Mastering Industry Job Talks: A Step-by-Step Guide

How do you prepare for an industry job talk? This is a question I get asked a lot. So today I'm going to go into great detail about exactly how to prepare an industry job talk that will land you a job. Whether you're currently preparing for a talk or it's on your horizon, this episode is one to come back to when you are ready to get that job talk together. So let's dive in. 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 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, to start out, you are going to need to craft a really good introduction. You're going to want to set the stage for your talk. Candidates sometimes lose their audience really early in the job talk because they don't start with a compelling reason to want to continue listening. So we're going to treat this a little bit like a social media post and you're going to want to start with a really good hook. If you need to research this, I suggest you go to YouTube and see how people start out their videos with questions with something compelling and engaging. At the beginning of this podcast, I said who it was for immediately. If you go back and listen to that, that is my hook that immediately perks up people's ears. If they're indeed preparing for a job talk, you can do the very same thing in a science talk. You have come to give this talk for a reason. You have gotten through part of the interview process. They are excited to hear what you have to say and now you need to hook them in. So this can be an anecdote, a surprising fact, or a question that sort of captures the audience's attention. Then you'll want to introduce yourself very briefly, and I mean briefly. We're talking about maybe 20, 30 second introduction and then you're going to want to outline your talk using a roadmap slide. I really like well done roadmap slides because these foreshadow what's to come in the talk and they give people a reason to keep listening because they think, oh, okay, we're going to learn three things in this talk, and then you will provide clear transitions between those things during your talk. Let's take the example of an immunologist applying to a cancer immunology science position as their first industry role out of a postdoc. A really compelling hook might be something like imagine a world where our immune system can be trained to fight off not just infections, but also chronic diseases like cancer. As an immunologist, I've spent my academic career studying the intersection of immunology and cancer, and today I'm gonna share some of my relevant research and how it aligns with the innovative vision of this company. But first, a little about me. That hook asks a compelling question, it ties it back to the job, and it leads seamlessly into your introduction about yourself. Now, this introduction should be very short. It really should just introduce you and your passion for why you're interested in this role without going into the nitty gritty about your entire background, because you're going to demonstrate that through the rest of your talk. And then finally this overview and this sort of comes to the organization of the talk. And usually it's an hour long talk, but we want to leave about 15 minutes for question and answer, whether that happens throughout the talk or at the end. So you should organize your talk to be about 45 minutes in length and within that you should prepare two to three short stories. Now, I really like three because three is a number that humans love like, and it looks really good on a slide. This is where you could introduce these three short stories or vignettes that are going to be little pieces of the research you did before. And you're going to choose the most relevant projects for the role. And you want to also choose projects that you can show your thought process, some troubleshooting, some things that went wrong that you fixed, and how this knowledge directly solves some of the problems that were advertised in the role. So I want to point you back to a previous episode on Dissecting Job Descriptions that I will link in the show notes, but that is really relevant here as well. So many times people go into job talks and they ramble on about their research without tying it back to the problem. And we advertised a job to solve a problem that is so important to remember. It's a really different application than all of the talks you gave in grad school, which were to inform people about your research. We've advertised this role because we are lacking somebody with that expertise and skill set. So as you were able to dissect the job description and you see that there are themes coming up in the job description, and again, refer back to that podcast episode. It's really, really good for helping you to read a job description and pull out the relevant things. You're going to start to notice patterns in that job. You might notice keywords that they use a lot. You might notice soft skills that come up over and over, like collaborative or innovative. Those sorts of things. You want to then tie into your job talk with every single story that you craft. In this job talk, you're going to drive it home at the end of the story with how the knowledge and the techniques, the skills, the soft skills that you gained through that project are going to be directly applicable to solving the problem that we need solved in the company. Okay, so on your roadmap slide, you are going to have these three different vignettes organized simply as titles. You want this slide to be really simple. You're not giving a lot of detail here. You're teasing people and you want to tease people with a little bit of a foreshadowing. So, for example, if one of your projects dealt with immune cell signaling, you might have a bullet point that simply says something along the lines of immune cell signaling as a key indicator of tumorigeneity. Then you're going to verbally say one sentence about that and tie it right back to the job description. What's really key here is not to clutter your slides with lots and lots of words. You want slides to be simple, to the point, and something that people can immediately glance at and then refocus on what you are saying. That's really hard for graduate students. A lot of the time. We're used to putting all the data