Win Over Every Interviewer (Even the Skeptics)

This week I have a repeat guest. Stacey Tannenbaum is back with us, and to remind you, we had a great episode with her a few months ago. Actually, I don't know when it was, a little while ago, and we talked all about presentations. This week we are going to talk about something a little different. We are going to talk about establishing rapport with different types of people that you may encounter, both in interviews and just broadly within your company. And she is an expert on this because part Part of giving a great presentation is establishing rapport. Plus, she has led project teams through her 20 years in pharmacometrics and companies including Astellas, Metrum Research, Novartis, and she's really observed how well establishing rapport quickly with different types of personalities can kick off projects right, can kick off your interviews right. She sat on both sides of the table, of course, hiring people and being hired, so she really understands that. Stacy now helps scientists and technical professionals across biotech, both in my community and in her own consultancy, become better at presenting and communicating. So with that, we're going to jump right into the episode. Thank you so much, Stacy, for coming back to teach us more stuff.

Thanks for having me again. Always fun.

So one thing that I encounter a lot when working with my career development clients is that they have to go into a panel interview situation. Well, really any interview situation, but I think especially where you have a panel interview and you may be meeting, I don't know, 6 to, if a company's really unkind, 14 people in one day, and you have to kind of context switch between each type of person. You may be meeting with the department head in one meeting, and the very next meeting might be with a team of research associates at lunch. It can be really different. And so, I have picked out a few phenotypes that are interesting, and I just wanted to get your take on establishing rapport with these different types of people in interviews and then project teams too. So I have noticed that the people that my clients get most nervous about talking to are typically the higher-ups, the department head. Sometimes it's the hiring manager is the most senior person you're speaking with, but sometimes they'll throw like the VP of XYZ in the mix because they want the final say on a candidate. Let's talk about that phenotype right now. That's kind of like the business leader, right?

Right. If it wasn't for people, scientists would be great at interviews because we love talking about our science. We love talking about ourselves and what we've done. But people always throw you for a loop because you just never know who you're going to meet. You never know how engaged they're going to be. You never know if they're going to be senior or junior. You never know if they're going to be interested in what you have to say. You don't know if they've read your CV. You hope they have. And in particular, with the senior leaders, it's probable that they have not spent a lot of time reading your CV. I think when you're meeting with senior leaders, your job is to get out of the weeds. And I think for scientists in particular, we love the weeds. We love talking about the technical details of what we do and the those minutia. But when you're talking to a senior leader, you want to be up here, and you want to talk to them about kind of what you bring to the table and why you're excited to be at that company. And you want to ask them questions about the culture. You want to ask them questions about how do you interface with people that would be on my team, and what are the types of things that you look for in a candidate? What do you look for in a candidate that's going to really meet the needs for you and your company. And when they ask you about yourself, don't read your CV to them because they've hopefully at least looked it over. Tell them a little bit about what makes you excited about this job, this company, what you bring to the table, and why you're the right candidate for the job. One of the things you need to think about when you're talking to a senior leader is that they may not work with someone on your team directly. You may be 2 or 3 levels below them, so they may not know what somebody in your field does day to day. What they want to know is what is the impact that you can make on the company and what are you bringing to the table? So digging into the weeds of your science and really getting into the minutia, they don't care. I mean, I hate to say that, but they really don't. What they care about is how is this person going to help me look good. How is this person going to help my company achieve success in the particular project with the problem that we're trying to solve by hiring this person? I listened to one of Carina's presentations on job talks, and I really loved thinking about that component of people don't hire just to hire. They're not hiring just because they want a warm body sitting in a seat. They're hiring because they need somebody to do something, to solve a problem, to fill a gap. So how can you fill that gap? And why are you the right person to fill that gap?

Yeah.

I think those are the primary ones. So you don't want to dig into the weeds, but you really want to kind of, A, show them the enthusiasm for being at the company. Tell them what is the impact of the people that are in your discipline and why in particular you're somebody who can come in and help them solve a problem that's going to make them look good and make the company look good. So you want to be up here versus sort of down here, which you might be when you're talking to other research associates or other folks that are kind of at your level.

