How to get a job in biotech or pharma
Wisdom from the school of Hard Knocks
Increasingly, I’m being asked for career advice: where to find a job, how to get a job, whether to take a particular job. This was certainly not an area I deliberately got into - there’s patient data to be analysed and drugs to be developed - but I vividly remember my years of frustrating job hunting and the largely useless guidance I received. The job market is a confusing, weird system. It’s barely a system. And it's plagued by randomness, bias and well-intentioned but useless advice. So I understand people trying to understand it, especially those new in career or trying to attempt a career transition.
After saying the same things again and again, I’m writing it all down. Partly so that others can benefit from it. Partly so that people can comment, criticize and correct. Partly so the next time I’m asked for advice, I can just point here …
But first, read my page of necessary disclaimers and assumptions.
For those new in career, I have a separate article. I suggest you read that first.
This is a living document that I’ll keep adding to or changing as better advice comes in and as I change my mind.
The job-hunting process
Before you start looking for a job
You should always have a CV. It’s incredible how often I ask someone for a CV and they beg off, asking for a few weeks to prepare one, eventually returning some confusing, over-long document. If you always have a CV:
You’re ready for any opportunity that arises
Your CV can iteratively improve
There’s a similar school of thought that you should always have a soft job search on. This is more of a personal choice - a perpetual job search can be exhausting - but you’ll get much better jobs by being opportunistic than by waiting until you need a new job immediately.
Before you start looking, it's a good time to work on being visible: to publish, to present at conferences, comment on social media, teach classes, anything that involves you being a professional in public. You don’t have to be famous but if you’re visible, recruiters will reach out to you. Hiring managers can google to find out who you are. In a sense, your public profile is proof of your CV. Some of this can be tough for the more introverted and I don't blame anyone for wanting to avoid the toxicity of social media, but look for ways to get your name out there.
(Don’t become one of those people who is constantly on social media, commenting on everything. That incessant self-promotion can be worse than having no profile at all. I won’t attempt to define a dividing line but there’s definitely a point at which there’s too much.)
This is as good a place as any to suggest looking at dedicated career resources and perhaps professionals. Many universities or education organisations will have a career centre and advisors that can critique CVs and cover letters, point out job listings, find classes to improve your interview performance and the like. It sometimes just helps to get an outside opinion. If you have the money, it might even be worthwhile paying for a private career coach - a moderate cost might save you a year of bad or no job.
Looking for a job
Where do you find jobs? It’s a lot better to have the jobs come to you, than you go to find the jobs. There a few broad ways to passively find jobs:
Your social circle: Tell everyone you know that you’re looking for a job. Reach out to contacts. Studies have shown that soft contacts are tremendously valuable for finding work.
Recruiters: Frankly a mixed bag. Some recruiters will go to great effort to match you with a job, others will try and force you into any old position. But if you speak to 10 recruiters and only 1 finds you a job, that’s still a win, a good use of your time. Reach out to recruiters, talk to them, get on their books. After a while, you’ll find it difficult to get away from them.
Pharma & big company job banks: many of the big companies and even some small ones will take CVs on spec, supposedly keeping them to match against future job opportunities. I’ve never got a job this way, nor has anyone I know. But it’s an easy quick thing to do, so why not do it?
Make sure you have a LinkedIn profile and it’s well-written and up-to-date. People will look at it. Switch on the “open to work” flag so recruiters can find you.
Be a bit shameless. I once finished a conference talk with a slide pitching myself as open for work. You have nothing to lose by reaching out.
What if you have to actively look for jobs to apply to?
Pharma & big company job banks: even in allegedly slow times, big companies have a lot of jobs, actually too many to search. Find their dedicated job sites and sift through on few keywords. Don’t get too caught up on job titles and initial descriptions - often an interesting job hides behind a bland or cryptic lead (Lead Digital Enablement Manager, Companion Diagnostics Analyst, etc.)
There’s a few pharma / biotech job websites, of frankly mixed quality. LinkedIn is surprisingly good, especially as it learns what jobs you are interested in or you search for broad categories like ‘pharma’.
I suggest you limit your job search to one or two days a week. You don’t want it to take over your life and new opportunities don’t appear that often. Take care of your morale and ring-fence the search to a useful cadence. Then get on with the rest of your life.
