In this episode, my guest is Kathy Gann, former MSL director for Mallinckrodt and Syneos Health. And we talk about how to prepare a presentation for an MSL interview. Great information. So anybody preparing for an interview, you definitely wanna check this out. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to MSL talk with Tom Caravella, a podcast specifically designed for MSLs and all things field medical. Hey, guys. Thanks for joining us. So very special guest today, Kathy Gann. Hey, Kathy.
How are you doing today? I'm okay, Tom. How about you? Happy Saint Patrick's Day. Yes. Saint Patty's Day today. Although it doesn't feel like it. The old ones are closed. Yeah. So how do you have Saint Patty's Day with with that? Well, I put on green. I noticed you didn't. You did. I know. I'm wearing blue today. So, yeah, it's weird. It's a weird time. But It is. You know what?
We're thank god we'll just all get through it and live virtually for a little while and and, practice good social distancing. Right? Absolutely. So you are joining us from where are you located? Providence, Rhode Island. You're in Rhode Island? Mhmm. And you recently retired. Correct? That's correct. Yep. After many years in the pharma industry. And you have done it all. Tell us. Tell everyone, like, you just done it. When it comes to medical affairs, you've pretty much done everything.
Well, when it comes to medical science liaisons, I've certainly done it. I started as an MSL. I made the decision I did the the academic track. I'm a PhD. I got the assistant professorship, but I knew I didn't wanna write grants for the rest of my life. And I basically stumbled into an MSL role at a job fair and took it and thought, wow. I'm never looking back. This is great. And over the years, I've been an MSL.
I have been MSL manager, and that's where I most recently was with Mallinckrodt and with Syneos before that. I've also been an MSL trainer, and I was vice president of a small consulting firm that did everything soup to nuts with MSLs from a needs analysis for a company to cutting the geographies to writing the product the policies, you know, the regulatory policies, to managing, training, everything. So if it touches an MSL, I've done it. Perfect. Well, I'm glad you're here. And Thank you.
I'll tell you this is a really important topic. I'm really appreciative that you decided to join us and talk about how to prepare for an interview, how how to prepare for a presentation on an MSL interview. Right. I can't tell you how many times people ask about this piece of it or how many times we get info from clients that the interview did not go so well because of the presentation.
So the presentation portion of an MSL interview could potentially be the most important part of the whole equation. It could make or break it. So Absolutely agree. I wanna thank you for being here. So let's get into it. So where where do we start? I'll let you start off. Well, I think the first thing, when you get that call, oh, we wanna bring you in for an interview, and we want you to do a presentation before you go much before you even start really preparing the presentation, and we'll talk.
We can talk about different kinds of presentations. As you're preparing that presentation, always expect the unexpected. So if first off, make sure you know how long you have to give the presentation. And if they say, oh, you have 20 minutes, ask them, was that with or without the q and a period? Mhmm. Because that may be with it.
And so, really, you only have 10 minutes, or it could be, no. It's 20 minute presentation, 10 minutes q and a. So make sure you're clear on that because what you don't wanna do is run long on a presentation. Yep. You can also, and if they tell you it's 20 minutes for your talk, plan 18. Sit down a little bit. Mhmm. There's no reason that nobody says you have to use every last second, and you always wanna be prepared that something can go wrong. There can be power failure.
Mhmm. There can be people dialing in late for a virtual interview. There can be the sort of thing that I had just happened to a candidate who brought his presentation on a thumb drive, which you should always do, and he had copied the wrong presentation onto the thumb drive. Oh, boy. Yep. So, fortunately, he had it in his email, and we just opened his email and did it that way. So prepare for everything. Bring it on a thumb drive. Bring your own laptop.
Bring handouts because, again, like we said, power goes out. You can't use your computer. But if you have a handout, then people can follow along. And then these days and, you know, days of the virtual, interview, I think that there's nothing wrong with saying, may I email you my PowerPoint beforehand So that if somebody needs to follow along that way because you're not doing it face to face, I don't see that there's any issue with that. But I as a hiring manager, I would be quite open to that.
Yeah. No. These are great points. And I think right from the start, it's really important to understand as you said, understand what the instructions are. You really need to follow the directions because if you don't understand exactly what they want, how much time is you have for slides, how much time you have for QA, then you're basically sending your presentation up incorrectly, and it's just gonna be a setup for failure. But you bring up a good point.
