Navigating a Biotech Job Search: Tips and Insights in collaboration with the Hopkins Biotech Podcast

This week we're doing a throwback episode to a podcast appearance I made on the Hopkins Biotech Podcast last fall. This podcast is great if you're looking for another option in the biotech space, especially if you are early career or a job seeker. In this podcast, the host, Joe Varieli and I went over a lot of the things that you might be worried about right now in your job search, including layoffs, spelling, common myths, LinkedIn, networking, and thinking about resumes. A wide variety of things that might be of interest and it was just a nice fun conversation. So a quick side note, I do mention an Ask A Recruiter event, which we have actually turned into this podcast. So if you were listening to the episode and wondering, hey, where's that Ask A Recruiter event? You are here. You're listening to it right now. Without any further ado, here is the Hopkins Biotech podcast that I did with Joe last fall. Hi, I'm Karina Klingman, scientist turned CEO of a talent strategy consulting firm. I've helped over 85 biotechs hire and develop thousands of amazing employees so I know what works and what doesn't work when it comes to landing a job and then excelling in it. I created the Biotech Career Coach Podcast to give you simple, actionable, step by step strategies to help you land your dream biotech job then move up the career ladder. If you are exploring career paths, looking to learn about biotech, or simply striving to be the type of person who makes an impact and gets promoted, your the right place.

Hello and welcome to the Hopkins Biotech Podcast Insights segment where we investigate major topics that are shaping biotechnology today. For updates about upcoming guests, follow us on social media and Visit us@hopkinsbiotechpodcast.com to check out our full catalog of episodes. I'm your host Joe Varieli. Our guest today is Dr. Karina Klingman. Karina is our first repeat guest and we're so excited to have her back on the podcast. Karina is the founder and the CEO of Recruitomics Consulting, a biotech hiring and recruitment agency based in Cambridge, Mass. For a full debrief on Karina and her work at Recruitomics, I encourage you to listen to her first Hopkins Biotech podcast interview released in July of 2021. Today we're having Karina back on as an expert on the state of biotechnology hiring to wrap our heads around the current market and how to navigate the job search process. Karina, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me. It's so nice to be back. I can't believe it was so long ago. It feels like just yesterday.

Yeah, well, as I mentioned in the intro, we've spoken with you before, so I encourage everyone to go listen to that episode from July 2021. But before we get into our topics, maybe you could just briefly reintroduce us to recruitomics and the work that you do there as the CEO.

Yeah, absolutely. So recrudomics is a niche biotech consulting firm. We specialize in helping small startup biotechs get their process for talent acquisition set up in the first place. So a lot of times we work with really tiny biotechs, maybe just two or three people, and they need to hire, you know, their. Their fourth and fifth scientist or something like that. And so we will put processes into place. We do all of the kind of groundwork and the strategy behind how they're going to hire, when they're going to hire. And then all of my recruiting team have PhDs in different type of different scientific areas. And they were interested in staying close to the science but leaving the bench. And so they found that through, you know, being a recruiter. So that keeps them close to the science. They get to chat with the hiring managers, think about those jobs, and then also, of course, talk to all the great scientists that we hire. So that is my company in a nutshell. As we've grown over the years, I have taken on more of the role of I'm out in the community, I'm doing things like this. I'm writing articles and business development and just kind of making all the pieces run, and I mop the floors when needed. So it's kind of all the things.

Yeah, yeah. It sounds like you're the.

The everything person, one of the everything people. We have a couple of everything people at the company, actually, and we just wear the hats. Whatever needs to be done.

Yeah, that's great. And last time we spoke was 2021 and wow, things have changed.

Oh, my God.

2021 was the height of biotech mania, where funding was abundant and companies were hiring like crazy. And now in 2023, we've settled down and we're seeing the job market's true colors. So I'm hoping you could set up our discussion by comparing and contrasting the market in 2021 to that of today. What sort of trends are you seeing and what are you hearing personally from both job seekers and hiring managers?

Yeah, it is night and day. Absolutely. We. I am. I'm actually thinking that this isn't just status quo, but we're actually in a bit of a correction right now, so I hope that gives some of your listeners a bit of hope. There was a lot of over hiring that was done in that 2020, late 2020 through 2021, even a little into 2022, we were seeing really abundant funding. And according to. So I have a podcast called Building Biotechs and we talk to people who are on the funding side and the insight we've gotten there is that the funding was maybe a little bit too loosey goosey. So maybe companies that weren't ready to be funded were actually funded during that time and maybe their science wasn't as sound. This is not a blanket statement, but this is sort of what we're seeing as we are seeing a correction in the market. A lot of companies didn't make it and as a result a lot of the VCs have reevaluated how they're even thinking about funding. So we're seeing a real tightening of the VC belts and the, and the PE belts. So that is what the market is experiencing. So from the candidate side, what candidates are experiencing is that there have been a lot of layoffs. I know that everyone's very aware of that. There's a lot of candidates on the market right now. And I can say in terms of numbers, back in the 2021 timeframe when we would post a job, we might get 100, 125 applicants to a job. And these days we're getting around 300 applicants to a job. So you know, in terms of what we're seeing from the recruiting side, there are a lot of candidates per opening. So you're feeling that if you're a candidate out there. I definitely know that, yeah.

