May Career Coach Insights: Navigating Career Gaps and Mastering the Hiring Process

This week I'm going to talk about my monthly Career Coach column in Biospace. It just came out yesterday and I'm excited to go a little deeper in the topics that I discuss in that column. I like to go behind the scenes once a month to take you into my brain and perhaps give a little bit more context around the answers. So here we go. 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 I answered was about tutoring during your career break. So I want to really back this one up because this tutoring example is something that at least three people in my community I know for a fact are doing right now. And they've brought it to me in different ways, like how do I message this during an interview, Do I put it on my resume? You know, what do we do? There is a lot of fear and shame and just confusion about how to present yourself in light of being on the job market, especially if you've been on the job market for some time. Let me just turn this around for a moment because we as recruiters, the companies, we know that this has been an absolute crappy market. We get it and we are more interested in understanding what you've been doing in this time to sort of sharpen your skills and keep yourself brushed up and how it relates to the job or what brought you to the job, what interested you in the job enough to apply to it. We're not so concerned about what do you do from the hours of 9 to 5 and when do you eat lunch and exactly how many jobs have you been applying to and why haven't you been hired? That's not crossing our mind at all, but I know that's in your mind. If you are in the midst of an unplanned career gap due to a layoff or a riff in this economy, we get it. And it's more built up in your mind than anything. So for a broader discussion on this, I really encourage you to go back to the biospace event than I did a couple of months ago. We really dug into a little bit of that psychology and you can hear from a totally different voice, a different recruiter, echoing my exact sentiments here. We don't look at your career gap here as a mark against you. If you look at it as a mark against yourself though, you're going to get into trouble in your interviews. And here's why. The biggest mistake that we hear when we ask the question, you know, oh, you know, what have you been doing for the last four months and what tempted you to apply to our job? We often get rambling, five minute long responses to this question that sound guilty, that sound down, that sound like you are defending yourself. And that doesn't play well in an interview. Nobody wants to hear that. What we want to hear is a really brief summary of what you've been doing, how it was impactful and why you like our job. Why are you even here? That can be accomplished in a couple of sentences. So I'm going to take this tutoring example. I can say that within our community, people are mentoring. People have joined things like women in bio to become chairs of events, committees and things like that. People have used the time, the newfound time to get involved because at the end of the day, you didn't go to school for most of your life and not have a drive. Right? You are driven to be impactful in the world, to human health. We get that. So if you find yourself sitting around applying for jobs, figure out how you can get involved just for a few hours a week. It will really enhance your life and it'll also enhance your application. So I'm going to take the tutoring example because it's straightforward and I bet a lot of listeners are going to resonate with this. Tutoring is a great thing to do during a gap because you have a lot of knowledge to share. I would have absolutely loved for a tutor when I was younger that had actually been a biotech employee. Like, how much wisdom could they impart beyond just helping me solve physics or chemistry problems? Right. What a gift. So if you have that opportunity, it is something that you can get paid to do. Not, not as much as biotech. I get that, but it's something and it helps you to hone your mentorship skills as well your teaching skills. And that is really valuable. So here's how I would answer that question. If I were currently tutoring and I'd had career gap after a layoff or something like that, I would say Something like, yeah, thanks for asking. It's been a tough job market. However, I have had the opportunity to tutor during this time, and I used to do it all through college. I forgot how much I love it. I love teaching. I love mentoring. And I'll say this, one thing that really caught my eye in this job description is the emphasis on mentoring junior employees. So I forgot what a love for that I have. And I am so excited to be able to carry what I'm doing now with my tutoring and mentorship into a new role so that I can build toward maybe leading a team someday, which is my ultimate goal. I'll admit, in my last role, there wasn't a lot of opportunity for mentorship, and I didn't quite realize how much of a hole that was in my life. All right, let's unpack that answer a little bit. It was short. It was to the point. And at the beginning of the answer, I started with commiserating a little bit. I'm telling you right now, as a recruiter, as a talent acquisition strategist, as someone who's hired before, it's okay to find common ground. And you know what? We know that the job market's been