Smart Questions to Ask in Your Recruiter Screen (and How to Use the Answers to Win the Next Round)

If you're not sure what you should be accomplishing during a recruiter screen, that's that first phone call of the hiring process, then this episode is for you. You might be leaving a lot of really critical information on the table. In this short episode, I'm going to show you how scientists can turn those brief phone screens into better resumes and better interviews throughout the whole process. And I'm going to give you a set of simple scripts to help understand what are the must haves, what are the tools, what are the first 90 days like so that you can go into the rest of your interview process really well armed with that information. So if that sounds like it might be useful to you, let's dive in.

I'm Karina Klingman, scientist turned CEO of a talent strategy consulting firm. I've helped over 85 biotechs hire and develop thousands of amazing employees.

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 lap matter. If you are exploring career paths, looking to learn about biotech, or simply striving to be the type of person who makes an impact and gets promoted, you're.

In the right place. All right, so first I want to talk about why you should ask questions during your phone screen. And I'm just going to back up and say that most candidates I speak with do not have questions ready. They don't have good questions ready if they do. Every once in a while someone pulls out a great question and I'm just thrilled to answer it. But most of the time it's pretty underwhelming and sometimes candidates don't actually ask me any questions at all because they have spoken too much during the interview and we run out of time. So get very used to having a concise answer to questions. Don't monopolize the conversation. You might think that this is about you and it is about you. It's an interview about you. However, when there are two people involved in a conversation, the conversation feels better if both people are speaking. So make sure that you are asking great questions throughout your interview so that when the recruiter leaves that call they think, wow, that was a great conversation. Conversation being the operative word. You can't have a conversation if it's one sided. So that is a main reason to ask questions is to keep the conversation feeling like it's flowing, but you have a more subtle reason for asking questions, and this is to create a better resume and to arm yourself for all the next interviews that come after that one. This is something that people don't do well, and if you do, you're going to feel so much more confident going into the next set of interviews. So I'm going to teach you how to ask those questions, what you should be asking, how to let your recruiter know that you're going to send an updated resume and how you're going to leverage that during your next calls. So let's go. You are going to learn the must haves, the keywords, the tools the team is using, the scope of the role, the near and long term deliverables, and you're going to learn about the culture in the process. So one of the main questions I get asked, which is not a terribly good question, to be honest, is something along the lines of, what's the culture like? No recruiter is going to be like, oh, it's terrible. Don't work here. That's not our job. Right. So if you ask bad questions, you're going to get crappy answers. I'm going to teach you to ask questions that help you tease out what the working conditions are like, what it's like working for that team and with that boss, but without asking directly. All right, so here is what I've got for you to tease out. The must haves versus nice to haves. Here is a set of questions you can ask. Question number one, what are the top three must haves for this role? And then you can follow that up with something along the lines of what has disqualified candidates for this role so far? That's going to let you know what are the three things that are most important to the hiring team for this particular role?

And.