I recently had a situation where the power went out. But the candidate was smart enough. She did bring, handouts for everyone. Everyone was able to follow along seamlessly. There was really almost no interruption. As a matter of fact, it was kinda dark in there, so people were taking out their cell phones. And they were using the flashlights on their cell phones. So, you know, it's perfect. Expect the unexpected. Know the instructions to kinda prepare for everything.
You know, even you know, make sure that if you're preparing your I guess, if you're preparing your presentation on a Mac, make sure it it will be compatible with because you don't know if they're going to have the same type of format. Absolutely. Right. So make sure it's compatible with Windows. These are all little things that you have to think of. And that's the most and that sets you up.
Before you even start doing any sort of putting your presentation together, just keep all those things in mind from the very start. Alright. Good. Good. Good. So let's talk about there's there's a lot there's different types of presentations. So what would be what would be examples of of different presentations that someone might request in an interview? Sure. So most recently, at Mallinckrodt, what we were saying was we want you to do a presentation on something scientific or clinical.
K. And we started really delineating scientific or clinical because we had somebody come in and talk about something much more operational. Well, that's not an MSL role. We want to see how you present scientific and clinical data. So we just said, don't care about the topic. Make it scientific or clinical. So that's the first one where you get to choose the topic of your choice. K. That's one kind of presentation. And in that situation, yes, scientific or clinical.
Then there may be the situation and this is what some companies are doing. They will send you just the papers and, say, put together your presentation. And so then it's up to you to design the presentation from that. And, again, it's important to understand the data. You know? If the company just sends you the papers, then you want to make sure you understand what sequence the clinical trials were done in. We had a candidate come in in one of my previous roles, you know, manager roles.
We checked in the papers, and they presented the data in exactly the backwards way. Uh-oh. Go ahead. Which, to us, said, you don't understand what we were trying to do here. So, again, do your due diligence. Understand how these things all fit together. If you need to go to clinicaltrials.gov to see when these trials were done, nothing wrong with that. But make sure you understand that. And then the third thing, maybe they'll send you the slides and the papers.
And, in that case, again, I'll give you the same and, usually, if they send you the slides, they're in the order Mhmm. What how the trials were done. But, in that case, there's nothing wrong with your adding slides to it. Remember one of the most memorable interviews I had or had someone do, presentation we do, was we sent them the slides, and then they added transition slides that were their questions. Like, what would I do next? Those kinds of things. Or why was this important?
And they personalized it. And it showed to us that they could think. They were thinking about the data and thinking about what was the audience going to hear. So those are really the 3 kinds of presentations that I've been most familiar with. Yeah. Yeah. And we see that. We see all of the above. We also see one of the things that's somewhat unique is we have clients that will send out the instructions. It might be a paper. It might be an article.
But they'll send it out 5 days ahead of time because they want every candidate to have the exact same amount of time to prepare because everybody's being judged the same. So it's an even playing field. So you also need to be prepared that you might not actually have 2 or 3 weeks to prepare. You might only have 5 days. Typically, we try to at least give them a weekend so that they can use the weekend. Absolutely. But that's another thing that comes up.
Most oftentimes, our clients will do so the first thing you discussed was topic of your choice. Yeah. You you know, scientific, clinical, but it's it's a topic that you choose. So one of the questions that always comes up is, do I pick a topic that is on the company's science or product, or do I stay away from the company's science or product and do something that I'm more comfortable with? What's your thought on that? My thought is the latter. Do something that you're comfortable with.
Okay. Now perhaps you are in the therapeutic area that the company is interviewing you for, and you're not going to know their data, but you know other data, other parts of it. You know more about other asthma drugs, for example, if you're going to work for a company that has an asthma drug. So it's okay to do something related if you're comfortable with it. But unless you were really comfortable with that company's data, I wouldn't be doing it because you're setting yourself up.
You've got the experts in the room with you. Yeah. No. That's good advice. I can't agree enough. I've seen that go horribly wrong. So I think I think it's really important, to choose a topic that you're really comfortable with more than anything else. That has to be the number one rule is to be really comfortable, and don't take the risk if you're not 100% comfortable taking that risk. Absolutely. Yeah. That's great advice. When I was an MSL, I got thrown all those kinds of situations.
I think my first job talk was give it on something that you want. Well, I've been lecturing, so I just used a lecture that I had been doing. And that was okay. But then I other times, I've had somebody say, okay. We want you to do it on this topic. Right. We're not gonna send you anything, but here's the topic because this is a drug we have in development. Well, then what do you do? Well, so then and I think we can talk about this as we talk about really setting up the presentation also.