Yeah, I think about that all the time when we are hiring. When I— let's just say when I kick off a job with a brand new hiring manager, the kickoff call that I have with them is always digging into what is your pain point? Like, why does it hurt? Why does it hurt right now? And figuring out then, okay, well, they might think they need this person over here, but really they're telling me that their pain point is really more specific or more broad or whatever it is. And so to problem solve with them to find the right phenotype to put into that job. And so read the job description carefully. We leave clues there about what the problem is, what our pain is. And then, then it is on you, I think, to do research for what the company's overall goals are, maybe what the company's overall pain is if they're marching toward an IND, that's good to know. If they are in the clinic, if they've dosed their first patient, like, that's good to know. And to bring that, yeah, into that senior leadership conversation with, yeah, you might be an entry-level scientist in the analytical development group, but how are you going to think about moving the ball forward on that IND filing for the business need? I've told every client of mine who's preparing for an interview, And then you might move into a series of other conversations with team members, and usually you're going to speak to the hiring manager again. So that hiring manager, they want to talk to you a couple times, usually sometimes 3 times in the process. That's great because typically they're going to be your boss, so they want to make sure it's a really good hire. In your first conversation with a hiring manager, let's just say you haven't yet spoken with a hiring manager and you're getting on the phone with them. How do we distinguish a little differently with the hiring manager's phenotype and how to build rapport with them right away versus that senior leader.

Some of the same things apply in terms of the fact that you're excited about this job and this position. And you, of course, also want to show them that you're somebody pleasant to work with. And so having been a hiring manager, lots of good CVs come my way. And then that screening call, so that's pre-interview, that screening call when I'm having that initial call with a potential candidate to decide if I'm going to bring them in. That can make or break it. They have to be interested. They have to have at least a couple of questions. They have to want to know more about the job, the culture. And of course you dig into that much more deeply in once you get to the interview stage. But if they're just like, oh, well, I need a job. Okay, well, great. So you just want a job. I want somebody who's going to be excited about this job. And so I want them to ask me questions and I want them to dig in a little bit about sort of what it's like to work there, how many people are in your group. I've had somebody, and I actually really liked this question, she said, what kind of manager are you? You don't micromanage, do you? And I said, well, I don't think so. But for her, that was a deal breaker. So you should also remember you're interviewing them too. And so you might decide after that screening call, you don't even want to come in and do the interview. If you have a disinterested hiring manager or somebody who's not engaged or just kind of says, well, it looks like you check all these boxes, so great. You're going to be working for this person. So this is an opportunity for you to see how are they as a person? How are they as a collaborator? Are they friendly? Do they seem open? But also, this is the opportunity for you to also say this is why you are qualified to come in and interview for this job. I asked one of my clients recently, tell me what your elevator pitch is when you meet somebody for the first time that you're interviewing, whether it's during the screening call, and she's got a screening call today. Good luck. And she says, well, I just take them through my CV. And I said, don't do that. Because again, first of all, they've looked at your CV. If they're bringing you in for the screening call, they have looked at your CV. If they bring you in for the interview, they've looked at your CV. Tell them about your path. Say, my name is so-and-so, and I got into pharmacokinetics this way, and it's something that has really been a passion of mine, and here's how I've followed that passion through my career. And you can hit on some of the things in your CV that you want to sort of make sure that get raised up that they may not have noticed, or may, you may want to make sure that you talk more about, but you tell them a little bit about you, why you're excited about this field, why you're excited about this position. And all of this has led up to me looking at this job thinking, this is a perfect fit for me, and here's how I can help you. So what you've done is you've just wrap, you've told them about yourself, you've hit on some of the highlights that are in your CV, but you've also told them why you're excited about this job and how you can help them solve that problem that Carina was talking about before, that pain point. Again, we're not hiring just to put a body in a seat. We're hiring because we need something. We need a pair of hands. We need a problem solver. We need somebody with a specific skill set. Because we don't have that, or we need somebody who can help teach the people in our group a certain skill because maybe we're lacking in that. So you can get that from the job description and make sure you hit on that in that initial call with the hiring manager. Because what that's going to do is make them go, ping, this is definitely somebody we want to bring in to do an interview, and this person's got the goods. Now, you still have to prove it, but these are good ways to have that initial call and to make you more interesting because interviews are timely, interviews are expensive. So we want to make sure we're not interviewing every single person, even if they have a good CV. We're going to interview the people who really sparkle to us because we want to make sure that's time well spent. So that first screening call and those calls with the hiring manager can be really impactful. So that's the one that you really want to study for and you really want to prepare for.