tough. We've seen companies around us doing layoffs. Many of my clients have done layoffs. Sometimes the company that's doing the hiring has done layoffs, and now they're just building back. Nobody's viewing the fact that you were laid off, that you were part of a riff, that you have not been able to immediately just jump into another job in this market as a strike against you. So commiserate. Just have a little bit of fun with that and say, oh, yeah, you know, this is a terrible market. Been it. Next, you've been fortunate to do xyz and you noticed in the job description that something aligns with that, and that's really exciting to you. That is going to just pull the answer right through, right back to the point, which is how can you solve their problem, the problem they posted the job to solve? So I hope that's really helpful to you, but this does not need to be a big, scary thing. Candidates, however, build this up in their heads. And if you have a unique situation, please write in. I would love to know what your situation is, what you've been doing during your career gap, and when you do propose how you might spend that, propose how you might take the transferable skills from that into your next position. That'll be a little practice for you. The next question I answered this month is from a junior hiring manager. So if you are a job seeker, don't tune out because this could be you sooner than you'd think. Many of the roles that I'm hiring for now, the mandate for this person that we're hiring for would be to turn around and hire a team. So this individual let me know that they are a first time hiring manager, they've never managed a team before and they are being asked to run a hiring process at a company with very few resources, which is so common in the startup space. Look, startups have shoestring budgets and the people who work there are a little scrappy, a little entrepreneurial. And so sometimes you have to run your own process, sometimes you have to kind of figure things out. So they've been tasked with hiring for their team, but haven't been given a whole lot of tools as to how to do so, how to measure success in a hiring process, how to set things up. Their question was more tactical. I'm going to give a couple of different angles to this, but I think what's really important to hear in this answer is if you're a candidate right now, what would a hiring manager be looking for? Let's. We're kind of turning the table. You can see now take a peek behind the hiring team's mind. And if you are an employee, whether you are tasked with being the hiring manager or you're on a hiring team, I think there's something in this answer for you. So the first thing I want to talk about is a little bit of an audit of the system. So when you're asked to do a hiring process, you may or may not be gifted with all the systems and tools that you would need to run an efficient and compliant process. When I say compliant, I mean that you do need to think about the legalities of this. It is important when you're running a hiring process that you do understand the legalities of hiring. You don't need to be an employment attorney or an expert, but you can't say illegal things. So that's important and I'm going to touch on that. So in step one, the audit of your systems, it is your responsibility to figure out how you are supposed to conduct this hiring. Do you have resources? Do you have a recruiter at your disposal? Do you not have a recruiter? Do you have systems? Are candidates supposed to be emailing you directly? What are the things in place that are going to make your life either easier or harder? Now, if you are lucky enough to have an applicant tracking system, I Recommend that you do everything through that for compliance reasons. There's a reason we put those in place and it is twofold. It is to protect the companies and it's also to protect the candidates. There's a lot of confidentiality in this process and these systems make sure that we're not just emailing resumes and things like that back and forth. Ideally, we don't do that. Ideally, that all lives in a secure system, along with our notes, along with all the confidential information that a candidate might need to provide during the process. Let's audit the systems. Let's figure out exactly what you're supposed to be doing to run this process. Now, if you're at a really small company, it is not uncommon to have an Excel spreadsheet and an email account and expect that the hiring manager does all of the candidate communication. If you're at a little bit more of an established company or they've invested in the systems that are required to run a good process, you may not have to do any of that. You may be able to just review the pre vetted candidates that come your way from a recruiter or a team. Either way, I do think it's important to ensure that you know the full process front to back so that you can weigh in if you see any inefficiencies. So the next step of the process, if I were coming in and I were consulting on this, would be to clean up those systems and make sure we have compliant systems in place. You may or may not have power over this, so don't worry about this at this point. If you can advocate for systems, if this is, let's say, a new company, but you've received funding and the plan is to ramp up hiring, it is appropriate to put an applicant tracking system in place. It will save countless hours of