Hey, guys. Welcome to the podcast. Today is a solo episode where I am going to present information on how to jump start your job search. It's basically 8 steps on how to help you land more interviews. Hope you find it helpful. This kinda came out as a request, or a, give the people what they want type of episode. So hope you guys really like it. Don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram, YouTube, and, MSL talk live on Clubhouse as well. So check us out, and, 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 me. I am going to spend some time talking about how to get more interviews. So if anybody is engaged in a job search or maybe you're starting out your career and you're looking to find some direction, this podcast is for anybody. It's not just for medical affairs folks, MSLs, aspiring MSLs, and MSL leaders.
Really, anybody could benefit from this information and and from this system, if if that's what we're calling it. Grab a pen. Grab a piece of paper. Hopefully, this is gonna be noteworthy, and you guys could take down some notes, and and, and it'll help you in figuring out what to do next in your job search. So first and foremost, let's start with number 1, which I think is is pretty obvious.
But I think before you start your search, you need to really have an understanding of what your career goals are. What is it that you wanna do? What do you wanna do next? If, again, if you're a college grad, you have to really sit down with yourself and say, what where do I wanna go? What do I need to be? What are my skills, and what job do I want? If you're an MSL, there's a lot of different things that you can do.
You can try to get into a number of different areas within medical affairs to really try to define which areas you wanna pursue. Because if you don't have a target, you're not gonna know what to aim for. So that step 1 is to really understand the goal. And then in the other 7 steps, I'm gonna help you work towards getting to that goal. So let's go to number 2, and that would be to research, the role, the industry, companies, and jobs.
So so I think the one of the most important things that you need to do, and this isn't just at the beginning of your job search, this is throughout your job search, is you need to factor in time for research. And let me explain what that means. So if you're jumping into an industry into a career just to start, you need to learn everything that there is to know about that industry. You wanna know who are the key players. Is there an association or a society that you can join?
Are there LinkedIn groups? Are there resources? Is there a podcast? I mean, obviously, people that are listening to this podcast are in the MSL space. What resources are available, and what do you need to jump into not only to educate yourself and be a part of that industry, but also to be visible. We're gonna talk a lot about visibility today and why it's so important to be visible within the industry that you're looking to pursue.
So that's that's one of the most important parts of doing your research. But the other thing is you wanna know who the players are. Who are the companies that you are gonna wanna pursue? So, for example, if you're in oncology, you wanna know all of the companies that exist in the oncology space. It seems pretty obvious, pretty simple, but break it down. Let's just say that you have a background in, I don't know, breast cancer or prostate cancer, and that's where you did your research.
And you're looking to align yourself with an organization that might either be in that space or they're launching products in that space. You have to do as much research as you possibly can on those organizations, know everything that there is to know, become an expert, and put yourself right in the middle of that space.
And this means that you're gonna go to all of the different company websites for the companies that you're interested in and see if there's positions posted on those company websites so that you can start to track who's hiring, who's not hiring. So that's one way of of really trying to get an understanding of what jobs are available.
But, again, you're educating yourself and you're putting yourself in the middle of that industry, so that you can create a knowledge base and an understanding of of how you need to get yourself to the next step. But the other thing that's really important when you're researching jobs, it's really easy nowadays. I don't know if anybody heard my pod my podcast. It was episode 62 where I was talking about my story. When I first started out in my career, there was no Indeed.
There was no SimplyHired. There was no Google. The way we did our research back then is we had to get them to Sunday newspaper and see what ads were out and and what companies were hiring. Now you can go to these different websites. If you go to Indeed or SimplyHired, you can simply put in the title of the position that you're interested in finding and the location.
You can even set up an alert by putting your email address in there, and they'll send you emails once a day for all new positions that get posted within that criteria. So the research can actually come to you and, like so the foundation of your job search has to be in the research, and the research has to be ongoing. So you wanna make sure that, again, number 1, you know what you're looking for. You know what you wanna do. You know what your goal is.
Number 2, you're gonna do extensive research on a daily basis throughout the course of your job search so that you can keep abreast of what's going on and you can know where it is that you need to start applying and start networking to get yourself in the door in you know, within those opportunities and within those companies, etcetera. So let's go to step 3 because it ties into step 2. So step 3 is you need to keep a journal or a spreadsheet of all of your activity, all of your research.
This is really important. I think if you had one simple spreadsheet where you can capture all of this information, I think it would be tremendous. And I think Excel is a great place to do this. You can set it up where you have maybe the the title of the company I'm sorry. The title of the position, the company. If there's a contact person listed, you wanna put the date of the posting if that is there.
And then you also wanna put a comments or a notes section so that you can put, you know, list if you apply to that position when you applied. And just keep track of all this stuff. The reason this is important it's important for a lot of reasons. But 5 years from now, if you're back on the job market, you can pull out this resource and look and see where you left off. What did you do in your prior search? Where did you apply?