I want to double-click on a few things there. When I get feedback from hiring managers, when they want to reject a candidate, the most common feedback, aside from like a technical skill is missing, the most common feedback that's just about the person in general is that it felt like they just wanted any role and they didn't really care about this role. That's the number one thing that I hear back. The number two thing I hear is that they didn't ask any questions. So what Stacy said, that is real. Those are real things that hiring managers want. So I'll just also turn it around, and you had said interviews are expensive, and they are, not just for lost work time, but for wages. We actually calculate that. So one of the things I do is I look at the team, the panel that the hiring manager wants to assemble, and we'll push back and say, Do you realize that this interview, in terms of the wages that we will be paying each person, is going to cost us $1,700? And so that's one way that I can say, we want to interview 3 people for this role. We want to fully panel interview 3 people because then we know we're making a good decision. We have real data then. Are there some extraneous people on this team that we could trim out? So I talk numbers all the time. With my interview teams down to, yeah, people's salaries and how much an hour of that person's time costs times the 14 people they want to include on the panel and how that's a terrible idea. Not to mention if we're doing a seminar and we're inviting the whole company and not the whole company doesn't always come, but we do have a cohort of people who genuinely enjoy attending candidate seminars and come to almost every seminar. We know the statistics on that. We know how many people are going to come. That's another thing we have to think about. So the money is real. We are a business. The company is a business. And then the other thing that I think about in terms of the business is that we don't see a positive ROI on hiring somebody for 18 months. That's an average, but we do need people to stay employed for about 18 months for it to be worth hiring. It is expensive to recruit. It is expensive to lose the productivity, the ramp up, the new tools that we have to buy for people, the the computers, the IT, like all of this stuff is very expensive. And we need people to stay for at least a year and a half, preferably much longer than that. So the enthusiasm, the why this job, the passion, the mission alignment is so important for us to see. And you can make that impression. I'll say, I look for that too as in the first screen, the recruiter screen, we're looking for that too. The hiring manager is absolutely looking for that. That senior leader is absolutely looking for that.

The other thing that, that you mentioned is not having questions. If you think about it, an interview is like a date, right? So if you go out on a date and the other person just talks about themself the entire time and doesn't ask you any questions about yourself, you're not going to be particularly interested in going on a second date with them. So I always try to remind people, don't forget you're also interviewing the company. And particularly in my field, we have a lot of people who are looking for jobs. And at this point they're like, I just want a job. It's like, no, no, you don't just want a job because you want to stay and you want to find a place where you're going to grow and you're going to learn. So you need to ask those questions. Is this going to be a pleasant place for you? Because nobody wants to get up and slog into work in the mornings. So it's important on both sides for you to ask questions and find out what is it like to work there? What are the people like? Are they personable? Are they collaborative? And when you're meeting peers, are they putting up walls or are they like, oh, let me tell you a little bit about how we work here. So if you don't ask those questions, you won't know what it's really like because much as your CV looks the same to a lot of people, whether you're a pharmacokineticist at Company XYZ or Q, you're doing pharmacokinetics. So like the job itself in and of itself is probably pretty similar. So what differentiates those jobs from each other? So I want you to think about that too when you're looking at these jobs, not just about, okay, the salary's good and it's got good benefits, but what are the other, what's the, when I say total compensation, I'm not talking about money necessarily, although money's part of that, but like, what am I going to get out of this job too? Because it has to be two ways. And asking the hiring manager about that is super important, like finding out What's going to be the benefit for you? How are you going to be developed? What's the growth opportunities? How are people developed? Do we have opportunities to go to conferences? Do we have opportunities to publish? What are some of the things we do? How do we collaborate with other groups? Those, I mean, those are just general important interview questions to ask, whether it's at the screening call or beyond. We've meandered off into other topics, but I think all of these are important in terms of those conversations that you have with people.

I think that's all great. It all builds rapport, which is the underlying thing that we're working on is if you can convince a hiring manager that you are excited about this job, this company, this mission, their mission, and you want to stay because you're interested in development opportunities. Somebody who's just any job, they don't care. They're not going to ask about development opportunities. If you're asking the right questions about development, I'm thinking, okay, they're thinking long-term. They want to stay here. They want to understand how they can develop here, how they can build a career here. And that is all positive signals to me and the hiring manager and the senior leader for sure.

Right. It's not a stepping stone. It's an opportunity that you want to really squeeze everything out of and give a lot to as well.

