The Job Presentation in Pharma

When you interview for a job in Pharma you are often required to give a seminar on some work you have done in the past. Usually these last an hour, which is to include time for questions. I have sat through countless boring, scattered or poorly delivered ones and I am here to tell you a secret: to my knowledge no one has ever gotten a job because of their seminar but I have seen many not get the job because of their seminar. You see, there is no upside to a job presentation, all there is is downside. But time and again, interviewees come in poorly prepared, not having practiced, using material that was often thrown together at the last minute.

Job seminars are not the same as a scientific seminar. Yes, the audience wants to see something novel, but most don’t expect to see anything new due to intellectual property considerations. I doubt anyone has gotten legal approval to present their work to a competitor during a job interview. Instead, compounds are often blinded or the work that is presented was done years ago on dead compounds. In some cases, work done in graduate school is presented. And that’s ok because the real objective of the job seminar is to evaluate YOU in front of a crowd and see how you handle questions.

As a hiring manager let me give some advice to all those looking for a new job:

1.) Know your audience. Learn who will be at your seminar. Is it just pharmacometricians or will other scientists, like clinical pharmacologists and physicians, be present? Ask the hiring manager for the job what level of detail do they want you to go into because the presentation you make to pharmacometricians should be different than the one you make for a mixed audience.

Once you know your audience, tailor your presentation for them. What is it you want the audience to know? If they leave remembering one thing, what is that one thing? Take the time and effort to do a good job. Show that you are invested enough to care in the quality of your work.

2.) Prepare. The preparation you do beforehand is reflection of the quality of work you will do later. It is very obvious to an audience if a presentation was put together at the last minute. Respect your audience and don’t do that. Lastly, make sure you have enough material to fill the allotted time. On the flip side, don’t be the person who says “I know this is a lot of slides. Let’s see how much we get done.”

3.) Practice. This may seem obvious but most people fail to practice for their job seminar. Instead you get comments like “what did I want to say here”. Practicing will also reveal how cohesive a presentation is. Is what you are saying making sense? Is the presentation too long or short? Do you need to spend more time in a section because it isn’t making sense? Remember what the purpose of the job presentation is – it’s to evaluate your communication skills.

Don’t forget your first impressions. It usually only takes a few minutes for people to make their mind up about you and whether they are truly going to listen

to you. These first minutes are crucial. Make eye contact. Smile. If you have technical problems, make a joke about it. Once things get started, start strong. Practicing will help you create those powerful first moments of a presentation.

4.) What was your role? In some cases, it’s easy to see what the presenter’s role was in the presentation. If they are the pharmacometrician then they probably did the modeling. Sometimes though scientists come in and present study results and modeling results together. In the Q&A it becomes apparent they did not do the modeling work but were presenting the work of others. This is bad.

Part of working in a company is collaboration. Presenting someone else’s work as your own is somewhat deceptive. Showing how you collaborated in a team presents you in a positive light. Remember, it’s not just about you. When I think back about some of the people I’ve hired, I don’t really remember what they talked about. What I remember is how they presented. How they made me feel. I can look at every one of my staff and tell you whether they did a good job at their presentation, whether they were nervous, or whether they displayed confidence. And for the people that we didn’t hire, they are often discussed in terms of what they did wrong. “Do you remember so-and-so? Their presentation was so bad.”

There have been many times when I hired someone who gave a bad presentation because of their technical skills, but what I have learned is that often their bad job seminar skills carry directly over to the presentations they make for their job. Now, I am to the point where I would rather hire an average pharmacometrician with great communication skills than a great pharmacometrician with average communication skills. So, please do everyone a favor, take a little time to create a memorable job presentation. It can only help you land that job you want.