Applying for a job
“CV” and “resume” once meant different things. Now they seem to be used interchangeably to refer to the same thing, a short focused profile of yourself.
The overwhelming majority of CVs that I see are horrible. Your CV is probably horrible. You should fix it. There’s lots of guides and advice out there. You should read some of them. Here are some good ones:
At the same time, don’t get caught up in very prescriptive details or shibboleths like date format, or the order of headings. I get CVs in all sorts of formats and as long as they fulfil the first point below, they work.
Here’s my condensed advice on what makes a good CV:
It should be easy to read. It should be easy for me to find something in it. Don’t make me work for it. THIS IS THE FUNDAMENTAL OVERRIDING PRINCIPLE.
It should be 2 pages in length. Experienced professionals might stretch this to 3 pages. No, you are not an exception.
Use lots of bullet points, sentence fragments, sections and white space to break it up, make it easier on the eye, quicker to skim. Avoid large blocks of text.
Every piece of irrelevant information you put in there, robs space and attention from the relevant information. Be brutal about trimming or abbreviating old jobs, immaterial publications, unrelated hobbies or pastimes, work in a different field, inconsequential qualifications. “Irrelevant” is the key. If the job is looking for leadership and you have a hobby activity that demonstrates leadership? Then it’s relevant.
Too many CVs are laundry-lists of skills and tools, just dry facts. As a result, they’re not just boring but uninformative. There’s lots of people that can use sklearn, build a phylogeny, or visualise data. Instead try and tell a story, talk about the problems you solved, the difference you made. What was the value you provided? There’s a caveat here, in that early in your career you’ve got little but your list of skills to sell yourself on. But look for whatever you can to demonstrate you can actually apply those skills.
Avoid vague wishy-washy words like “supported”, “assisted”, “participated”. What did you actually do? Use too many of those words and it looks like you just happened to be present in the room while others did the actual work. What did you do? What was the result? Can you measure that? (Some lists of action words to use instead: https://zety.com/blog/resume-action-words; How To Do a CV | CV Words | Best Words for CV (monster.co.uk).)
Academic CVs tend to emphasis impact factors, prestigious PIs, conference posters and other markers of scholarly prowess. If you’re not applying for a university position, tone these right down.
Interviewing
I have a Twitter thread with some loose ideas about interviewing: "Been interviewing job candidates lately ..." (twitter.com) from which much of this has been harvested. And let me be clear, I have done some terrible, awful interviews in my time. I made all the possible mistakes. I am a cautionary tale you can learn from.
There are some questions interviewers will always ask, so have an answer ready and don't look so surprised:
Why do you want this job?
Why are you leaving your current job?
When can you start?
There’s some less obvious questions that frequently come up, but often flummox people, usually the cultural / values / soft skills questions. You can recognise them by way they start:
“Here at BIG PHARMA, one of our values is ‘Be bodacious’. Can you tell us how you’re been bodacious lately?”
(More subtly) “Can you tell us of a time you had to adjudicate a conflict between two colleagues? How did you do it?”
Here the interviewer is inviting you to tell a story of how you work and think and deal with soft problems in the workplace. There’s no single right solution here. You don’t have to deliver a perfect answer but a thoughtful answer. You can even confess to making mistakes and things going wrong. Look up the STAR format (Situation, Task, Action, Result) for a good framework for your response.
Sometimes you will be asked equality or diversity-related questions such as how you deal with different backgrounds or cultures in the workplace. Do not respond by affirming that you love everyone and don’t have a prejudiced bone in your body. That’s not an answer.
(In fact, “that doesn’t apply to me” is probably a bad answer to any question. It’s an assertion, a cop-out, not an explanation. Explain how and why it doesn’t apply to you.)
There is a slight prejudice in industry against academics, partly deserved. Everyone has a story of a new recruit coming straight from university who was disorganised, communicated poorly, wouldn’t work on business-relevant problems or just wanted to potter around working on what interested them. If you’re coming straight from the university, interviewers may question you aggressively on this point. Show that you’re organised, can work with people, can pursue business objectives, have thought about the differences between business and the academy.
(More broadly, whenever you move from one type of environment to another - big company to small company, small company to big company, public sector to consulting - the interviewers will quiz you to see if you appreciate the differences and can function in the new environment. Show that you’ve thought about it, demonstrate examples of what they will need.)