But then, you know, I had to go into the literature. All I knew was that they had they gave me the topic, and I had to figure out how to present it. Got you. And so that was one of those things where I fell back on teaching skills. Yeah. What's the audience going to wanna know? Because remember, in your presentation, this is the the mock of talking to a thought leader. Right. And while you're not gonna have a chance to be didactic usually Mhmm.
As a thought leader, You want to be able to present data in a way that is going to resonate with that thought leader or health care provider, whomever. Right. And so part of that is think about your audience. Who is your audience? And in this case, you know, going to a company. Well, the company is your audience. What do you think they're gonna wanna know Yeah. About about you and about how you give a presentation?
So these are things that you have to think about either actively or passively, but they should always be in there as you're building your presentation. Yeah. So let's talk about that. So let's go back. So we you get an interview. You find out you have to do a presentation. You get the instructions. You know exactly what it is that you're supposed to do, and then you prepare the presentation. So you go in, and what would you say what are the interviewers listening for?
So how did how do you what should you be prepared for? Sure. I always say to people who call me about how do I do the presentation, what hiring managers are listening for is can you think? So we talked about getting the clinical trials in the right order. So that candidate who put them in the wrong order, we're going, well, this person just can't think. They don't understand. They don't understand the flow of how you bring a drug to market or what you should be looking for. Can you think?
And, also, can you tell the story? So in a case where I was told, here, here's a topic. Just do it on this topic. I went back and and, actually, they sent me their one clinical trial. I remember I knew nothing about the, disease.
So I went into the literature, put together some slides just on the disease and on the prevalence of the disease, pulled up some pictures of what it looked like, talked about the impact on the patient, and then could and then also could roll into, so here's why this drug is important. We've set the stage for it. So I was thinking about where does this fit in the armamentarium that a health care provider has to treat whatever the issue is. And that's what hiring managers are looking for.
They're looking to see if you can think Okay. At least I was. Yeah. Somebody would you know, somebody, you know, you somebody could get up and just recite their slides. And then you ask them a question, and you realize they really haven't thought about it. They've memorized a script. Yeah. And I don't want somebody who can memorize a script. I want somebody who can think. Yeah. And tell a story. Right? And tell a story. And tell a story.
Because ultimately, what the presentation is for is not just to assess someone's scientific acumen and ability to present something clinical. They wanna see their style. They wanna see their presentation skills. How do they think on their feet? And Absolutely. At the end of the day I always tell people at the end of the day, everyone that's in the audience that's listening, they're going to evaluate you and say, wow. That person did a really good job. They put a lot of time into it.
They had great communication skills, great eye contact. There was good flow. It wasn't a data dump. They didn't rush. They were good with the questions. You wanna basically put together just a really good presentation. I think it's less important the science and the clinical is a little less important than being able to deliver a really good presentation. Yes. I agree. You agree? I agree. And the other advice I would give, and this is presentation skills 101, is don't read the slide to me.
Yeah. Yeah. I always said, look. I learned to read in 1st grade. I can read the slide. Tell me what the so what is. Why should I care? Yeah. What are you trying to do with this experiment or whatever it is? Why should I care? And if it's a graph, then give me time to acclimate or get acquainted with the graph. We have the x and y axis. Tell me what the time span is. Give me time to follow along with you. Now that's presentation skills 101. That's what we're listening for as hiring managers also.
Do you respect your audience enough to want to bring them along with you on this journey of telling the story? Yeah. Well, that's great advice. And I'll tell you, it's very often the feedback that I get is clients will tell me, well, they they literally read the slides the whole time, and it was it wasn't fluid. They were up there just reading the slides. And I think sometimes that becomes a bit of a habit. Sometimes it's lack of preparation.
Whatever the case is, I think it's just really important to know the information cold so that you don't have to do that. So that brings up a good question. Preparation is really, really important. What's your advice? How much time should someone, you know, allocate in just preparation practice? Like, how much practice would you recommend somebody does? And I think that depends person to person. Okay. Of course.
You know, if it's something that you know really well, maybe you're talking on your own research, well, then you can do that, you know, with your eyes closed, without the slides. If it's something where they've given you a topic or they've sent you the slides, you've gotta be comfortable And I knew what the so whats were of each trial. So, and I knew what the so whats were of each trial.
So I would talk to myself as I was driving my car, giving the presentation to myself as I was driving the car. I would and and saying it out loud is important. That probably sounds weird to people, but the way you say it in your head, it's not the same way you say it when you're saying it out loud. So practice saying it out loud. Practice those transition sentences between slides.
