It’s been a bizarre month. After many years spent exclusively recruiting senior staff and executives, one of my clients asked us to fill two entry-level scientific positions. Stranger still, we were asked to run job ads for these positions—quite a stretch for a company that for years has avoided advertising like the plague. We’re an executive search firm, and running ads is not our normal mode of operation.

The experience was both a blessing and a curse. Yes, we found an additional candidate, but no, it didn’t make the process any easier. It also held some useful lessons—both for us and, I hope, for readers of this column.

The job market has indeed improved. Everyone I know in the recruiting business is busy with client companies who are positive about future job growth. Despite this, if job applicants don’t learn the lessons of others before them in the job market, their efforts may be wasted. If you’ll examine what works and what doesn’t work, however, you may walk away with some great ideas about how to land at the top of that stack of CVs, whether you are out there networking or responding to ads.

The recruitment effort
Our first step was to develop a list of internal candidates—molecular biologists and protein chemists from our own database. As I mentioned, because our company works primarily in the director-and-up category, we had to begin by asking our senior-level contacts—professors and senior company execs—the “who do you know” question specific to this client’s need.

The results were disappointing. Instead of passing along the names of their top people, most professors referred us to their “hard to place” people, or those with poor publication track records. And execs we called in industry either weren’t connected to newbies or referred us to equally hard-to-place contacts who had been looking for a job for far too long.

We identified some prospects through LinkedIn, but because so many junior-level people either are not on LinkedIn, or have a marginal profile with missing information, that approach had limited value. It was frustrating to have to make LinkedIn connections just to get an email address and phone number. Tip: Put your contact information into the text of your LinkedIn profile. You’ll certainly hear about more job opportunities.

Kicking it into high gear with an advertising campaign
Two weeks in and still lacking a good short list, we decided to advertise. With the help of a consultant, we ran ads in a half-dozen local biotechnology markets. Of course, those ads were also available online by consolidators like Indeed.com.

Within a day, the CVs started to pour in. And this is where things really got difficult, because the responses were far worse than I expected. We got quantity but not quality out of our efforts and expense. Here are some statistics, based on a few “must-haves”—elements of the open position that are absolute, or in other words, not “nice-to-haves”:

• 5 years of experience post-Ph.D.: More than 40% of the respondents had either too little or too much experience. It’s not a problem to have 3 or 4 years, or 7 or 8. But when you have 20-plus years of experience, don’t apply for an entry-level job. No matter how hard up, it doesn’t help to put yourself through that humiliation.
• Significant Experience in Blah-Blah Technique: If an ad says that a particular method is job-critical, and you don’t have it, would you send a CV? Evidently people have no problem with this; more than 60% of our ad respondents did not have this very specific technique listed on their CV. In some cases, those applicants may have had this experience but did not take the extra few minutes required to update their CV and reflect it.
• Must be a Productive and Independent Scientist: With that request, wouldn’t you include a list of publications or patents? Where do people get the impression that they need a one-page résumé? Over 25% of the respondents provided too little information about themselves, sending their documents in the résumé style. Most science employers want a CV! While you don’t want to bury them under 8 to 10 pages with every abstract or poster you ever put up, you will want to provide the detail required in the ad. Just be succinct. Don’t worry about the number of pages. And, if it’s a scientific job, as this one was, it’s absolutely essential to enclose your publications list as it is the gauge upon which employers judge your productivity.

Lessons learned
From first-hand experience, here are my suggestions for managing your ad responses. As always, use job ads to supplement your networking and not the other way around.

1. First and foremost, deliver a CV to the ad that has been customized to fit that employer’s specified needs. Too few of the responses we reviewed in our experiment actually used the verbiage in the job ad to their advantage.
2. Never ever use a form letter as your cover letter. It is too valuable an opportunity to highlight why you fit the role. Professional CV reviewers can spot a form letter a mile away.
3. Use a name if you can find one. It takes 10 seconds to find my name on our website. Why was it not present on even one cover letter out of hundreds of responses? “Dear Sir or Madam” went out in the 1950s.
4. Don’t look desperate by repeatedly applying or sending multiple inquiries about your status. Move on to the next opportunity and don’t obsess. There are job applicants we heard from who made as many as 6-8 update calls to check the status of their application. Most of the time, that will automatically earn you a do-not-call status.
5. Learn to spot the must-haves and separate them from the nice-to-haves. While you’ll need those must-haves, just one or two nice-to-haves might get you an interview. Employers sometimes appear to be looking for everything rolled into one; at least a third of those listed requirements are last minute inclusions that have far less impact than the core skills that come earlier in the ad.
6. Don’t provide a résumé. Provide a scientific CV for an industry science job, with one possible addition, and that is the Qualified By or Summary of Qualifications at the top. Make sure that summary applies to the job!
7. Remember to use a custom name for your document. “J Fleming CV ABC Company Aug 2015” is much better than “2015 CV.” Our company computer is littered with lost CVs that have a name like this.
8. Make sure your immigration status and work availability are clear in your application.

Of course, my best recommendation is to stay positive, and focus on networking. Responding to ads can be a time sink in which you think you are advancing your case, but in reality you’re just wasting time if you don’t do things just right.

You’ve heard the horror stories about the number of scientists in the job market. While some of that is true, the actual number of people who do it right are so few that it’s created a very low bar to rise above. Becoming “noticeable” in the process is easy. Good luck!

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David G. Jensen
Contributing Editor

David G. Jensen is an executive recruiter working in the life sciences with more than three decades of biotechnology experience.
He can be reached at (928) 274-2266 or via davejensen70@gmail.com