And the, the numbers that you describe, you really do take a data driven approach. Can you, can you tell us about how data plays into, you know, the day to day work at Recruitomics and, and what the data suggests about the hiring market?

Yeah, sure. So we, we love data. Kind of a byproduct of being a bunch of scientists over here. We think very deeply about the data at all stages of the hiring process. So hiring, we think of it as a funnel. It really looks like a funnel. When you think about at the top we have all the candidates, these are applicants and these are candidates that we maybe source into the role. We like to, we like to do a twofold approach. We like to actually ask people to apply and evaluate the applicants. So at the top of that funnel we have a whole bunch of people and we narrow that down at each step. And there should be a pretty predictable progression to that. And we have a lot of data around what, how many, what number we should have at each of those stages in a normal, healthy search. And so when it's not normal, it's easy for us to quickly pinpoint why and at what stage. So as an example, if we put up a job today and we get 100 applicants, like I said in 2021, that might not have raised any flags, but now that raises a lot of flags for us because that's not enough applicants for what the market is telling us. So we do have to adjust as the times change. But what that would tell us is that the job is not appealing to candidates for some reason. So that brings us back to the drawing board in terms of maybe the job description, how we're marketing it, where we're marketing it, what the title is, is the leveling appropriate. So we have a lot of levers to pull there and then with our clients. Then as we move through the process, we like to look at the data at each step of the process. And if we're losing candidates at any one step of the process more than we should be, we're able to pinpoint that and drill down on why. And that's also how we look at our DEI data. So as we're moving through the process where we're losing candidates or, you know, where candidates are either self selecting out or being selected out by the hiring manager or the interview team, we're able to look at those analytics as well and understand if we are making good hiring decisions from a DEI perspective, are we being, are we letting some bias creep in? You know, what, what is the problem there? And so we can consult with our clients at those different steps.

That's a really interesting analytical approach. And, you know, coming from a team of mostly PhD students, that, that sounds really on par for what you're doing. So given those data and market trends, do you see any specific differences in say, you know, biotech versus Big Pharma? Are these market trends impacting all levels equally or are they especially, you know, poor at the entry level? What sort of, you know, key insights can you gain from, from those data?

Yeah, unfortunately, I don't think anyone's immune to this phenomenon that we're seeing right now. We are seeing when a company does layoffs, often it's, it's entire groups of people from, you know, entire departments, which includes the, you know, the heads of the departments. All the way down, we're seeing a lot of layoffs in big pharma as well. It doesn't feel as bad in big pharma because there are, there are bigger numbers there, so there's more to absorb. But we are seeing that big pharma has made a lot of changes and interestingly where, where we would normally see more acquisitions. So a lot of the time with our biotechs, the point of the biotech is to bring a really cool technology to the point of being able to be commercialized. And then usually there's an acquisition or you know, a licensure event that allows that biotech to give that to a big pharma to carry on all the way through the process. So what we're seeing is, is fewer of those events, so fewer licensures and acquisitions. And I think that all comes down to the funding climate and people being more conservative right now. So it really is affecting both big pharma and small biotech. And I think there are bigger numbers of folks trying to get in at that entry level. So it feels worse there. But I know a lot of VPs and heads of this and that that are also really struggling right now. So it kind of affects all levels.

Yeah, yeah, it seems like it's across the board. And you mentioned layoffs and as you mentioned, in the current market we've seen layoffs across companies of all s. And these are really unfortunate events for the people let go. And I can speak from experience because I was laid off from my first biotech job after a negative result in a late stage clinical trial. I'm wondering if you could talk about how the industry can break the stigma of layoffs and how individuals you see that are involved in these layoffs can use this as a positive force to advance their career rather than seeing it as something truly negative.

Yeah, I love this topic because it's, it's something we hear and it's so heartbreaking how people internalize this, this layoff. As you know, this is my fault or I'm lesser because of it. And so I want everyone to hear me that layoffs don't define you. Layoffs are a business decision. And I think one thing to also note is the terminology layoff and reduction in force or rif. A lot of people don't know the difference between those two things. So a layoff is typically considered a temporary event. It is a loss of funding or some other event that is constricting the ability to keep people hired. But the intent would be to come back from that, build back, maybe hire some of those folks back, whereas A reduction in force is more intended to be like, we aren't, we are eliminating this department. This is no longer necessary. Our business plan has changed and we don't need this function anymore. These, these individuals. And in either case it's, it's not, it's not the people's fault. It's a business decision and it comes from all the way to the top and it sometimes comes from market pressures even beyond the top. So sometimes if a company is, you know, just in the biotech market and they sell things to biotech, sometimes they feel that pressure and it's not a reflection on anybody in the market. So I think those of us in talent acquisition and in hr, we, we recognize when we see people who have been laid off or they were part of a rif, that is not a reflection on them as a candidate. And I think that people feel they're unhirable after that sometimes and that really affects their self esteem. And so if you are experiencing that, I am hopeful that the companies are helping to give some support there. There's a lot of support that can be given in, you know, terms of, you know, counseling or coaches or something like that. Externally, a lot of companies do during a layoff provide those sorts of resources, but if not, come talk to me because we provide some of those resources for free. And I'm always happy to help people who have been laid off or riffed to figure out what their next step is. Yeah, just talk to me.