on the slides, but I would argue even as graduate students, this is not a good idea. Slides can be a distraction and not an asset to your talk if they are too cluttered. It's really important to let the slides be more visual aids rather than putting lots of text on them. Choosing images and cartoons that you create that really help to illustrate what you are saying is going to be your friend in all talks. Not just job talks, but especially in job talks. The next part of your talk is going to be really crafting storytelling into each and every one of your vignettes. You want to really explain the big picture problem and why it matters. Then you're going to want to bring a personal connection, so tie it back to the patients, to the greater good, to the healthcare industry, to Impacting human health care, Whatever the company's mission is, you're really going to want to hit this hard here. This is the why they should listen. Why should they care? So it's the what, the why, and the so what. So what did you do about it? This is the research journey. You're going to want a story arc here as well. And a really good tip within storytelling is to hearken back to the improv world. I really love improv games to help people learn how to be better public speakers and better storytellers. So you want to be really positive in the way you're presenting things using the yes and framework, which is a fantastic improv technique. And I really like the storytelling pattern. And. But therefore. So when you're telling a story, especially one where you want to show your ability to think through problems, and let's face it, your research work, whether it's academic or an industry, is riddled with problems. Nothing ever works perfectly on the first time. We are always troubleshooting things. We are always tweaking things. This is a perfect place to string people through your story arc using the and but therefore method. So basically, you are going to. Yes. And yourself you're going to tell them, okay, here was the problem, and we did this, but this happened, therefore we did the next thing. I found a really nice example of this framework in an oceanography example, actually. So here we go. The seawhip coral may serve as an essential habitat for many commercially valuable species in the mid Atlantic. And there has been evidence of damage and overgrowth by fouling organisms of seawhips in fished areas. But little is known about the coral reefs, nor the individual seawhips that compromise them, despite their potential importance to commercial fisheries. Therefore, we are examining the age, colony complexity, growth, and regrowth after damage of seawips from four sites in the Delmarva region in an effort to reconcile this knowledge gap. That's a really nice scientific example there. You heard me pause and emphasize and. But. And therefore. Go ahead and rewind that if you didn't. If you can pull that through your story arc, it makes it much, much more compelling because you are pulling the audience along. You're giving them a little bit more reason to keep listening. Wow, look at this. And this. But this, therefore this. It's a really compelling way to tell stories and certainly something that, if you incorporate it into your three vignettes, is going to keep your audience very engaged. Hey, friends, I just want to cut in one quick moment to tell you about a really exciting development in our community. For a long time we have housed our community in Slack, but that poses a lot of challenges. First of all, it separates everybody away from our course content and it doesn't allow us a really good platform to be able to search back through all of the great messages and threads that we've been curating. So to that end, we are moving our community into Kajabi, which has a really beautiful course platform that integrates well with the community platform. And we're going to be launching within the next few weeks an app in the App Store that is a totally branded app just for the biotech career coach community. So if you want access to all of that, please be sure that you're on our mailing list so that we can get you into that community and you can be a part of our really great journey. I've been working really hard on getting this community set up just for you. We are going to be doing monthly career chats with industry experts. We're going to be doing other live events. We're going to have exclusive Q and A sessions. It is something you definitely want to be a part of if you are a biotech professional. Whether you're on the job market or you're climbing the career ladder, I am really excited to help you out at any stage and to provide a really great place for you to connect with other peers. So be sure to be on the mailing list because we are adding everybody on the mailing list to this new community next week. I can't wait to see you in there. Now let's get back to the show. The next thing I want to touch on is really keeping slides simple and effective. This is essential. I cannot tell you how much I never want to see an ugly Western blot again. It is not necessary in your slides to present all of your raw data. What is important is to present really nice examples briefly and very clean, not complex graphs separate things out. They don't need to be the same images that you published in your papers. You can create visuals images, you can create cartoons, you can create graphs and data representations just for this talk that have not been published before that are really independent of what maybe you've published, but with the intent to very clearly and concisely communicate your points. If you think about the body of work that you've published, those papers were really dense and you had to Satisfy reviewer number three with, you know, 15 new control experiments. And there's just so much stuff in those papers. But the actual reason you wrote the paper is usually very Simple. So if you can simplify your message in these talks down to the parts that really matter. And then if you're worried about wanting to present more original data, put those into some supplemental slides that you can flip through during the Q and A. The visual design should also be very consistent throughout your presentation. Choose two fonts that go together. Google things like font pairs. Graphic designers with