And you can make sure that your resume reflects that. The next question is, what does success look like in the first 90 days for this hire? And how are you measuring that? That's going to help you to understand really deeply how ambitious this hiring manager is for the accomplishments of this person. And if they have a clear metric by which they're going to be able to measure those accomplishments. And that's a really good question for you to think about the culture. So if you listen to that and you're like, wow, that's really ambitious, you're going to know that hiring team, that hiring manager, that company might be a little harder driving. And if they don't give you a clear answer for how they're measuring it that might give you an indication of how they maybe do everything right? What we measure, we manage. And so if they are not measuring things or they don't have a clear answer for that, then that's a little bit of a flag to me. The next question I'll share has to do with tools and techniques. So looking at your job description, you're going to intuit what might be in there and you might ask a question like what platform do you use for? And then you're going to insert a technique like for your mass spec. Or you might ask about instrumentation, or you might ask for techniques where maybe there are multiple techniques for a specific set of experiments or assays. So you want to kind of show your expertise here as well. You want to make it clear that you're very fluent in these things. It gives you an opportunity to showcase that. So, for instance, if this is an HPLC role, you might say something along the lines of do you use active for your instrumentation or are you using a competing hplc? The next question is around the depth and scope of the role. So you might ask something along the lines of what level of independence is expected in this role or will I be driving the experimental design in this role? So you're really wanting to see if you're going to be sort of owning a process or if you're going to be a cog in the machine. Again, that's totally preference based. You may enjoy learning under other people or it may be your goal to be the one leading the research. So you need to figure that out through these types of questions. And intelligent questioning along these lines will help you to do that. But know that in this case, the recruiter may not always know the answer. And really, in any of these questions, a recruiter may have to defer. But if they do, it's a good chance for you to follow up in an email to find out the answer if they were unable to give it during the call. The next line of questions is around the teams. I suggest asking a question about which teams this person's going to collaborate with most and on which types of workflows. This is going to give you an idea of how many different groups and people you're going to touch in this role throughout the organization, which again goes to ownership and your ability to sort of collaborate throughout or cross functionally, if we want to use a buzzword. And finally, I think a process based question is appropriate asking your recruiter what the next steps are and what the expected timeline is. When will you hear back if you're comfortable with it, there's a little bit tongue in cheek way of asking this. You might say something like, when should I bug you if I haven't heard back? So giving them that gentle nudge is totally fine, but getting them to tell you when to do it is gold. You also may want to find out about the rest of the process in terms of will you be giving a presentation? If so, is it virtual? Is it on site? Are any of the interviews on site? Are they all on site? So learning about the process so you know what to expect is really important. All right, I have a list of 50 questions like this that lives in the community and it's totally free for everybody. So if you're not in my biotech career coach community on school, what are you doing? Get in there. This is all freely available to you. Yes, you can grab it from a podcast, but I can't go through all 50 questions here. And the other questions might spark different ideas. They also deal with a few unusual topics or sort of edge cases for interviews. All right, now that you have asked your great questions, we need to turn this into resume content. So I want you to say something along the lines of thank you so much for this interview. It was so great to learn more about the job in the company. I would like to tweak my resume because I learned a few things here in the interview. Can I revise that and get that back to you by. And then give a time limit, let them know exactly when you're going to do that, by 5pm today, by 10am tomorrow morning, whatever that is, because recruiters are always fine taking an updated resume. We want to do our job well and we know that candidates can put their best foot forward sometimes after these conversations. So just advertise that you're doing it and give the timeline and then that should be totally fine with them. You also should be able to email it to them directly as opposed to going through the applicant tracking system or anything like that. Now, more and more people have been bringing their own notetakers, AI notetakers to these meetings with me, and I've got mine in the room too. It is totally fine if you do that. You don't have to worry so much about taking notes. But if you're not bringing an AI note taker during this interview, try to take some notes on the tool names, the assay types, any of the timelines, any language that kind of stood out to you because it's interesting within a culture, within a community, like a company, you're going to have some lingo develop that is sort of unique to them. And so if you can bring that into your resume, that's going to give you a little bit of an edge. If you can start using that lingo during your interviews, it'll again give you a little bit of an edge. When you are done with this interview, you're going to immediately run back to your resume. And if you have brought an AI notetaker, you could go back to the resume tailoring prompt set that I've taught you to do if you're in my community and put the whole transcript of your interview right in there and ask for help refining some of the highlights, bullet points, making sure that you're really bringing those top three things that were revealed to you to the top of your highlight section. Making sure that throughout you've got really good language, you're starting to incorporate the language of the company. If you're at this interview stage, you've made it past, I don't know, 95, maybe 99% of the other candidates. So don't slack off now. Push hard at this stage. This is where you want to really come back with an awesome resume that reflects that conversation. And like I said, if you're in our