Yeah, yeah, we, we definitely want to get into some of the nuances of, of what you and your group can, can offer there. Um, before we get into that though, I, I, in terms of layoffs, in my own experience, getting laid off w was really the thing that pushed me to decide to go back to grad school and, and get my PhD.

Okay.

And otherwise I think I, you know, maybe you just would have stayed in biotech with a bachelor's and, and tried to progress that way. But it can be sort of a positive force for change. I'm wondering if you have any anecdotes or you've spoken with individuals who have sort of taken this layoff as a time to reflect on their own career progression and say, hey, maybe what I was doing in my last role wasn't exactly what I, you know, saw myself doing in biotech. So I'm going to try to switch to some other department, some other job function that I think would, would maybe be more applicable for my skills and interests.

Yeah, I think that's a fantastic point. It's Hard in the moment to think this is a good thing. It's really, really hard. But many people, when they look back, just like you are, I'm sure when it happened to you, it didn't feel good and it didn't feel like it was like it was an opportunity, like a door was opening for you. But hindsight is 20, 20 or better sometimes. And sometimes, you know, looking back, you can see that it was that opening. So if you are in the middle of that, I would encourage you to speak with folks that know you well, know your career plans well, are supportive of you. To try and see that door that just opened. It's really hard to do. And I'm not saying that everyone, you know, it's not like, oh, just look on the bright side. It is. It is very difficult. But if you can look at this as an opportunity to make a change, sometimes you can seize that opportunity and make your career so much better than it ever would have been. You're right that. That impetus to change, it's like that activation energy, someone did it for you. So now you have the ability to go out and change direction, change path, go back to school, whatever it is.

I think it's difficult to consider when you're in the job because you have your job function and you have, you know, a manager, and you have yearly performance reviews that reflect, you know, what you're doing for that specific job. And I think, you know, especially for early career people, they. They strive to really do well in that first job, and they maybe close themselves off to their own feelings about, hey, is this the right thing for me to do, or am I just doing this because this is what I get rated on in my performance review at the end of the year. So time for reflection should not just be when you're going through a career crisis, but on the job. I think, you know, every day, month, week, you should be having these conversations with yourself and saying, hey, do I enjoy doing this? And is this something that interests me and I find fulfilling?

Yeah, you are. You are wise beyond your career years. I'll say that because that is something that takes a lot of people many, many years to figure out. Your career is your career. It's not the company's career. It's not. It's not anyone else's. So you deserve to sit down and think about it. And I would say if you have a good manager, this is easier to do. Um, if you don't have a good manager, you can manage up. You can figure out how to make this happen. For yourself. But it is a matter of sitting down and thinking about your strengths, the areas that you'd like to improve. And those aren't necessarily your weaknesses. They could be the same. So everyone has. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, areas that they. That they could work on if they wanted to. But do you want to? I think that that's really the key is, like, if you have a strength and you're just pushed along in your career in that area of strength, and you're never given an opportunity to explore those places that you'd like to improve, that's. That's where the missed opportunity is. And so a good manager will help you stop and think about those things. And a manager that's not quite as in tune with that will just be barreling along trying to, you know, get things done. And so that's when you get to stop them and you get to say, hey, I want to explore. What do you think my strengths are? Where do you think I could improve? And I really love doing this thing over here. Is there an opportunity to do more? A good example is managing people you normally. Biotech. Biotech is a pyramid, right? There are fewer managers than there are, you know, people who are entry level. So how do you get that opportunity? And that is where conversations, regular conversations with your manager come in, saying, I would like to manage people. To that end, I have done XYZ thing. I've been reading this. I've been learning this over here. Is there an opportunity for me to manage an intern or can I mentor somebody in the group on something that I'm strong in that I know I could pass along? My goal is to become a manager. What are the steps? So you get to really control that if you want to.

Yeah, that's a really great point. I think the other thing is that intuitively we become complacent in these periods of difficult hiring or downturns or, you know, impending layoffs, where we think, well, if I strive to have those conversations with my manager or, you know, try to have different experiences within the organization outside of my main job duties, that it might reflect poorly on me if there is an impending layoff or rif. So what advice can you give people, you know, in these difficult times to say, hey, even if there's this, you know, looming potential layoff for riff on the horizon, you can't give up on yourself and your own career ambitions to try to placate, you know, your manager or somebody else within the organization?