Of course. So the scariest people. On the interview panel are the ones that usually the candidates are not that scared of.

And so I'm going to make—

yes, exactly. So, you know, because you have hired people, when we get into our debrief sessions, so typically we have a couple of candidates come on site or have virtual interviews. We do a couple of panel interviews and then we come together to discuss the candidates as a group. The nitpickiest The most scary feedback comes from the peers, the other scientists.

Oh yeah.

And it's really interesting because those are the people that our candidates, especially who are early in, earlier in their careers, they haven't really seen this, they tend to let their guard down around those individuals. And I want to talk a little bit about that because we had a great session with you last week where you taught our premium members all about building rapport in presentations and group situations, group project situations. And you talked about this naysayer, the person that maybe is not on your side, the skeptic. You talked about the skeptic. And the skeptic is not sometimes going to be apparent in your interview, but I want to treat the peers in the interview as the potential skeptics. They may not be. They may be absolutely thrilled to meet you, You may sense though a little bit of, you mentioned earlier, walls being thrown up. You might sense that. Tell us a little bit about that and how that phenotype appears in interviews.

So there's a couple of reasons that you might have a skeptic. So when I talked about building relationships in this seminar, I was focusing to some extent on building relationships with team members who don't do what you do. And so the skeptic is going to be someone who kind of is skeptical about your science or potentially about you if they don't know you. But skeptics in your field, those are really hard because you've got that guy who's just like, what is this person bringing to the table? We've got this already. So it could be they feel threatened, particularly, and I think this was a question that came up during that seminar. Let's say you're bringing in, let's say, a new methodology, or you're coming in with a skill set that the team doesn't have. You are threatening people's way of working because you are going to be bringing in something that's going to force them to change. Nobody likes change. Change is hard. Change is difficult. Change is painful. Change slows you down. And I think that might be one reason that you have those people in the audience because they feel like their position, particularly if you are bringing in a tool or a method that usurps something that they're already very good at and maybe they're the department expert in. And now you're coming in and saying, well, I'm gonna teach you all how to use this methodology, this assay, this software. And this person's like, I don't need that software. I got this far in my career by using this software and I'm not changing. And it's like the boss says, well, actually you are. That's threatening to them. And frankly, they may, people are people, but they may end up sort of almost sabotaging you or downgrading you because it's not about you, it's about them, right? It's about their fear of change. So we can do a whole nother thing on change management, of course, but I think one of the things to do is to introduce, again, risk. What's the risk of not getting up to speed? Like, think about AI now, and I'm not going to go down an AI path, but think about AI now. And think about how if you don't embrace it soon, it's, there goes your job. You at least need to be conversant with it. So you're coming in saying, I'm going to bring an AI empowered software. And this guy's like, AI, um, but they're because of that, because of their internal threat, they're going to be difficult to use. So part of what you can do is to also say, I understand. Sometimes empathy goes a long way. I understand that this is a potential significant change to the way that everybody here works, and I empathize because change is hard. And sometimes just empathizing that change is hard can break down that guard a little bit, but also helping to understand the risk of not embracing this particular, whatever, science or method or tool can help a little bit. And your willingness to be empathetic to change and also to say, I'm excited to work with you on finding a way to implement this because I've been told that you are the expert in XYZ. And so I'm going to need your help. People love to help. They love to feel important, right? So you say, I am really going to need your help in this because if I bring this tool in, I know that there's going to be a lot of resistance to it. You don't even have to say, I know there will be a lot of resistance to it. And I've heard that you're the expert, so I'm looking forward to working with you and figuring out a way to implement some of these changes. And suddenly they're like, okay, they're, they understand. They want to, maybe they want to partner with me. It may not break down the wall. It depends on how, you know, how sturdy that wall is. But sometimes these just acknowledgments and empathy and also, I need your help. I really am going to need you if I come in here. I can't do this by myself. I understand I'm up against something by bringing this kind of thing in. So that can help by sort of making them part of the process. And so that's one thing. So threat is a big part of resistance. Another one is you, they may be super, super experienced in something and you may be moderately experienced in something and you've had the gall to come in and try to teach them about this thing that they're an expert in. I mean, when I interviewed at Novartis, I had done a project during my postdoc, and I didn't really even realize that it was a really heavily statistical project. I mean, looking back on it now, it's very clear. And somebody said, well, you were really brave to present this to a room full of statisticians. I didn't even realize. And they were actually quite friendly about it. It was a useful methodology, thank God. But sometimes you've got that expert in the room And that person is like, what can this person bring to the table, please? We already have that expertise in-house. We don't need this. And so that's another person who might just want to be heard. So let them ask the question that is not actually a question. It's more of a comment. We've all been to conferences where people stand up. It's like, this is more of a comment than a question. We know that person. Let them say it. And sometimes going, you know, I'm so glad you said that. And this is a piece of the thing that I actually don't know yet. And I'm so excited that if I come here that I can learn more about this from you. Again, people like to feel heard and feel needed. Sometimes all a person wants is to just feel heard and understood and appreciated. And if you can give them that without kind of being obsequious, you don't want to be like, oh my God, you're so smart.