really good eyes have already chosen really nice font pairs. And font pairs would be something that you would use in the context of your headline would be always the same font. And then the body stuff that you put in the meat of your slides, that would be a different but complementary font. And there are tons of these font pairs that you can choose from, but keep it consistent. Your headlines should always be the same size font and it should be positioned in the same place so it's seamless as you flip from slide to slide. Your body font should always be really legible and very brief. Very, very brief. As few words as possible on a slide. And when you can, instead of listing things on a slide, make a little graphic. Something very simple. Even icons are really nice for audiences to quickly glance at and then refocus on what you are saying. One major place people lose their audience is when they put too much stuff on a slide and the audience then focuses on the slide and not the speaker. And then when they do refocus on the speaker, at some point they don't know what the speaker's talking about because they were zoned out reading their slide. It actually leads to people just simply tuning out and no longer listening to your talk. And then they're left with an impression the talk was bad, even if it actually wasn't. The next thing I want to touch on, I've already mentioned a few times, but I want to tell you exactly how to do it here. Always tie everything you're saying back to the position. So I've talked about this ad nauseam, but let's go into exactly how. So throughout your talk, you're going to explicitly connect your research back to the job. And don't be coy about it. This is another thing that I really notice in job talks with candidates that are coming from academia specifically, they're very humble, which is really, really great. And of course you want to be humble. I'm not saying that you should be a braggart or you should take all the credit or anything like that. You definitely want to be talking about your team and your contribution in the context of projects. However, what you really want to do is lead the audience by the nose in telling them how your work directly relates back to the job description in an obvious way. So for example, if you're that cancer immunologist and they are looking for somebody with direct experience performing cytotoxicity assays, you would talk about your story arc, you would talk about what you did in that story arc and give a nod whenever you come to areas that have specific requirements. So that could look like if you're talking about some complex cell based assays that you did with CO culture and you were looking at T cell readouts and one of them was cytotoxicity, you might specifically say something like, I just want to highlight here. It seems like a strong need for somebody who really deeply understands how to develop, troubleshoot and analyze complex cytotoxicity assays. And this was a huge part of my research for this project. So I'm not beating around the bush there. I am specifically saying I noticed in the job description this is a pain point for you and lucky for you, I just so happen to have that skill set, right? It feels uncomfortable to speak like this, but if you bury the lead and you don't tell people how well aligned your work was to the job description, they might miss it because you're also talking about so many other things. So don't be coy. Just tell them exactly how your work relates back to that job and their pain point. Another thing that you can do is talk about the growth areas that you have. And we all have them, right? So there are going to be pieces of the job description that you could do in your sleep, and there are going to be parts that are going to be a little bit aspirational and those make candidates nervous. And what I see is people try and hide that they might gloss over some of their perceived deficiencies where it's actually much better to meet those head on in a really positive way. And again, this is an area where you can call out pieces of the job description. Let's say you don't have experience with a very specific type of assay that was listed in the job description or a piece of equipment that was listed in the job description. But you do have great transferable skills within your story arc. You can call that out and say, I did xyz, which is very related to your need for abc. I'm really excited to be able to expand my skillset into that area because it's going to help push our knowledge of insert the company's mission here forward. So you just want to come at this with a lot of enthusiasm because you've learned so many things in your career, whether it's all academic or you've been in industry for a while. The beautiful thing about our industry is it's always evolving and it is built on a foundation of learning new things and putting those things into action to make human lives better. So we were not born knowing any of these things. The best candidates are the ones that really embrace that everything changes and their knowledge base is going to change too. And that is exciting. So don't hide some of those perceived deficiencies. Wear them like a badge of honor. Wear them as an opportunity for your personal development that has really attracted you to this job in this company. That tip, by the way, is something you can use in your one to one interviews as well. I really stress to candidates that going into these interviews with a lot of positivity and always addressing those questions about things that you don't actually have direct experience in as a positive thing is your best chance at success. There may be some non negotiable skills that we just can't get around and therefore we cannot hire somebody. However, it is important to note that we are looking for candidates that are going to be with us for a long time rather than get bored immediately because they already meet every single requirement and know all the things. We recognize that professional growth is really important. And so if you can tell us where the professional growth is going to happen for you and how exciting that is and how you're going to embrace that learning that is going to set the whole tone for the interview. As this candidate is a self starter, they're motivated to learn and they're