Yeah, I actually just did last week a Friday. Foundations on that that's one of the, one of the blocks of mentorship that we have. And the whole thing was about how to ask for a promotion. But this is a really important point because right now people are scared, so they don't want to rock the boat. And that is very understandable. So what I would say is that timing is important. I will say that if you're asking for a promotion right after half of the company just got let go, that's wrong timing. That's. That's not the right timing to ask for that. The right timing to ask for a promotion is after you have had a conversation previously with your manager and you have done the things that they laid out to get that promotion. So with the end in mind, you have that conversation about what you want your career to look like and what the next three, six months looks like and whether the company is doing well or not. That's a reasonable conversation to have because your goals can align with the company's goals as well. And then my, my real big trick is take something off of your boss's plate and do it better than they could. So don't just take something off of their plate, do it better. That's really key. So if you see that they are overloaded with something and there is an area you'd like to grow into, offer to do a task that they're doing or a function that they're doing and then work your butt off to do it better than them. And that's not going to show them up. They know that they're stretched too thin. As you, as you move up the ranks, you are spinning more and more plates. Right. So if someone takes one of those plates off of your table and they do it better than you ever could, you're going to love them for it. It's not going to reflect poorly and they are going to look at you as an asset. So when it does came time to make maybe hard choices, maybe some people do need to be let go. For whatever reason, you have already separated yourself as someone who steps up and takes on something and then does it exceptionally well.

That's really great advice. So you know, volunteerism and trying to go above and beyond and you know, I don't want to step over what you mentioned first is like a foundation and goal setting.

Yes.

Writing those things down, having clear, well defined goals, something that you can try to reach.

Yeah. If you can align those goals with something that makes you happy, makes you excited, that also falls under the organization's goals. So within, let's say an organization's goal is to drive revenue. Okay. There's a lot of ways to drive revenue. Right. Are you interested in business development? Are you interested in marketing, networking? There's so many different things that you could do under that umbrella that if you can find a goal that you're excited about, therefore you're going to do well, you always do better if you're excited or happy to do something. Right. So if it aligns with that organizational goal, then it's going to make everybody happy if that's your goal.

Right. And I want to expand the advice that you're offering. It's incredible. You've recently, since we last spoke with you, spun out a group called the Collaboratory Career Hub.

Yeah.

And that has a lot to offer in terms of free content, things that we're discussing today for academics looking to prepare themselves for a career in biotech, or potentially people already in biotech that want access to some of this advice that, that we're discussing on the podcast. So can you tell us what the goal of this program is and how can our listeners interact with it to help them in their career journey?

Yeah. So we have a few goals with it, but I'll back up and tell a story because through the foundation of this company and in my soul searching as to why I'm so called to found this company, I realized something really important about, about myself. So I started recruitomics to solve a problem. And so the problem I saw was that I was a PhD student, I was starting to interview for jobs in industry and I felt that the recruiters who are non scientists were just had no business recruiting. I had a chip on my shoulder. I'm just gonna say that I had a major chip on my shoulder in that time. I thought, they can't understand why I'm so valuable. Like I'm not getting a job because they can't understand me. And so I, I founded this whole company, which honestly has been the best thing. I, I love the company. But what I realized once I got onto the other side and I started to work with candidates and Moderna was my first client. And so I was working with candidates that I absolutely spoke their language. I'm an RNA biochemist and that's who I was hiring. So I should have known exactly what they were saying. Right. I get off the phone with some candidates and I would think, what do they even do? Like, they could not explain that at all. So what I realized is that it's twofold. Right. The candidates also need to learn to communicate their value. Proposition to everybody. And the thing about biotechs is that they're just businesses, they're companies just like any other company. And so yeah, there's a bunch of scientists in there, but there's also business development people and finance people and marketers. And everybody in the company needs to understand what you are trying to say. And likely on your interview team you're going to be faced with people from across the organization. That's how we like to structure these interviews, is that you have some people from your department, you have other people from different departments, you have non scientists, scientists. So during that time as a candidate, you have to be able to communicate your value proposition to everybody. So what I realized pretty quickly was that was a major disconnect from the candidate side. So all along we've been helping candidates to fix their resumes and learn how to give an elevator pitch and things like that. But we can't do that at scale because it was kind of one onesie twosies. It's like helping candidates through each little process. So we had a big request for this. And then in light of all of these layoffs, we heard from candidates that they got outplacement services from their companies. But the outplacement services were not science related, they were just general outplacement. And so they still weren't able to actually get much value from that because they weren't, they weren't understanding how to craft their presence. So the really long answer of that's like the backstory of that's the problem. The problem is that recruiters and a lot of people in biotechs are not scientists. And scientists need to learn how to be better at communicating. So we sort of analyzed what makes a really good resume, what makes a really good interview and we just put it together into really simple frameworks. So it's actually much simpler than you'd think. And there are some great technologies. Right now I can tell you. We have a whole course on using ChatGPT to help you to craft your resume a little bit better and a little bit faster. DISCLAIMER don't use ChatGPT to write your resume. This is to help you. But I think that what we've done now is we've created and built out the curriculum using used a bunch of test dummies from my network. I was like, hey, you need a job, Come in and test this out. And it was great. And we are just rolling this out right now to career centers to be an extension of their career center into the biotech space. And to companies as that outplacement service. And we're also offering it to individuals and we have a couple of different offerings and one is just to come into our free Slack group and just chat with my recruiters. Just if you have questions, come in, talk about your job search. So we give a lot of free resources to candidates and then we do have some paid options as well. So it's kind of an ecosystem of recruiters helping candidates and candidates helping each other once they get the hang of it. What I love seeing is that the candidates now, when they know how to make their resume and they've got one that's working for them, they give feedback to the other folks in that space. And it's really great.