I always laugh that my cats got real tired of hearing my talk because I was practicing my transition sentence as I yeah. I knew the data, but how did I get from one slide to the next in a smooth way? Right. So those things are important, but you need to do it to the point where if there is a glitch, what happens if the computer goes out? Can you still talk? If you can, well, then you may like I said, you may not hit every data point, but you know the story, and you know why it's important.
And that can so often happen when you walk in to talk to a health care provider. You walk in. First off, you thought you had half an hour with them. You get there. You've got 10 minutes. Now what do you do? Mhmm. The things you need to get through. Okay. How do you cut down so you can do that? Because that's also important. Know where in your presentation you could stop it if you had to, or what can you skip if you need to?
Or you walk in, and I had this happen with more than one health care provider who said, don't open your computer. I do not want to take anything off of your computer. So I had better be able to tell the story without the slides in front of me as a crutch. That's when I knew I was prepared. When I had somebody come up to me in the lobby of Joslyn Diabetes Center and ask me a question, And I said, oh, yeah. And I grabbed a napkin and sketched it out for him. Then I knew I knew my data.
Yeah. That that's great advice. So you get through so you do all this preparation, you get through the interview, and now you have to answer questions. So one of my couple of my clients intentionally will throw in a curveball question to try to catch people off guard and see if they can think on their feet. So what's your advice for someone that gets a question that they just don't know the answer to?
The best advice is the same thing you would do out in the field when you got that kind of a question. You say, I don't know. I need to research this a little bit, and I will get back to you. And then make sure you do get back to them. I got emails from candidates after the fact saying, okay. Here's the answer to the question that you asked. And it was interesting because I'm thinking of one candidate in particular where I knew the answer to the question I had asked.
They sent me the wrong answer. Oh, jeez. Yeah. So yeah. And I thought I'd been pretty clear on the question. So Yes. So, yeah, make sure you understand the question. Okay. Ask yeah. Is this what you're asking? I'm not sure I know the yeah. I'm not sure about the answer to that. Let me look it up. But get clarification on the question just like you would in any presentation. Good. Yeah. That's great advice. I think it's important never to really wing it. You know?
Just that doesn't end well, so maybe just graciously express that the question's really important. You wanna take a little time to do some research and then get back. So You just don't do it with every question. Yeah. Exactly. Because then you really it doesn't seem like you know anything. Yeah. Exactly. You know? So there's preparation that goes into the QA portion as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. What kind of questions if somebody were giving you that talk, what questions might you ask them?
Right. Yeah. And, again, what do you think is important to your audience? You prep that way. And at Mallinckrodt and other places where we've interviewed where I've interviewed, we would if we really like the candidate or if we had questions, either way, truthfully, we would start pushing the questions to see how far they could go. We kinda had an idea what the minimal answer would be to here you know, here are some easy questions, and then you just keep building to see.
Can they think on their feet? And at what point do they say, you know what? I don't know the answer. And if I answer and you're you're thinking to yourself. But if I answer, they're gonna know I don't know what I'm talking about. So let me just say, I'll get back to you Yeah. And visit. Good. Good. So thinking back to your interviews, prior interviews, do you have any interesting stories of of, you know, presentations gone wrong?
One that comes to mind immediately is back in the day, before we all were using computers Yeah. We were still doing things we had everybody do things on overhead transparencies because you never knew if you could get a 35 millimeter projector. And besides, who was going to make 35 millimeter slides for a talk? We always knew we could get an overhead projector. And we also didn't know, if we did it on a computer, could we get an LCD projector?
So we said to everybody, do it on overhead transparencies. So I had one candidate come in, all ready to set him up to do his talk, and I said, so, you know, where are your overheads? Oh, I didn't do it that way. And he said, excuse me? You didn't do it that way? Well, no. Nobody gives talks that way, so I didn't do it that way. So in my head, I'm thinking, you know, I asked you to do it that way. Therefore, it's not nobody does it that way.
Yeah. And to our point earlier that there are some there yeah. You walk into an office. You don't know what kind of setup they may have. Yeah. So there was that. So right then, the guy was kind of knocked out. But then the rest of it was he sat for the whole interview with his feet tucked under him on the chair. Yeah. So what if he dress professionally, but he didn't have a professional demeanor. I can't send him out to represent the company that way. So that and that was all one candidate.
So that's the one that always sticks in my mind that somebody didn't follow the directions. And we talked about that. Know what the, you know, know what the instructions are. Follow the directions. And to your point, you know, you're being evaluated in for every sync from the second you walk in till the second you leave.