going to come in and be with us for a while because we have something to give to them too. So I hope that that helps kind of frame the reason for why you shouldn't be burying those things, but why you should really be upfront and positive about what this job's going to teach you. Once you have gone through all of your vignettes, we need to tie those up in a bow. The conclusion is really important. You want to circle back with a brief, I mean brief summary of how the vignettes in your talk all tie together and you want to talk a little bit about the future directions that you would have been able to take in that work. So we realize that you're probably leaving that work. But of course there's more research to be done. That's the beauty of science. And if you use that and but therefore framework through your story, you're going to leave loose ends, which is beautiful. So those loose ends are going to be the future directions of that work, showing that you can think through the implications of your work into what comes next. So while you might be departing that exact field of study to come to a new job, there's always the scientific excitement that there is more work to be done and you can't wait to see what happens next. So show that. That leaves the audience with a really good feeling that things have moved forward, you've pushed a project forward, and there's obviously more to be done. We all know that that's science. After you've tied up those vignettes in a nice little bow, you want to talk about the impact and how it ties back to the company. So again, we're bringing it home. We're going to land this plane and we are going to talk about how all of these things together have fueled your enthusiasm for the science and the mission of the company. How on day one you can provide a big impact and you can solve the problems that were advertised in this job, land the plane, bring it home for them. How your body of work, your experience, has really set you up for success in this role. 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 stage of your presentation is often the Q and A, and depending on the company culture, sometimes this sort of occurs throughout the presentation. I certainly have clients that like to have a more informal presentation where people are allowed to interrupt and ask questions throughout your presentation. Many times though, questions will be reserved for the end where you can actually put some extra slides in past your concluding slides that have a little bit more data to offer. So for example, if someone asks you about how you did some troubleshooting for a particular assay that you mentioned, or when you're doing your and but therefore Framework. You said that there was a problem with an assay, so you did some troubleshooting. Therefore, here was the outcome. Somebody might go back and probe into exactly what did you do for troubleshooting, how did you come to that conclusion? So trying to get ahead of that and anticipate some of those questions and prepare a few extra slides and is incredibly helpful and shows that you are really peering around corners which people like that potential employees might be anticipating the things that might be asked of them by other colleagues, by the scientific advisory board, by the fda. Right. We are. We are trying to create drugs here. So understanding the questions that are going to come up is key. My advice is to actually give your job talk to a few trusted people if you can. Now, you may be able to prepare sort of a baseline job talk that you would be able to just tweak for each different company. And when I say tweak, I mean the messaging you give in your stories and how you relate it back to the job might change, but the stories would be the same. Therefore, the questions might also be the same. So if you have some really trusted folks, maybe one or two who already made that jump into industry, who would be willing to give a little bit of their time to help you in this process, this will be incredibly valuable to you. Have them come up with the aggressive questions that might be asked and get some answers on slides so that you're prepared. It's important when you're fielding these questions to listen carefully and allow people to finish their questions without jumping in. It's a little bit awkward when people are interrupting each other. And I often see candidates jump to conclusions about what's being asked and start to jump in and cut people off to answer questions. And that can be a mistake because it may lead to misunderstanding the question. And it doesn't look good that you're jumping in and interrupting colleagues. So really sit back and listen. And if you need to ask for clarification on the question, it's worse to answer a different question than to simply ask for clarification so that you can answer the correct question. You can also use this Q and A session as an opportunity to expand a little bit on different aspects of the work. If you're feeling like the 45 minutes was just not quite enough. If you know, I really wish I could have gone down this rabbit hole, but that's going to put me over time. You can tease it in your talk and you can say, I'm happy to go deeper on this. If you're interested in Learning more. And often then you're leading people to ask questions about the thing you want them to ask questions about. So someone might say, I would like to know more about that. And that's your opportunity to maybe trot out a few extra slides that you really wished you could have gotten into your presentation. And finally, practicing is really important. I recommend that you only memorize what you're going to say on that first slide. That's going to get you over the nerves hump. If you can just say what you want to say on that slide. But after that, if you memorize everything, it comes off as rehearsed. I like to practice things free form. I like to practice in a few different ways, and I like to practice in front of an audience if I can. Again, if you have a trusted person that can give you some of the guidance for the Q and A, that's a good opportunity just to practice. In general, you also want to time yourself. It is really important that you actually create a presentation that is the correct time length. It is not okay to run out of time. This is an important