I really like the university outreach portion. And you mentioned before we started recording that you're actually coming out to Hopkins for our listeners. So can, can you tell me more about the sort of university outreach and, and what your value add to existing professional development and career offices would be?

Yeah. So we love, we love our career centers that we work with and we love that there are career centers. I think the problem is with most career centers, the advice is somewhat generic in that they haven't worked in biotech. And often what we learned, what we've learned by being recruiters on the inside is the, is the vast amount of data that we've been able to look at, like, why did this resume work? Or why did this person who was perfect on paper bomb their interview? So we've gleaned those sorts of insights. And what we can do with career centers is come in and do fun events like ask a recruiter and get people thinking about biotechs and why biotechs are a little bit different than maybe all of the, all of the other things that the career center offers and then workshop the resumes and the elevator pitches and the actual content, that message that the candidate's trying to get across from the perspective of both a scientist and a recruiter so that we help people just translate. It's. It's really a translation problem and a marketing problem because what people are not doing well is marketing themselves. And if anybody goes and reads marketing materials, they're written very simply. Right. So we need people to think very simply about what their value add was, what they did and accomplished while still communicating the science. It's hard. It's not easy.

Yeah, I can definitely attest to that. In terms of the free content that you offer through the collaboratory career hub, like your blog and, and YouTube videos and podcasts what sorts of topics do you cover there and anything specific that you released recently that you might want to highlight?

Sure. We have a podcast that's actually under the flag of recruitomics. It's called Building Biotechs. And we speak with lots of different biotech leaders in different verticals. And the first thing we ask every guest is what they wanted to be when they were seven, what they are now, and how did they get there. Because we really want people to understand that career paths are not linear. And so we sort of. We want that podcast to be for everyone. Yes. It is geared toward people who are thinking about building a biotech, so founders and things like that, but we don't talk about the science. There's a lot of podcasts that talk about the science of the different companies, so we sort of leave that to them. We talk about the. The methodology and the thought process behind it. So if you are interested in careers in biotech, I would suggest taking a look. We release every Wednesday, so that's something I'll highlight because it's just very general interest. And you'll hear a lot of different cool career paths that maybe you never thought of, or you. You have, you know, your degree in chemistry and you hear that, oh, that cto, that chief technology officer is a chemist, it might just give you some ideas as to what your career could be. As far as the other things, we have a YouTube channel. We do an ask a recruiter event about a topic that we get a lot of questions about, and the people who are in the Slack community can submit questions ahead of that, and we'll try and answer those. And we tackle one thing at a time. It could be benefits that you might see. It could be funky things that happen in an interview. It could be how to structure that elevator pitch. So it's all different topics, all different things. We've got a blog and we sort of go over different things. Could be mentorship or interviewing, things like that. So lots of different resources. I definitely recommend the YouTube channel. I put a lot of stuff on there.

Yeah, it's a. It's a really, like, unique and broad offering. So we'll. We'll link to it in the show page. But we encourage everybody to go out and look for those pieces of content. Now we get to the fun part of the interview where we. I want to dispel some myths in the hiring process. And this is something that you've mentioned before. So. So what do you think are your, you know, top three myths in the hiring process? Maybe it's biotech specific, maybe it's not, but things that people often think, you know, are important and maybe that's not so important or maybe they disregard it and it's actually one of the most important pieces of their, you know, hiring bundle. What are some of those common things that you see?

All right, let's see. Three. There's so many. I'll start with. We got a really interesting question, like maybe last week in our Slack community and it actually made me sad. So I want to dispel this myth. In case anybody's thinking this. Apparently there's a rumor going around that it is shameful to put your open to work banner up on LinkedIn, that that makes you look desperate. That is not true. I'm just going to blanket say I don't believe that we use that, that flag so often in our recruiting work. We need people to put that up and there is no shame in saying, yeah, I'm open for opportunities. No shame. So if you have heard that that is a myth, we in the back end of LinkedIn we have what's called LinkedIn Recruiter. It's just an upgraded, way more powerful version of LinkedIn for searching and that comes up so prominently for us that it's like one of the main, there's like four big bullets buttons at the top of any search and one of them is prioritize open to work. So don't discount that. That's really important. So that's, that's myth number one. And that I would have never thought that that was a myth I needed to dispel. But there you go.

So just kind of double clicking on that myth. You know, the functionality of LinkedIn has expanded especially over the last five years. That open word banner can be only seen by recruiters. Correct. You don't, you know, if you're currently in a job and you want to switch jobs and you know, you don't want your manager to know or something that you can make it specifically visible only to recruiters. Is that correct?