I’ve seen so many good candidates shaken by a nervous demeanour. An interviewer can allow for nerves to some extent but not completely. So this is a problem and you should do something about it. Rehearse. Relax. Make sure you get enough sleep. Best solution? Do a lot of interviews, so you become good at doing interviews. I hated those years I had of endless job applications, talking to listless audiences. But interviews don't make me nervous anymore.
Don’t be in a hurry. If the interviewer asks you a question, don't trip over yourself trying to get an answer out. Stop. Pause. Think. Ask for clarification if you need to. Take your time. You're doing the interviewer a favour because you'll give a more considered answer. There are so many candidates that rush to answer and you get a maelstrom of loosely connected anecdotes and weird asides before they splutter to a halt and THEN ask if they've understood the question. Nope - start from that place, don't finish there.
Further to this point, don’t over-explain: I see this a lot. And perhaps it's a personal foible but if someone explains and explains and keeps talking, going on and on? It doesn't make them more convincing, it makes them less convincing. Concise, to the point answers. People can ask for more detail. Because communication is a desirable skill, especially at the higher levels. And everyone on the panel is wondering what you'll be like to work with
Don’t be too desperate. One of the cliched bits of advice out there is that you should make a direct pitch: “I want this job!” But most interviewers take this as a bad sign or find it a bit off-putting. An ex-colleague of mine described the optimal attitude for a job interview as "interested but slightly pissed off”. Maybe you might better read that as "interested but politely skeptical”.
(A friend of mine disagrees, saying that he prefers candidates that are “a little hungry”. Maybe the answer is to never exceed “a little”.)
This seems like such obvious advice but do not criticise or smear your current employer. It looks bad. There may have been bad behaviour or bad judgement but your interviewer doesn't know that, doesn't need to know that, it's not their job to fix that for you. Don't distract them, be positive and tactful. If you start laying out your problems in front of them, an interviewer is going to wonder if you’re the cause.
Come to the interview with questions of your own. It looks very bad, very passive and incurious if they ask you for questions and you have none.
After the interview
What should you do?
Do a postmortem on the interview. What went right? What went wrong? How can you strengthen any weak points? What sort of questions did they ask?
Then move on to the next job application.
Seriously. You’re not going to achieve anything by worrying about what’s done and it’s a lot simpler to just move on. I have never got a job from chasing up the interviewers. The most that’s ever happened is a vague “we’re still considering” or a sheepish admission that another candidate has been selected and “you should have been told, I dunno why you weren’t”. It’s just easier more efficient to act as if you didn’t got the job.
What if they offer you the job?
Should you take it? That depends, do you want it? You should think of yourself as the buyer in these situations, a person who has choices. Don’t make a decision out of fear. This is one of the reasons why soft & opportunistic job searches are so much better. You already have a job, you don’t need a new one, so you can take your time and be choosy.
I’m a strong believer that an interview tells you a lot about an organisation - how organised they are, whether they have reasonable expectations, whether they actually understand what the job entails, their culture and attitude. You can assume their behaviour in an interview is as good as it ever gets. Would you want to work with them? See: don't ignore these job search red flags — Ask a Manager
Unfortunately, bios and LinkedIn profiles tend to draw very linear pictures of careers, like a series of well-plotted moves, ever upwards. But this is largely post-hoc making a story from a series of accidents and ad hoc decisions. (As a colleague of mine once said “I can’t write on my CV that I took that job because it’s all I got offered and I needed to pay my rent.”) It’s okay to take a step sideways. Most careers are actually a zigzag. Just have a good story to go with it. Another way to look at it is to be less worried about whether this is your dream job and think more about whether this gets you closer to your dream job.
Miscellaneous
Are you getting every job you apply for? Are you getting an offer after every interview you do? Then you should be aiming higher.
A lot of job advice is aimed at ever-rising career paths, pushing people to become PIs, professors, vice-presidents, founders, etc. But (a) there’s only so many professorships and vice-president-ships out there and (b) the world is full of unhappy middle managers who were once happy technical leaders. Decide what you want, resist those who who want to turn you into what they want.
Resources
No guarantees, warranties or global approvals of everything these people have written but they are good place to study
Ask a Manager, although US-centric, has refreshingly realistic takes: job searching — Ask a Manager - answers about your job hunt