You're the best.

But if you can be like, that is awesome. I'm still relatively, I would say junior in this area. I can't wait to learn at your feet when I come here. And I hope that you'll take me under your wing and teach me more about this. People love that stuff. So that's one way also of breaking down that skepticism. Another one is just, it's a new methodology. They don't really understand it. And so nobody wants to admit that they don't understand something. And it may just be that maybe that you're presenting it wrong, but let's assume that you're not. Let's assume that you're presenting everything right and this person doesn't understand. That also is threatening because you've got somebody coming in who knows something that you don't. And I'm not talking about like that's gonna usurp your project or something, but they know something that you don't. And of course that makes you feel bad cuz nobody wants to admit they don't know something. And so they may just try to poke holes in it in a way that just makes them feel better cuz they've said something, but it doesn't actually really do anything, but it makes them feel better. Sometimes people just wanna be heard. A way that you can handle those kinds of questions where people are like, well, I just think this is, this is unnecessary or whatever. And I talked about this in the seminar. Love, I love this. This is my friend Mike. His mother was a grade school teacher and he heard me do a seminar on this and he said, here's something that you can add. If somebody says, well, I think this is blah, blah, blah, you can go, you know what? I thought that too, but. Here's what I did to convince myself that's not the case. So what you've had the opportunity to do is make them feel heard, make them feel understood, like, okay, well, you thought that too. And then you get to trot out the evidence to show them why they're wrong. And it's a very subtle way of doing it. Instead of saying, well, you're wrong, here's the evidence. You say, yeah, I know exactly where, what, why this is coming to you. And I thought the same thing. Here is what convinced me. There's different reasons why people are skeptical. And one of the most important things to do is to understand if you can, what's the source of that? Is it threat? Is it, you know, that they know more than you? Is it that they know less than you? And by understanding kind of the source of that, if you can get to that by asking questions or doing active listening or just probing a little bit, you will, you can often diffuse that. The most important thing to do is to, instead of leaping to defense is to just ask the question like, what is it that concerns you about these results? And I'd love to hear from you because I'm always trying to learn. Again, you're making them feel heard, you're asking for their help.

I wanna just summarize it quickly. So we've got sort of a few different buckets of reasons that people might be that skeptic. So first of all, they may be really defensive because what you're doing, what you're bringing in will mean change. And change is hard. So there's that. And it may threaten, feel that it's threatening their place even in the company. The second bucket would be that they feel like they already know, they're the expert, that what could you possibly bring to the role and how dare you try and educate me on something that I'm already the expert in. And the third major reason might be that somebody's scared that they don't actually understand what you bring in. Maybe scared is not the right word, but that intimidates them a little bit and nobody likes to feel dumb. And so to bring them along on the journey and to potentially explain it a different way or make sure that you're asking the right questions to get at how you can better clarify what it is that you do, I think those are really great. And all of those come back also to We are a little bit on a date in these interviews, and if you are just doing all of the talking, you're not necessarily going to be asking the right questions. And so getting people to answer questions is going to draw out, you know, whatever phenotype they are. Why are you feeling this resistance? Let's ask some questions. Let's get curious and make it more of a conversation, a two-way street, as opposed to you trying to lecture them. or you trying to just talk about your background. I love all of that. I think I see this, yeah, very much so at the colleague, the peer level. Usually the hiring manager is not any of these types because they've already selected you. They know you're going to come in and solve the problem that they need. So we also talked a little bit about allies in your seminar the other day. And so if I'm picking out like who is your ally, it's usually the hiring manager because they've brought you this far. And so how might you leverage that? Ally if you are working to bring your skeptics on side.