Yes and no. So you gotta be careful about that. So here's the thing about LinkedIn. It's really funny. So when you put that up, you can choose. Now that's a new feature is that you get to choose who you want it to show up to and you can keep that confidential. But, but, and this is a big but to rely on that you have to know that everybody in your company has appropriately linked their profile to your company. LinkedIn doesn't know how to spell your company name or anything like that, so I see a lot of the time if you're looking at people's profiles and they don't have a logo next to the company. Like, if you're looking at their experience and they list a company but there's no logo, but that company does have a logo, that means they've, they've spelled something wrong. They've, they've not attributed it exactly right to that company. And if that's the case and they happen to be a recruiter, and I've seen this happen sometimes, so I assume it's intentional. If, if someone in your company who might be looking at your profile is not attributed to your company, they could see that. So if you're looking, if you're looking secretly for a job and you don't want your employer to know, I guess that's the time I would say don't put that on there. And that's when you get really, really savvy about networking and making sure that you're working your network on LinkedIn and putting, putting those feelers out through messaging.

Yeah. But again, going back to having a good manager, I think that, you know, in an ideal world you should be able to have those conversations with people, you know, just maybe a few people in your organization and say, hey, like, you know, I don't think this is for me. You know, I've sort of identified what things I want in a job and I, I, I like where I am now and I appreciate the opportunity to work here, but I think I need something else. So I'm going to start looking. And especially for entry level people, I've always, you know, found it disheartening if, if managers said, oh, well, you know, that means that you don't have what it takes to work here or, you know, you know, you don't appreciate this or appreciate that and some people will respond in a negative way. But you would hope that, you know, speaking to people who will be eventually be managers in an organization, you know, don't take that information in a negative way and try to help that person because it all comes back around. Right. If you can help that person truly find what they want to do and get the job that they want, you know, that might help you as a manager in the future. So that, that's just my rant about, you know, you should be able to be open about your, your work status.

And anyways, you absolutely should be able to. And if you are open with it, I think that that gives your manager an opportunity to support and celebrate your next step. I would just add that when, if you work at a bigger company and not everyone knows everyone, I would just be careful about how you message, you know, your open to work banner. You just don't want any negativity coming through the organization. And some companies take a hard stance on employees searching for jobs on company time. So there, there could be some ramifications with that. But you're right. In an ideal world, your manager would celebrate that you are ready for the next thing and, and support you through that transition.

Yeah. Okay, myth number two.

Let's talk about resumes for a second. We spend a lot of time working with people on their resumes. In fact, we have a resume template that you can grab from our website. It is a simple, ugly template and it works great. So I think the myth to dispel is that when you're a scientist and you have this big complicated background that your resume needs to always be complicated or reflect how complicated your work was. But when we are looking at resumes, on average, a recruiter will look at a resume for an average of six to seven seconds and they look at the resume blown up on their screen. So it's pretty much like the width of their screen, which means they're seeing a little less than the top half of the resume when it opens and loads on the page. That's all most recruiters are ever going to see of your resume. That's all the time they're going to give it. So we call that above the fold. It goes back to old newspaper lingo. If you don't know what that is, you can look it up. But what is visible immediately above the fold is 95% of, of what's important on your resume. The rest of it is only if, if they get past that and then they scroll, that's the only time they're going to see that. So we recommend that people ditch things like objective statements. Those don't work. Those are actually really self centered. If you've heard have a good objective statement. Those to recruiters read I want this and I want that and this is where my career is gonna go. It's very self centered sounding. A great headline though we call em Headlines will give your value proposition tailored for the job in one sentence. Not a big block of text, one sentence. And then we like a highlight section of three or five bullet points that is perfectly tailored to the job. And it has numbers in it, it has keywords that are bolded in it. Like it should be very clear at that one glance why you are a great candidate for this job. And it, it really, we live in the age of TikTok. Like it has to be clear immediately. And so it's so important, I can't overstate how important that is.

So on the subject of resumes, the idea of tailoring your resume to a specific job that you're applying for, how far does that go? You know, candidates who are looking for maybe an entry level scientist job, they might be applying to 50, 100 jobs, you know, especially in a down market, trying to find that first position. Um, what, you know, to what extent do you suggest people tailor their resume for a specific job?

If you're applying for fifty or a hundred jobs and it's taking that many to get interviews, there's something wrong with your resume. So when I go back to data, let's talk about data. That's your data point. To know that something is not landing with your resume. So if that's, you hear that, you should be hearing back from probably, probably 5 to 10 of those applications if you're doing your job right. So with that in mind, if you were Hearing back from 10% of your applications and you only need one job, do you really need to apply for 50 jobs? Hopefully not. Hopefully you're doing your job and you, you're getting more interviews and then you're doing well in those interviews. So the answer is yes, you do need to tailor your resume. And the reason is it's not a scientist on the other side reading that. It is usually a person who is a perfectly nice individual who fell into recruiting, they landed in a biotech doing that, and they are looking for keywords and they are looking for things laid out in the way that the job describes it. And so if you don't paint that picture for them and lead them by the nose, then you're missing the opportunity. So my question comes back to if you have a really good base resume, like a great. This is my, this is my template. This is my resume template. So we give you a template. So then you fill out that template and now you have a template and then you use tools and we teach you how to do that. I have a little chat GPT video I think that's on YouTube. We teach you how to take your resume and the job Description and within 10 minutes really do a good job of tailoring those bullet points, especially in that highlight section and that headline. If you do that and you only have to apply for a third or a quarter of the number of jobs, then you're probably saving yourself time actually so that is my ask to people is to really do a good job of tailoring those resumes, make them simple. You're going to hear back from more companies, you'll get more interviews and you don't have to apply to a hundred jobs. That sounds crazy to me. It's way too many.