work. It is worth five to six times the investment, if not more, in saved employee time. And what's really interesting to me is I like to talk about startup math. So you may be, you may have scrolled through Instagram and seen funny memes like, you know, cat math or chicken math or kid math. Right? They're just funny examples of how math flies out the window in the face of adorable things like kittens or puppies. Right? Startups have the same problem. I call it startup math because startups don't seem to remember that there is a number attached to the hourly rate of each of their employees. And I see the funniest things when I come in and I do my audit. For example, I have seen A founder of a company, a company founder in the middle of a fundraise, spending 20 hours a week of their time scheduling interviews and interviewing candidates. 20 hours, that's half of their time theoretically. Although I know that startup founders work much more than 40 hours a week. However, in an ideal world, that is a lot of time, that is 20 hours not spent polishing their pitch deck, working with mentors to figure out the holes in their pitch deck, working with coaches about their pitch deck, pretty much anything to do with their pitch deck, that's more important. So this startup math though, it trickles down and it becomes part of, well, you're the hiring manager, so you talk to the candidates, you do all this. It is incredibly time consuming to run a hiring process. So if you can advocate for some tools and systems to be in place, that is going to be your best friend. If you're in a ramp up, if you are doing a one off hire and there was no other hiring plan, then maybe it doesn't make so much sense. So whatever the case is, let's move on to the data. So stage three is understanding the data of a hiring process. This is within your control as a hiring manager. You should attack a hiring process just like you attack any scientific problem in the lab. It is so funny to me that really smart scientists who have impeccable lab notebooks, great experimental design, just tight experiments in the lab, will absolutely throw all data and scientific method out the window if it's not related directly to a lab science process. But recruiting can be scientific and we can use data to ensure that we are getting the best candidate into the process. So stick with me here. Your hiring funnel should look like a funnel. You as the hiring manager should be interviewing the best candidates. And when I say the best candidates, it depends on your systems. But ideally, if you're working with a really good recruiting team, you have good systems in place. You should be speaking with five to seven candidates on the phone or on Zoom. From those five to seven, you should only be bringing in three for a panel interview because panel interviews are very expensive. Again, let's talk about startup math. Every single person's time, the hour of their time, the time coming together for a seminar, the wasted time in recalibrating your brain between doing lab work or whatever else and interviewing candidates. It's not like you have an hour and you're immediately focused on the next thing. That never happens, right? We have to do debriefs, there's little sidebar conversations in the halls. All of these things take A lot of time for your team. So when you're thinking about who to bring in for an interview, you better be pretty sure that you would be willing to hire that person. This is not an exploratory thing. If you want to have an exploratory thing, just bring in one or two other people for a second opinion, a third opinion. Don't subject a candidate that you're meh on to a whole full day interview, okay? It's too expensive and it's not a great experience for the candidate either. So if we can trim that down. You speak with five to seven candidates via Zoom. We bring in three candidates that are solid, that you're very excited about, and we hire one. That is the gold standard. That is what the big companies strive to achieve in their hiring pipeline. When we detect problems in this pipeline, we have too many candidates or not enough candidates in these different stages. That's where we can get curious. And we love doing that as scientists. Okay, why have we interviewed seven candidates in a full day interview and not hired any of them? That's a data point far outside the norm. And we have an interview problem. We have a team interview problem. We know that because the data tells us so. So I would encourage you to get really, to get really curious about your data, to track it, to think about it, and to partner. If you have a recruiter, if you have a talent acquisition person to partner with them to make sure that this process is run really efficiently, that your team's efficiency is really maximized in this process. The other thing in this part of the process, when you're actually interviewing candidates, is the actual candidate assessment and how that is often not data driven in the least. Which again is funny to me because we would apply data to anything else, right? Anything else in the lab, we would be collecting data. And yet I often come into companies and find that their hiring processes have been completely devoid of data. In other words, they're interviewing candidates. They're not writing down anything but sort of notes in the margins of a resume. Sometimes they're coming together unprepared for a debrief session, which