So a couple things in the preparation for the interview, especially with the hiring manager, you can ask them a little bit like, I'm really excited to come. Tell me a little bit about the personalities that are on the team. Tell me a little bit about the people that I'm going to meet. So you can go on LinkedIn and see their CV. That doesn't really tell you who you're going to meet. So trying to dig in a little bit and say, oh, okay, so how long have they been at the company? Just trying to get a little bit of feel for the people that you're going to meet with so that you can kind of pre-prepare, I guess, for those personalities, I think is very helpful. And also, you know, when it comes to the seminar, ask the hiring manager, I'm thinking about talking about these 3 things. Is this going to resonate with the group? Is there one that's in particular a little bit more interesting to the group or maybe more challenging that people might be interested in learning about. So you can certainly kind of do a little homework in terms of like figuring out your battle plan for both the interview and the seminar. So those are helpful. Another one is depending on when your seminar is during the day, if you're later in the day, as you're talking to people during your one-on-ones with them, you can sort of allude to what you're going to talk about. And kind of see what pings to them and say, what is it about this that, that's interesting? Oh, you know what? I'm going to talk about that during my seminar. And if they ask a question to you in that one-on-one, be like, can you do me a favor? Can you ask that question during the seminar? Because I would love to be able to address that. I don't have that in my slides, but actually I think that would be cool. And if you think this is interesting for other people, could you ask it in the seminar? So now you've got them, you've already got a planted question. And you've got somebody who's already interested in this topic. So that's really good. The ally thing too, if you're a nervous presenter, I always look for the person who's nodding and smiling. And I am, you can already see I'm, I talk with my face and my hands and my, my expression. I'm always that person in the audience. Like when in doubt, just look for the me's in the audience who are engaged with the presentation. Because if you're nervous, you find that one person who's always smiling at you and nodding. And it makes you feel better. So those allies are going to be those people. And so you look to them. Plus, if you see them nodding and being like, oh, like you can see that you're something in your presentation is clicking with them. Talk to them more during that vignette because they may also be able to come in with a question or come in with a comment. Those are the good comments. Like, oh, this is really cool. This is something that we've been thinking about for a long time. Ping, you've now found one of those pain points. That the company is looking for that you can then leverage for the rest of the day and make sure that you bring up in your one-on-one interviews. So if you look for those people and you read the expressions, I mean, obviously you're looking at your slides, but you should look around the room and look for those people that are going, persons who's taking the notes, kind of just click in your head like, okay, this person seems to be very interested in this thing. So maybe you can ask a question to them about it, or maybe you can sort of highlight this and say, I noticed several of you were really taking a lot of notes during this part. Do you have any questions on this? Because this sounded like this might have been interesting to you. But the allies are great to some extent. So there's actually a downside of allies in that it's almost like what I used to call the good job evaluation. So you do a presentation and everyone's like, you were great. And it's like, you know, you weren't great. I prefer somebody who's going to challenge me slightly because then I have the opportunity to say more. And if when you're interviewing, all they're doing is saying, oh, cool, that's neat. Are you actually hitting the mark with them? And if they ask a question, you know that they're engaged. But if they just are nodding and smiling and thumbs up, I'm not sure how to read that.

Yeah, it feels good. Well, I can attest that you are the person in the audience smiling and nodding. I have given a talk with you in the audience. And yeah, I was like, well, Stacy's digging it.

Yeah, I know.

So I Love all of that. I have a few little tips and tricks that just go a little deeper on some of those things. Do you know something that I have seen work really well? I've done it myself. It only works in small group presentations. So this is not something you're going to go to an international conference and do this technique, but it does work for job talks with small audiences. It does work for department talks where you have your small group. When you see somebody have a thought bubble, You know what I mean? Like their, their face is just like, oh, I call it out sometimes. And I'll just say, I think you just had a thought bubble, or I just saw a light bulb go off. What were you thinking there? And you can kind of interrupt your own, if it doesn't derail your presentation, but you can just invite that thought to come up.

I love that.

And it's such a nice way to get maybe a group that you don't have a lot of rapport with yet, like a brand new job talk. You don't know anybody, but somebody in the audience goes, oh, Then you can say, oh, I just, I saw that thought bubble. Was there something I could pause on there? And do you want to share that thought? And that sometimes creates a really nice conversation and builds rapport with the group. So that's one thing that I've seen work really well.