You know, maybe, maybe it's exaggeration, but.

No, I've heard that that number, that number is normal. I've heard that.

I think part of it is because of this technological world that we live in. In 2023, you know, there's LinkedIn One Click Apply, right? What do you think about LinkedIn One Click Apply. And you know, I, I think one of the common things that I hear with people that aren't familiar with the job search process is, you know, I applied and I haven't heard back. Well, it's like, have you talked to anyone in the organization? Like, you know, have you reached out for coffee chats? Like, you know, have you been doing the types of networking that says, oh, I'm going to pick this person's resume up off of the pile and bring them in for an interview? So, so what do you think about the, the, the now and the future of this sort of informal application process and people getting dejected because they, they don't find success, but they're using maybe these methods that aren't the most efficient?

Yeah, that's a great point. I'll use that as point number three. LinkedIn Easy apply indeed Easy Apply. We turn these off. We don't even allow people to do that because it is so spammy and we get such a low quality of applicant. It is the spray and pray approach. I don't want to look at your indeed profile. I want to look at your application to this job. Right. Why do you want to apply to this job? So we turn those off. And most applicant tracking systems, many of them do have the ability to turn that off. So if you're ever annoyed that you go to click through and you can't one click Apply, reframe that. That's a blessing. That's, that's your stop to say, okay, someone on the other side actually cares about the quality of the applicants here, let me put 10 minutes into making this application really good. You're going to have a much, much better chance. And then you're right about the networking piece. So what I don't recommend to candidates is to go and try and figure out who the hiring manager is and then send them a bunch of like inmails that doesn't work at all. But what does work is using your LinkedIn correctly. So we have, I actually have a whole workshop on this. Your LinkedIn profile is your billboard and you can use, you can use that banner section, you can use your headline, you can use your name. There's so many different places to put your value proposition within there. And then what you want to do is go interact with people in the company on their profiles, comment on things like, like their posts, you know, interact with them in a very organic way and get them to just be like, oh, who's this? Oh, they're, you know, they're a genome engineer. We're looking for a genome engineer. And get them to click through. And then you have a billboard on your profile and there's tons of analytics on LinkedIn that you may not even know about. Just sending out spammy messages doesn't work. But being really authentic in the way you network on there, it's not overnight, but if you do this for a month, you will get a lot of traction on LinkedIn, I'll say that.

Yeah. So. So we've dispelled some job seeker myths. I want to move a little bit further back considering, you know, PhD candidates or maybe master's students or otherwise to the. Not job seekers, but job considerers. You know, we can come up with a better word for it, but people who are maybe in their, you know, third, fourth year of their PhD, they have one to two years left and they're thinking about what they want to do in the future and they have some, you know, solid ideas and they have keen interests. So what should those people be doing and what sort of offerings could Collaboratory Career Hub have for those individuals that are not ready to apply, but they're thinking about their future career?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think that getting into the mindset of biotech, if that's your goal, it's never too early and you'd be surprised how much you can learn by participating in things like our Ask a Recruiter events. If you went to every, let's say you were going to start applying for a job in a year from now. If you went to every Ask a Recruiter event, we're probably gonna skip like Christmas week or whatever, but let's say there's 50 in a year. You're going to have absorbed so much about the process and the weird things and the cool things and what not to do and what to do and all those little bits and pieces. So if you don't wait and you Just commit half an hour a week to learning, then you're gonna be really prepared. And similarly, if you don't wait on building your LinkedIn network and you start that now, I mean, we're working with candidates who, they come to us and they don't even have a profile picture. They haven't used their LinkedIn at all. They have three connections. So. And they want a job now. Now they want a job. If they had started that process that we recommend a year ago, they would have thousands of connections. They would have a real network that's engaged with them already. And then they just say, all right, I'm ready. And then the opportunities will be, be there instead of starting from zero. So I don't know if that helps, but it's, you have a, it's a great position to be in if you have that Runway because you can start to make the connections. And the first thing you should do is link in with me and all of my recruiters because we all have thousands and thousands of people in our networks and that immediately opens up all of those networks to you as second degree connections so that you can start to see those in the feed and that sort of thing.

So, yeah, yeah, I think the key point there is that it's an active process and nobody's going to come into your lab and grab you and say, you know, you need to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life. So I've always considered it an active process and I think that listeners here should, should really consider the fact that, you know, yes, you have a lot going on in grad school, but it's really important that you take the time for career exploration. And I guess even listening to this podcast might, might be some evidence of that. But the other piece of that is learning the industry players. And you know, you mentioned you're an RNA biochemist. If you're coming out of grad school, you're saying, okay, I have skills in RNA biochemistry, so Moderna would be an interesting place to land. How do you suggest that people sort of think about the skills that they learned in grad school, those transferable skills? This is more for people who are looking for industry science roles and identify, you know, the, the key companies or, you know, growing companies that are working in areas where you have those transferable skills?