then turns into a group think session. And nobody knows at the end did they make the right decision. So here's how to fix that. It's really quite simple. We'll implement a scorecard system. There are probably things that you want to know about every candidate from a technical standpoint, from a cultural standpoint, from a personality standpoint, especially coming into a small company, a small startup, you want people who are a Little bit entrepreneurial, a little scrappy. They're problem solvers. Right. They're not above doing anything, including sweeping the floor sometimes or this is important. And so we can assess all of those things through the process, but it needs to be documented in a scorecard system. I usually use a 1 to 5 rating for each thing that we're evaluating. And those should be blinded. Nobody should see those except for the hiring manager and the hiring manager should fill theirs in first. So I love to organize an interview day with the hiring manager being the first interview. So of course you will have spoken with them during that phone screen or zoom screen, however you want to, whatever you want to call that. And you will also speak to them on their panel interview. It's important that you get to speak to them twice. I really emphasize that it's important because they're going to be working for you and the more time you have with them, the better they're going to feel about it and the better you're going to feel about it. So if you can set it up so that you are the first interview and you have a debrief with them after the interview. Now that they've met everybody, do they have any other questions, anything come up for them? Be the friendly face that also sees them out of the interview process. Just 15 minutes, nothing big there. You will fill out your scorecard from the panel interview before anybody else on your team fills out theirs and turns them in. If you're in an applicant tracking system, this is very simple. If you are doing this a little bit the old fashioned way and maybe you are asking people to fill out a secure document in your Google workspace or in your office 365 environment. Either way, do not look at those scorecards until you filled yours out and don't change yours. It is sacrosanct. It is done. You have done your part and your opinions, your thoughts are valid. What I see is that people, they for instance, had an exchange with a candidate that left them questioning their ability in an area or questioning their ability to work well within the culture of the company, within the fast pace of the company, something like that. If, if nobody else picked up on that and they were the only one, they're much less likely to voice that publicly because everyone else the group think has taken over, everyone else is being vocal about their enthusiasm or, or negativity about the candidate either way. And that groupthink is really powerful. So armed with your scorecards, you get to compile those scorecards, get an average score in Each category, just like you would do for any experiment in the lab. Of course, people can write comments, and they should write comments to back up their reason for their score. And then you can look for trends, and you can then go into the meeting where you can debrief on these candidates armed with data. So instead of just saying, so what did everyone think? And just having, honestly, the loudest person, the one who always chimes in, you know who that person is, chime in and give their loud opinion, and then everyone else just sort of starts to fall in line. Have you ever noticed that rather than doing that, you come in and say, thank you so much. I loved your comments. Really insightful stuff. I've found a few themes and I want to explore them one by one. The first theme I've identified is there's a potential concern for this person's ability to work in a really small company. And I want to unpack that a little bit. Let's each go around and discuss this. And then you choose the order in a random order. And it's not the loud person first. It's going to be one of the quieter voices in the group, maybe somebody who had a really insightful thing on their scorecard that you fear they won't speak up and say in a group feedback session. If you run your feedback sessions like this, you will get better answers. You will come with data. You will be armed with that data. And if you are starting to hear the tide shift and it disagrees with the data, that's interesting. And that's something that can be discussed a little bit more openly, saying, huh, that's not what the data shows me. So let's really understand why are we starting to think this way? 