Or the confused face.

That one too. Yep. Yep.

Yes. You look like you have a question.

I think I lost you here. I want to just pause and make sure I didn't. So I love that. You mentioned not getting good feedback after presentations, and this is actually something that the amazing Adam Grant has a wonderful, I don't know, formula for. So if you come out of a presentation and you can use this in your job talks when you go and you have a conversation with the team, usually not the folks that are probably below your level, but at least the peers and definitely the hiring manager. If they say, oh, that was a great presentation. Wonderful. Thanks.

Thank you.

Then you can say, that's great. What's one thing I could have done better to keep everybody, to bring everybody along with me and actually get good feedback? But that does two things. First of all, it makes your job talk better. If you don't land this job, it will be better next time, 100%. But second, you're building rapport. You're asking for help. And the hiring manager especially is going to look at that and think, wow, like this person is the type of person that wants to be better all the time. And that is really impressive if you do it the right way. If you do it in— there's a wrong way to do it, there's, and there's a right way to do it.

Did I do okay? Was that okay? Did it land well? Like, did people understand it?

Do you think it was okay? But I love that.

Like, what left you wanting more? And I always like that in my feedback from my training courses. I ask people like, what did you find really interesting? And like, what left you wanting more in a good way? And what left you wanting more? Like you didn't feel like we went deep enough. Now you shouldn't necessarily ask all these questions, but asking people like, was there something, what could I have added on a little bit that could have just made this much better? Yeah. Asking for feedback is great because it shows that you're willing to take feedback. Being willing to take feedback, as you said, and grow is a good thing. Being self-aware that like not everything was perfect, even if you did a great job. Somebody might have something that can just make it that much better. So asking for that feedback, I think, is a great way of, as you said, connecting with people and saying, how do you think that went? Is there anything that you felt like I could have done differently? Or was there something that was missing for you? And I, I'd love your feedback on that because I'm always improving. People like people who are always improving.

Yeah. One more phenotype I want to talk about just briefly. Is our cross-functional interviewer. There's two flavors of this. This may be a cross-functional interviewer in the sense that you're going to work with them in a technical capacity. So they are in a different department, but they are looking for your technical problem solving. This we see analytical development and process development go hand in hand. Like you need to be able to work with those people. Basic R&D, they need to also be able to transfer their assays eventually to analytical, to process. Like this is, so we're looking for technical colleagues, but they also might be culture interviewers. And so we do put people on the interview teams sometimes that are not in your department, or they won't be your direct colleagues, but they are, I call them culture carriers. These are people that embody the culture of the company, and we put them on the team to suss out whether you're going to also be part of that culture in a good way. So those are two people, and you will know that they are the cross-functional team members because they're not gonna be in the direct group and you can assess that quite quickly. So tell me about getting those non-direct colleagues on board.

One thing to do again is to ask for their help. So for us, for in pharmacokinetics, it might be clinical pharmacology or statistics. So you can ask people like, how do you collaborate with people that would be on my team? What are the roles and responsibilities? Not sort of digging into the weeds, but like, how do you work together? What happens when you guys have a conflict? So I know that sometimes in pharmacokinetics and statistics, we have different answers to the same question. So what do you do in those situations? How do you work together? And you can start to endear yourself being like, we quants need to stick together, we quantitative scientists. So asking them a little bit about how things work in the company in terms of how you collaborate with their team and how your teams work together is always a good thing because A, it shows that you want to partner and you want to collaborate, but also it shows that you're trying to suss out a little bit about, or some of those pain points, because in addition to being collaborators, sometimes you can be sort of competitors a little bit, depending on like the timber of the team. So getting to know that is really important. And also this is another one where you don't dig into the weeds on what you do, but you talk about like, here's what I know about statistics and like, here's how I've worked with statistics before. So being able to establish that you have a pattern of collaborating with that type of team, if you've done that before, or with that type of discipline, I think is also a nice way to go. And asking them a little bit about how teams are structured. So it's more you asking questions to them, but also being able to show them upfront, like, this is how I work with your team. So one of the things we talked about in the seminar was you want to establish that relationship from the get-go, especially if this is a really key partner. You can come in and be like, here's how I work with statistics. All right, that's not going to land well. But if you go, in the past when I've worked with statistics, here are some of the things that, that I've run into. And I wonder like, how does it work here? And how do you work with people? And so what you're starting to do is get to know the roles and responsibilities so that you can speak to that appropriately as you go to other interviewers. But also you start to establish how you work with people and how you're willing to partner/collaborate. So there's, it's, this is really where that two-way piece is important, where it's not just about you talking to them, but it's also about you asking for intel on the way things work in the company, because these can be traditionally tense relationships, or they can be traditionally very collaborative relationships. How is it here? Because this is important information for you if you're going to be working with this team. How do we work together or are we constantly at odds? So that's one. And the other is just helping to put the science that you do into the context that matters to them. So if I'm talking to a clinician, I'm not gonna dig into pharmacokinetics, but I'm gonna talk about one of the things that my team does. We help to understand by using our population PK modeling, we help to understand what is the optimal dose for most of the patients and who are the patients that are more sensitive or maybe need more or need less? And how sure are we about that? Because part of my job is making sure that we get the right dose to the right patient. And I know as a clinician, that's of primary importance to you. So being able to show the context of what you do and make that important to them also shows that you understand what's important to them and you also understand like how you're going to work together and what you supply to them, you understand how to convert that into what matters to them. Because a lot of times, those of us who are deeply in the weeds with our science, we don't know how to make that conversion of what we do to what somebody else cares about.

