little bit. That may be more valuable to you than a Master's. I don't find typically that the master's degree itself is something that my clients are like, oh, they have a master's, so they're going to be so much better. It's the experience, experience. It's the hands on experience now that can come through a Master's. But if you do choose a master's program, choose one that really heavily relies on helping people get internships. Northeastern is the favorite. Northeastern has a fantastic co op program. You're required to do co ops. They help you get them and we look at those more favorably. We don't really care about the masters, we care that you did the co ops because that's the hands on experience. So whether you go and work a year in an academic lab or two years, think about the master's degree. How long is that going to be? Maybe you could just go work that time instead of paying for a master's. You could be getting some experience. And that experience is going to be what I'm really care about. When I look at your resume really quickly, if you are relocating or you're willing to relocate, you know what, at the top of your resume, inject a little personality. I don't care how you do it. Some people just say willing to relocate. I prefer to see a little enthusiasm there. How about happy to relocate or excited to relocate to Boston? Something like that. Tell them right up front that yep, you are on it. You are willing and happy. All right everyone, I have to jump. I've got to go present an offer to a candidate. That's the best part of my day. Absolutely love doing that. So I hope this was valuable to you. Thank you so much for coming and we will see you next time. Thanks so much for listening to the Biotech Career Coach podcast by the Collaboratory Career Hub to join our free Slack Group 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. 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