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. Okay, so to recap, that is my three pronged approach for creating a really good, solid data driven hiring process. Step one is to audit the systems. And this is what I do for my clients. When I come in, right, I come in, I take a look at everything and I say, all right, this is good, this is broken. Here are the holes in your process, here are the things that are sucking up the time from your team. And then my second step is to implement really good systems. And this may include installing an applicant tracking system, some automations, the ability for candidates to self schedule, all kinds of things that really take the burden off of the hiring team and allow you to do your work until it's time to interview those great candidates. And then the third is to look at the data to set up dashboards that really describe what a hiring arc should be and allow us to identify when our data is actually not following that predictable path, where are the outlier data points and how can we pull those data points back into line so that we have a really good efficient process? And then how do we evaluate candidates in again in a data driven, repeatable way so that when we interview those three candidates, we know that we've chosen the one that is the best one for the job. Okay, I hinted at this in the last section, but my final question is around the legalities of hiring. So part two of that person's really insightful question was around what training do they even need to be a good hiring manager? Because you don't get that training in school. And yet I see so many companies ask hiring managers to just hire people without giving them the tools they need or even their teams, the interview training. They need to be able to be successful at the process. So let's unpack that a little bit. So I don't have time to do a full hiring manager training here, but it is something that exists in our community. So if you find yourself in the position of needing hiring manager training, I do have that for you and I do have that for my clients because it is really important. Interview training, hiring manager training, they are essential, essential to being able to run a good process, a legal process, a process that's not going to get the company sued. So there's a lot of big benefits to having good hiring manager training. So I want to talk a little bit about the legalities here. And again, job seekers, if you're listening to this, there is something in here for you. I promise you that. Because we're going to talk about your rights in a hiring process and this should be known by everyone, you should know your rights and honestly, every interviewer should also know your rights. In a job interview process, the only questions that can be asked are questions that directly pertain to the person's ability to do the job. We really don't want to have interviewers asking anything except for the types of questions that would allow them to get a really good feel for the candidate's fitness for the role, their technical skills, their ability to perform the role, things like that, nothing beyond that. Things that are blatantly illegal to ask are things about relationships, religion, specifically where people live, anything that could be construed to allow for discrimination in the process. Do you plan on having kids, any of that stuff? It's just not. Okay. I'll give a few examples of seemingly innocent questions and why they're actually not innocent to give some context here. So here's one. So where do you live? That question is, you would think as an interviewer, maybe just you're trying to build rapport, right? You're like, oh, you know, yeah, I know that area. What a nice area. Actually, what that can do is form an opinion in your brain that the candidate lives too far away and they might not want to commute. And if they do commute, they're going to be looking for another job. And all this stuff. That is not your decision to make. It's just not. If a candidate wants to commute, then they can commute. If they have a long commute, maybe they like audiobooks, maybe they enjoy driving. I was just having a conversation the other day with someone who used to do an hour and a half commute each way. Love driving. Spent the time either doing some conference calls or listening to some great stuff, good music, good, good audiobooks, good podcasts, whatever. Didn't mind the commute, loved the job. So when you ask that type of question and then perhaps the candidate doesn't get the job, they may be thinking in their head, oh, was it because they. Was it because that they didn't think that I'd want to do the commute? And that, as slight as it sounds, is actually grounds for a potential lawsuit because it is not relevant to the hiring process. You can ask if you need to know that somebody will be there five days a week, it's a lab based job, et cetera, is simply, I just want to make sure that you understand this is a full time position, five days a week expected in Cambridge. Does that work for you? That's it. If they say yes, that's the end of the story. Sometimes they elaborate and they say, oh yeah, I Already do that? Or, yeah, that's no problem. I just live in X, Y, Z. They can elaborate. Candidates can elaborate, but we can't ask. And honestly, I never make notes when they do elaborate. It's not my business. I just don't care. Did they say yes? Perfect. Another really common question that is seemingly harmless, but again, is not legal. Any questions around family or household or anything like that, and this often comes up in the context of a relocation. So, for instance, if a candidate is not local and they say they're willing to relocate, often the question is, you know, oh, well, how's your family feel about that? Or like, is that going to be okay with your family? Or, you know, oh, do you have kids? Are they going to have to move schools? Little questions like that again, may seem to just build rapport. But if the candidate doesn't volunteer it, it's none of our business. We really don't need to know it and we shouldn't know it. Again, I don't even make notes if a candidate does volunteer it. If a candidate volunteers to me that relocation