skill and it's something that companies really value, because often they're going to ask people to present in different situations throughout the company, even externally, and they want to know that they can trust people to create a presentation that's going to be the right time length and is not going to go overtime and therefore risk not getting all of the information out to whoever you're presenting to. That's the worst is when you run out of time and you can't actually finish your presentation if you're confident in what you're saying because you've rehearsed it a few times. This is going to allow you to enhance your presentation by, by working the audience, making eye contact if you can, using natural gestures, and being really enthusiastic about your work. Enthusiasm elevates your charisma and that pulls people into your world. And enthusiasm is infectious. You want people to leave thinking, wow, they were really passionate about that and I enjoyed listening to them speak. This is something that comes with time and many presentations, but being able to get up and honestly just look like you're having a good time presenting. I was really fortunate to have a fantastic PI that really drilled this into us. My PI was insistent that we could deliver really good talks, and we did. And I don't think that every grad student is advantaged with that sort of experience. One thing you could consider is joining an organization like Toastmasters, where you can actually present on all kinds of things. It Almost doesn't matter. Just getting comfortable, getting up and giving a presentation. Giving a talk on any subject is going to make you more polished in giving your job talks and giving your professional presentations. It really is a muscle that you just have to build. And like anything you can, you got good at doing all things science. This is the next evolution of your career. And I can tell you that people who move up in organizations and become department heads, Chief scientific officers, CEOs, they're usually very good presenters. They're able to pull people into the story, pull people into the excitement and enthusiasm, and they're a bit charismatic. But again, that's something you can dial up with time and you can practice and get really good at this. So to just recap briefly, we talked about a lot of things, but the format of your presentation in general is going to be an introduction with a strong hook, a brief introduction to yourself, and an outline of the talk so that people know what to look forward to. You're going to organize your talk into short stories, and those stories should explain the what, the why, and the so what. And this story arc should be compelling and it should use some improv techniques like the yes and technique and the and but therefore storytelling method. If you sit down and write out your stories using and but therefore and then practice delivering them naturally, it's going to be very compelling. Throughout these stories. You're going to keep your slides simple and effective, using consistent visual design, consistent formatting, and trying to keep one idea per slide. I didn't mention this earlier, but a really good rule of thumb is that if the audience fell asleep and woke up and read your headline, they would know exactly what you were talking about. A brief, informative headline and one idea per slide is going to be your friend because it's going to keep people eng on what you're saying and not what's on your slides. And when possible, use little cartoons, use little illustrations, get familiar with tools like Canva so that you can make a more visual representation of what you're saying, because that's something that someone can glance at, get the picture, and then refocus on you very quickly as opposed to a whole bunch of bullet points. These stories also need to tie back to the job so they're not just random stories that you're pulling because you liked the research. These are relevant to the role. You want to explicitly connect what was in the job description, what the underlying problem is that we're trying to solve in this company by hiring for this person, and how your research has directly prepared you to do that thing and be useful on day one. And also what you're going to learn in the role and why that's exciting. And concluding the talk is really important. You're going to want to recap the main takeaways from each of those stories. You're going to want to talk about the future directions and why the research you did sets up a whole new set of questions for a whole new set of of scientists to come in and answer and why that's so exciting and really bring it home with the impact that reinforces your enthusiasm for the role in the company. So just tying it in a nice little bow, landing that plane so that everyone really understands that your entire research career has really set you up for this job. This is the perfect role for you and here's why. And then you need to be really prepared for the Q and A. I love having some supplementary slides. Like I mentioned, you want to stay really composed during this and listen carefully and clarify and expand on any points that you just didn't get to in your talk because of time constraints. And as always, practice makes perfect. So getting really natural at giving talks is something that you can just develop over time. It is not something that's fast and easy to do. I will admit that this is a multi year process because most of us don't give presentations every single day. But the more you can expose yourself to giving presentations, the better. Over time it will get easier and easier. This really should be very different than your thesis defense talk. If you go in and you give your thesis defense, you will bomb your job talk. I promise you. You have to craft a job talk that is really focused on the company and the company's needs and how you are the answer to all of their prayers. It's hard to do, but if done well, people walk out of these job talks thinking where has this person been? This is exactly who we need to hire. So I really hope that helps. So with that, I'll see you next week. Goodbye for now. 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. 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. 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.