So your posture and and we actually have a client that and it's kind of a trick question, but they'll actually ask the candidate before they do their presentation, would you prefer to sit to be more comfortable, or would you like to stand? And, you know, we always tell people, like, you you this is a mock KOL presentation. You need to stand. You need to take this seriously. Be professional.
I think some of the some of the kinda, you know, snafus that we've seen is, you know, when people get too comfortable or they don't dress professionally. We've had some attire mishaps where people were just Seeing some of those too. Yeah. Not dressed appropriately for an interview, let alone a presentation. And then we also had recently a situation where candidate went in, in in the presentation, they weren't pronouncing the compound correctly.
And so they were mispronouncing the the compound or drug name. And my client told me, like, Tom, it was like nails on a chalkboard every time Absolutely. Every time it came out of her mouth, it was wrong and it was you know? And just so it ruined the whole thing. So these are things where, you know and and as a recruiter, we always try to prep or, you know, prepare our candidates and prep them as best we can, but we assume that they know how to pronounce the name of the compounds.
And if they don't, they should you should always ask, and we can help you. That's exactly what I was gonna say, Tom. If you're looking at it and it's one of these, you know, multi syllable Yeah. Words, which they all are, and you don't know where the stress point is on it, ask you. Let's just ask. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we've, you know, we've had some some interesting situations, but so let me ask you this. I would one other thing which you did bring up there.
Yes. Because this is not even just about the presentation. This is about interviewing in general. And I wanna make sure people think about this. Mhmm. That from the moment you are contacted by somebody from that company, you are being interviewed. Mhmm. And so when you walk in the door of the building, the person sitting at the front desk who's signing you in may be an ad hoc member of the interview committee. You don't know.
Sure. But the re and I always use the the people at the front desk that way. I would go back to them and say, how was that person? Because I had seen candidates be rude to administrative assistants and be very nice to me because I was the hiring manager. And I'm going, well, no. When you're out in the field, you're dealing with the administrative assistants too. You've got to get through that gatekeeper. So if you can't be polite to everybody, again, I don't want you on my team.
That's a great point. Great point. So speaking of, as we as we talk about advice for interviews and advice for candidates, I always like to ask folks. So a lot of aspiring MSLs looking to break into industry that are listening, what advice would you have for them as they're trying to break in and get their first role as an MSL? Yeah. Well, I think there are a couple of pieces of advice, actually. There is talk to people about the role. Understand the role. So I get a lot of emails on LinkedIn.
Can I talk to you about the role? People who want to be MSL. So we so you really understand what's in the role. But then when you're looking for that first job, look for something where you have a skill set. So classic examples, I put together a whole team of people who did not have MSL experience, but they all had experience in the therapeutic area. And in their own right, may have even been thought leaders in their geographic area.
So they didn't know how to be an MSL, but they could blow anybody else out of the water about the therapeutic area. And because they had the right personality, the right emotional intelligence, all of those things, the soft skills that go into being an MSL. I could teach them to be an MSL, and I was then gonna benefit from having them be experts, subject matter experts, already.
So if you can look at jobs where it relates to what you're comfortable with maybe you ran a coagulation clinic, so you look at those kinds of products. Maybe you ran an asthma clinic, so you look at those products. Maybe you were an oncology nurse, then look in oncology. But look someplace where you already are bringing something that some other candidate may not have. Somebody else may have MSL experience, but they don't have your therapeutic experience. So Perfect.
No. That's great advice and and, I'm right there with you. I always try to express to people, you know, you you stick with your strengths. Science is the key. Exactly. And that's what our clients are looking for. If someone doesn't have prior MSL experience but you're an expert in oncology, well, you have a lot of value that you can bring. And if you have all of the other, skills required necessary skills to be an MSL, well, then you're you're you're right there.
It's just a matter of timing and getting the right opportunity. So Exactly. Kathy, thank you so much. This was so helpful. This was such great information, and I I really wanna appreciate thank you and appreciate you for being here. We should do this again, for sure. That would be fine. Thank you for asking me. I'll I I enjoy coaching and mentoring, and I see this as part of what I'm doing in my retirement is this coaching and mentoring. Well, I'll be calling on you again because you were great.
Thank you so much. Care, John. Alright. We'll keep in touch. Thank you so much for listening to the show. And if you enjoyed it, please subscribe so that you don't miss an episode in the future and feel free to leave a rating or a review or a comment. Thanks again, and we look forward to seeing you soon.