might be challenging and they'd have to discuss it with their spouse because their kids are in school or whatever. I simply write down on my interview sheet, I simply write down, we'll consider relocation. We'll let us know within X days. That is all I write down. I don't write anything about speaking with a spouse, a partner, their dogs, anything like that. We hear funny things. I don't write them down. As an interviewer, you need to learn this skill. It's important that you're not sharing those sorts of things that may just kind of slip out of a candidate's mouth on a scorecard, in a debrief session, et cetera. Nothing that could sway the decision for hiring this candidate outside of their immediate skills and qualifications and their ability to do the work. Okay. It's really important. So there are a lot of considerations there with legalities around speaking about salary and visas. These trip people up. So if you have a recruiter or an HR person who can handle these questions, I absolutely recommend that you do that if possible. I love separating church and state in this way. I think hiring managers should just care about the job, the qualifications, nothing else. HR can deal with the legalities of like, can we actually hire this person? Can we meet their salary expectations, their title expectations, and their visa needs. That shouldn't really fall to the hiring manager in an ideal world, in a small company, sometimes it does. So there are a couple of ways we can ask these questions. But they have to be worded quite specifically. And again, we can't ask for any detail beyond what the candidate gives us in these questions. So for the visa questions, there are a couple of ways you can ask them. I'm telling you my language. You may have slightly different language. As long as the intent is the same and the language doesn't stray too far, it should be fine. I always start by saying, okay, I'm going to ask you a few HR questions next just to ensure that we're going to be able to support your candidacy. First, are you legally authorized to work in the United States? That is a yes or no question. If it's a no, then probably the interview is over, but most of the time it's a yes. I've only gotten a no a couple of times. And those individuals were trying to move in from, you know, Canada or someplace, had not yet even started the visa process. If they say yes, you can ask, do you require visa support either now or in the future? And if they say no, at that point, that conversation is over. They are legally authorized to work and they don't need anything from us, which most likely means they're a US citizen or they have a green card. So from there, there are a few clients I work with that have had security clearance for different projects. There are some security clearance specific questions that you can ask. However, that almost never is the case. If they do say they do require visa support, you can say, feel welcome to elaborate on that so that we can prepare ourselves accordingly. And they can usually say something like, oh, yeah, I'm on a, an opt. I'd really like an H1B or I'm on an H1B so I need to transfer. Whatever they say, you can jot that down. The next is with regard to compensation, and this varies state by state. So again, having an HR professional help you with this is really, really important if you are able, if not, brush up on the legalities in your state. I typically ask candidates if they're comfortable with the posted salary range. If we're in a state like California, we're posting that salary range is required. We really can't dig much more into it. If we're in another state where salary range is not required on the posting, I will typically ask the candidate if they would like to share their salary requirements with me, not what they are making their salary requirements. So they can have done research and they can say, well, I'm aiming for X to x, you know, 160 to 180, something like that. And again, I'll jot that down and that's really the end of the story. I can't ask much more than that. If though their salary requirements are well out of our range, I can simply state that and I can say, unfortunately, our salary target for this role is 130,000. So you're quite a bit above the range. Do you still want to continue the conversation? And that's a really good way for them to self select out of the process and to just make sure you're aligned so that when it comes to the finish line, you know that you're in the ballpark of their salary and you're going to be able to negotiate appropriately. So that's how I handle them. The next thing is around titling. So I always, again, in, in some states we have to be really clear with the titling because we've also put a range, a salary range. And so I simply state what the title is. I say we are, we are targeting a principal scientist for this role. Are you comfortable with that title? And if they say no, then there's a conversation. If they say yes, we leave it at that. I have to take them at their word. Okay. Even if they've had a different title, maybe a higher title at a past company, but they're a good candidate. Titles mean nothing at different companies. They're all over the place. I have had, I've had candidates who were previously directors, senior directors at a company, come back into an associate director, principal scientist role because that previous company had title inflation and they knew it and