Yeah, that makes so much sense. I was recently helping somebody with interview prep and she was, she's a scientist and she was interviewing to be on Solutions Architect team. And so helping to— it's a software product, but helping labs and other companies sort of use this software. And she said that she heard that the sales team, who you'd think would partner really closely, was actually very adversarial with the solutions architects. And but the solutions architects are put onto the sales process team right from the beginning. So you would think these two would be hand in hand. And so getting ready for this interview, the types of questions that we were structuring for her to ask when she met with the head of sales, who she would apparently be rivals with, we were creating questions to diffuse that quite quickly and think about, well, in the past, how have you partnered with the solutions architect? What are some things that work really well? And what are some things that don't work really well in this partnership? So teasing that out and getting him to talk and tell her, well, this is what isn't working so that she could then set herself up as the ideal partner. And I love that.

Yeah.

But that was really— she got that intel so early in the process. That was so helpful. And she got it from the hiring manager. I asked him questions about who am I going to meet in the process? How do we interact with these people? And he said right up front, the sales team, they can be a little territorial about what they do. And so really good intel to be had at that a hiring manager interview stage?

What do they call it? Forewarned is forearmed. So if you know that you're going to be meeting with this person who's traditionally difficult, you just prepare for that and you are nice as can be and you show how you want to collaborate with them and you want to work with them and how you want to learn from them. And that'll often diffuse some of that. You see, when you see the person and you walk in and they've got this body language and as you talk to them, you can sort of see it.

Yeah.

And if you don't see that happening, then, you know, you need to do something a little bit differently if you don't see that, those arms uncrossing and the body language sort of relaxing.

Absolutely. Yeah. Well, this was so, so informative. I know that people are gonna have lots of questions about this, so prepare yourself. People will probably reach out.

I'm ready.

So we are having a series of 3 seminars with Stacy that are all being turned into classroom material, so there'll be 3 different modules in our classroom. The first one we had last week, like I said, was awesome. It was all about building this rapport, mostly in the context of presentations and project teams where you do a lot of presentations, so communicating. I want to just bring this to the podcast because we use a lot of those same skills in the interview, and the interview is foreshadowing to how you're going to work with the team. I think this is really important to nail this early. We are going to talk next in your next seminar about job talks, structuring them, what goes in them, what does not go in them, how to make them compelling for a diverse audience, which is usually the case in your job talks. Uh, the third presentation you're going to give is going to be all on more general talks, which once you land that job, we just know that people who are good presenters, they get promoted more often, their salaries are higher. We see people who are good presenters move up the ranks because we need good presenters. And it is a skill that you can practice and you can get better at. So we're going to talk about those more general presentations when you're presenting to your company, outside the company, to a conference, whatever. And that'll be a lot of fun.

I'm excited about it.

Yeah, me too. And so is the group. So thank you so much for your time. It's a lot of fun. And we will see you all in the community if you're not in there already. And yeah, bye for now. Thanks so much for listening to the Biotech Career Coach Podcast by The Collaboratory Career Hub. Join our school community to get access to support, resources, and materials, 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. Have an amazing week, and we'll see you back here next Friday.