Sure. So I'm going to sound like a cheerleader for LinkedIn because I'm going to go right back to LinkedIn for this. I am not, and I have some major problems with the platform, but for the purposes of this, there are, with your free LinkedIn account, you do not need to pay. It's for the premium LinkedIn account. You can do some basic job searches with those keywords and you can start to find companies that are hiring for those. And then the neat thing is when you click through to those companies, first of all, you can follow them. So even if you're not on the market right now and you're just doing this as fact finding, you can follow those companies. And then if you scroll down just a little bit, LinkedIn suggests Other related companies that you can go follow. So not every company is going to be hiring and if they are, they might not have it posted on LinkedIn. So it's no guarantee you're going to find the job. But what you will start to do is start to follow companies that resonate with your, your area of interest. And what's really cool about that is that recruiters, when we're in LinkedIn, recruiter, we can see that. So if you have a recruiter at Moderna, for instance, who is looking for candidates, one of the filters is interested in your company. And if you've followed the company, then you can be prioritized in that search. So it's definitely worth doing from, from both sides. But those recruiters, especially for the bigger companies, it's for the smaller companies that don't have a dedicated recruiter, this may or may not work. But for the bigger companies, they have, they use that filter and it's super valuable because you know who's already been like, oh yeah, I know this company and they're going to be more, we know those candidates are more likely to respond to our outreach. If we do float a job to them and they already know who we are, we don't have to sort of start from, you know, start from scratch with that candidate.

Wow. Yeah, that, that's something that I definitely did not know, but that's a really good piece of advice. And you know, if you're someone who spends any time on your LinkedIn feed, you know, you get updates from the company when you follow them and press releases. You know, I always encourage people that if you're interested in going into biotech, you know, go through the data, look at their clinical pipeline, really understand their technology, even if they're not hiring or, you know, you, you might not apply to a position at that company, just understand the field that you want to be in because a broad understanding of that field, again if it's RNA biochemistry, is going to allow you to come into any one of those companies and say, I understand what we're doing and I understand what everybody else is doing. And I found that, you know, really strong candidates and people that tend to do really well in biotech are those that have this broad industry knowledge. And it's not just so science or technique centric.

Yeah. Biotech is so different than basic research. And so I think that that's really the key is that when you are going into biotech, you have to understand that it's not anymore just about the love of tinkering and figuring things out in the lab. It's taking something, a technology, a platform, a therapeutic target, and figuring out how to make it commercially viable. So it's a whole different set of skills. So I think that that sort of what you were saying about understanding more broadly, I think that's really important because you also have to think about the business implications. So when you're thinking about going and researching companies and what they're doing, it's not just about that underlying technology, but what other related technologies have come to market in the past that or what else is in pipelines for other related companies. Because getting the landscape of what are the challenges of that therapeutic are also going to give you a little bit of a snapshot into what that company might deal with. For example, RNA has been historically very difficult to deliver. So RNA therapeutics have not gained as much traction because the delivery modalities have had a lot of toxicity. So knowing that broadly, like, yes, RNA therapeutics are so exciting and there's a lot of promise and somebody will get it, somebody will figure it out. We're still in the process of like, how do we get it to the liver though? Right. So that's sort of knowing that broadly about the field is in whatever field you're interested in, it's going to make you a really versatile candidate and you can be able to talk about those challenges even if you're entry level in your interview process.

Yeah. Well, Karina, thank you so much for coming on again and being our first repeat guest. You know, your advice is really insightful and I think it's just really nice sometimes here to have a candid conversation about a lot of these issues that people are facing when leaving grad school or entering the job market or even trying to find their second job. Um, so I, I appreciate you coming on and we're going to link to all of the things that you mentioned that you're doing. Um, but if you want to plug them one more time.

Sure, yeah. I really recommend linking in with me. I do screen my LinkedIn requests, but if you're a scientist, you look like you're legitimately in the industry. It will definitely link in with you. So will any of my recruiters come join our Free Slack community? If you are on the job market, if you're in that earlier stage, just maybe join our LinkedIn or YouTube. But if you are thinking about your job search, just join our Free Slack community. It's, it's just a place to come interact network and get some feedback and I really hope to meet some of your listeners.

Yeah, and hopefully soon we'll, we'll start getting the, the data for the number of jobs that you've, you've placed just based on this, you know, free service. I, I think that would. Next time we, next time we talk, we'll, we'll discuss those data.

Yeah, I'm really, I'm, I'm optimistic so far. You know, we just started out, but we've had some amazing success stories. We had one candidate who had been looking for about six months, and he landed a job within three weeks at a really cool company that we actually used to support. We don't anymore, but they got too big. But, you know, so people are, people are kind of like, oh, it's this simple. It really is not as hard as people think it is. It's just you haven't been taught. So.

Very cool. Thank you so much, Karita.

Yeah, thank you. Pleasure. Have a good one. 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 so that you never miss an episode. And if you leave us an honest review, screenshot that review and send it to helloolaboratorycareerhub.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.