they knew they weren't a true director, senior director at most biotechs. So I try and absolutely ignore that. I think about the wealth of experience, the years of experience they bring and then let them decide. So it's a skill, it's a muscle that you have to exercise. You have to know what's legal, you need to know how to run the process and you need to be able to structure your questions in a way that cannot be construed as digging past what is essential for the job description, the technical qualifications, the skills required and the ability to do the work. And the ability also extends to their fitness with the team. Right. So if you have a culture that is hard driving, that is 80 hours a week, all that, you're going to be looking for someone like that. And that needs to be part of your consideration. And so the way we get at some of those cultural questions needs to be through savvy interview questions. So again, this is where training is so important. But Simply saying things like, we're, we're an ambitious group here. Are you ambitious? That's a terrible question. Who's going to be like, no, I'm not ambitious. Right. Who's going to, who's going to belittle themselves in that way? The best way to get at some of the questions that are trickier, that are going to be more of those cultural questions like, okay, our culture is this and we need people who are comfortable with that. Or, you know, we're really looking for somebody who's innovative. Like if you just ask someone, are you innovative, are you creative, are you a problem solver, they're always going to say yes. And you're not going to get any of the good stuff, any of the meat. And so this is where behavioral based interviewing comes in. And again, this is a skill that you need to acquire the muscle to exercise. Behavioral based interviewing is asking a question in the form of describe a time when or tell me about a situation where you're asking them to tell you a story. And candidates, this is. Perk your ears up here. Candidates. Candidates need to be good at answering these questions concisely. Nobody wants a 10 minute story. We want a two minute story at most. We want you to go through your whole story arc. What was the problem? What did you do about it? How did it resolve? And then tie it back to the job? Always tie it back to the job. We want to hear all of that as a story. Humans love stories. And so this is an opportunity for you to get to know the candidate as an interviewer a little bit more deeply. How does their brain work? If you ask them a question like, tell me about a time where you had a really tight deadline and it was all hands on deck. What did you do then? That invites them to tell you about a previous project where maybe they did work 80 hours, all, you know, all out. And you can hear then how they talk about it. Were they enthusiastic? Were they excited by that challenge? Did the team rally or were they pulling the team along? Or was the team kind of like, ugh, this sucks. Listening for things like that. Listening for. Did they say we a lot or just I. Right. How are they describing their contribution to these projects? This is how you get to know a candidate and whether they're going to be a really good member of your team. So again, this is a skill. This is not anything that you are born with. This is something to practice and exercise. And I always go armed with a number of behavioral based questions that are relevant to the job. So that I am ready to ask those hard questions and then sit back and just enjoy the story because ultimately it makes a better interview experience for you too. You're going to hear some really cool stuff and if you ask the right questions, you're going to get fantastic team members to join you. I hope this was really helpful. What did I just spend here? About 10 minutes talking about how to interview and what really should be a pretty comprehensive half day training. It's hard to interview people well. It really is a skill and it's something that I no doubt that everybody listening can develop and be really good at, just like you have developed any other skill in your life. Advocate for yourself within your company. You deserve interview training. You deserve to be armed with the tools you need to be able to run a good hiring process. A data driven, compliant, reproducible hiring process. So advocate for yourself. And I'll say this. If you're working for a company and you're listening to this and you are confused about how to implement all of these things or you're overwhelmed, reach out to me. Either I am happy to do a strategy call or I will refer you to somebody who will. But what I do for my small biotech clients, I become their fractional head of Talent acquisition and I map out all of this for them, make sure their teams are trained, I make sure their systems are complete. I make it really easy for them to just come to the interviews and do great hiring, which is really, at the end of the day what we want to do. If this was helpful, share it with someone and please review this podcast. It is so wonderful when someone reaches out to me on LinkedIn and tells me that they used a tool I gave in this podcast and I would love that to extend to a little review about how helpful that was to you. Thanks so much and we'll 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 hellocollect laboratorycareerhub. 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.