community, you probably have tailored your resume using my template with the set of ChatGPT prompts that helps you to do that. So you can go right back to that conversation and you can get some tips then on how well you did in your interview. Are there any things that maybe you could do better next time? What should you expect in the next round? And how can you put your best foot forward in that next round? Because now you know some of the secrets you've learned, some of the things about this that the hiring manager presumably cares about and presumably shared with that recruiter. And you should be better equipped to go into that conversation with the hiring manager, which is normally the next step, and talk confidently about tools, workflows, scope, all the things that you learned. And again, there are some questions you're going to want to ask in that interview. But the most important place where you can get this information before you get to that is with the recruiter, which is why I really press on. That interview is the one where you can learn a lot to put your best foot forward going through the rest of the process. Next, you need to send this resume back to your recruiter and this is where you use your thank you note. So you certainly are going to want to have a nice thank you note. We've Got some scripts in the community, of course, but it might look something like updated resume 4 and then role and name as a subject line. You want to make it really clear to the recruiter who you are and what role this is for. So it's easy for them to open that email and get your resume in the system. So you're going to want to thank them, say something interesting that they said, sort of repeat it back to them. I've got some scripts for thank you note that are really specific in the community where we sort of relate back to the conversation so that your interviewer feels really good about the conversation, that they helped you, that they imparted some knowledge that wasn't there in the job description or on the website. Then you might go on to say something like, based on the priorities around X and Y and the first quarter deliverables in Z, I've updated my resume to clearly showcase these relevant skills or projects or tools, however you want to phrase that. I've attached a revised version here if the hiring manager would like additional context or a brief note. I'm happy to share that too. I'm looking forward to continuing the process and learning more about the company and then sign off. I can't stress enough how critical these first calls are and how many people blow it, so don't be one of those people. I would say that of all of the interviews I've conducted in the past six months when I've really been listening for this, as I've been prepping some of this new content, it really maybe is 1 in 10 candidates who asks a good question that gets to an important thing that they didn't know before. Most candidates ask really simple questions that don't really give them much to go on. If this is familiar, it's okay, but I mostly hear things like what's the culture like? When should I expect to hear back? When are you thinking you'll hire for this role? And by the way, if we're bothering to interview for the role, we're trying to hire for it asap. So I'm never going to be like, oh six months from now, so don't waste your time on that question. And with that I want to go into a really advanced interview technique. So if you do that and you just gather some basic information using those questions, you are going to be a huge leg up on other candidates. However, I want to give you one more really important interview tip and this is around using questions to actually make a point. So I sort of touched on it earlier with the tools or equipment question where you might just sneak a little of your expertise into the question and make it clear you're a subject matter expert. However, have a list of questions prepared that you feel you really want to showcase in the interview. So, for example, let's go with an essay development question. Let's say that you have designed a really tricky, novel essay that had to be highly sensitive that you needed to work with a cross functional team to develop. And you're really proud of this and it's directly applicable to the job. Chances are you're going to be asked a question that allows you to tell that story. But sometimes there are interviewers out there that are not as good as others and they may not ask you all the questions you think they should ask based on the job description. So if you take the extra time to prepare and you have a few questions that are leading questions that allow you to get that experience in there, it's going to make you really shine. So an example of that might be. So you get all the way through the interview and they didn't ask you about that awesome assay that you developed. And you know it's important for the job and it would increase your chances of getting to the hiring manager if they knew about it. If they turn it over for question and answer, or if they don't, you can sneak it in by saying, hey, I have another quick question. And you might ask something like this. Previously I developed a really highly sensitive assay for xyz. It was fun and difficult because I had to collaborate with a huge team to do it all across the company. I saw in the job description that you need ABC assay developed. I'm curious how you see this role fitting into that assay development process. I really enjoyed the troubleshooting and really increasing the specificity of that assay, which was critical for the workflow. So now you've kind of told the story in a nutshell and you've asked a question that demonstrates that you're ready to get right in the mix. So that is advanced interviewing. But it is worthwhile if you know that there are some things that really make you shine for the role. Just have them ready in case you need to use that technique. It's a fantastic technique and it really helps you to get your point across when you maybe feel like the interview was rushed or the interviewer didn't know the right question to ask, which does happen. Most of the recruiters you speak with are not scientists. Most of them are going to be really smart, laypeople so they may look at the job description and prioritize the wrong things or not know how to ask the question so you can give them a little help and make sure that you get your point in by asking them a question that has all the information. All right, I hope that was helpful. If you have questions, jump into our community. It is free and we are having a lot of fun in there and I have a lot of these great templates for you so you've got nothing to lose. The link is in our description and I will see you in there.

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