One of the things that that recruiters like me and and my team and my colleagues, one thing that that really kinda burns us a little bit is if we submit a candidate to a position and then we find out, oh, well, they've already been submitted or they they're we already have their resume on file. Well, I mean, sometimes people forget. I understand that. But you wanna be on top of that sort of thing.
Even if maybe you applied 6 months ago and you might have forgotten, if you keep a spreadsheet and you know what's going on, that'll prevent that. But more importantly, and really the most important piece of the equation when it comes to keeping this research, is to know when to follow-up. So as you're doing your research and you're building this resource, you're gonna add more and more information to this.
And then, eventually, what's gonna happen is you're gonna need to to put in regular follow ups. And the only way that you can do that effectively is if you have it documented well enough to know exactly, you know, who and when you need to reach out to, and you have that all all that information in front of you. So very important. Keep a journal. Keep a spreadsheet. Track what you're doing. Put little tabs on the bottom.
So if you have to have different tabs within the spreadsheet, so you have different information, that's I just think that that's so important. It's so vital. So that's number 3. Number 4, resume tuning. It's really, really important that you're always updating your resume or your CV throughout the course of your job search and throughout the course of your career. Quite frankly, you really need to make sure that you're building this collateral.
This is your resume is the cornerstone of your career. It's going to be with you throughout your career, and it's going to help you in, both not just currently, but in your future as far as positioning yourself for jobs, for for promotions. So you wanna take it really seriously, and you wanna make sure it's really good, and you wanna make sure it's always up to date.
But what's important and why I use the term resume tuning is because you wanna tune your resume for specific positions before you apply. A lot of people probably hear me talk on this podcast a lot about matching and the system of matching, which is you take a job description and you match the keywords and phrases on that job description with your resume. That's something that I highly encourage you to do each time you apply to a new position. You take the job description for that position.
You look at the keywords, and you make sure that you can align your resume, your responsibilities, your experience, your transferable skills, what you see in the language on that job description. I wanna I wanna alert you to be very, very careful and kinda warn everyone to not overstate this piece of it. Do not copy and paste and just throw it in there and just say that you've done it if you haven't done it.
This is a technique that I highly advise, but I advise with caution because I want you to know that you need to be able to support any of the claims that you make. But if you're doing something that is similar or if you have the transferable skills, you wanna be able to document that on your resume or your CV so that you can show the hiring managers in the company that you're a suitable candidate. The other thing too is you want applicant tracking systems to pick up keywords.
So if you actually use keywords and phrases, and you put that right into your CV in certain places, again, don't copy and paste the whole thing. But if you can selectively put these terms, it'll help you with that keyword recognition in the in the app and tracking systems. So that's really, really important. Make sure you stay on top of that that resume tuning piece. So we're at number 5. And number 5 is a really important piece of the equation, and this is what I call have a plan.
You really, really need to have a plan for your job search, and you need to stick to the plan. What are you going to do every day? What are you going to do each week? What are you going to do each month to help your job search? So let me go back and give you an example of why it's so important to have a plan. Mitch DiRosario, who's an MSL and was on the podcast, I think it was episode 42, he talked about his plan and his story.
He reached out to a 100 and 30 different MSLs and MSL managers, both through LinkedIn and through email. And these were this was a these were were cold messages. So there there was this was just him going out and trying to make something happen, networking with people he didn't know. And what he did was he put individually personalized messages.
He said very succinct, very brief, but what he did was he was sure to put a call to action within the message, tried to find some kind of common connection to kind of, like, break the ice. But he also said he didn't make it about him and didn't say, oh, well, you need to help me because I'm looking for a job or I'm young in my career and I'm looking for somebody to help me. He made it a little more delicate and, and was very sensitive in in in his approach.
And he sent out a 130 messages and got 30 responses. And that's huge because what happened was Mitch grew his network, and he developed mentors, and he found people that were willing to connect with him, offer advice, and ultimately put him in a position to get interviews.
Because what happened is as he was doing his research, as he was identifying opportunities on the market, sure enough, some of these people worked at companies that had openings, or these people came back to Mitch and said, hey. An opening just came up on our team. Would you be interested? He wound up with multiple offers. So let me explain how this might work for you and how you can start and what you need to do to put together a plan.
Well, you wanna set either weekly or daily or monthly goals. So for example, you might wanna say, I'm gonna spend 30 minutes every day towards my job search, and maybe 15 minutes of that is research, 15 minutes of it is sending out LinkedIn connection requests. For example, invitations. And you wanna have 50 LinkedIn connection requests per week, let's just say. And you wanna have the goal of setting up 10 appointments, let's call it, or 10 meetings with different people about your job search.
Now that those 10 meetings are going to be it could be with it could be an MSL that you reached out to. It could be a recruiter, someone like myself. It could be a colleague. It could be someone who is on a hiring team, anybody that would be willing to talk to you about your search. Now I don't know how much time you have in your job, how much extra time you might have per day, per week. So you have to determine what your your weekly goals are. Here's the key. The key is consistency.
You really want to set up a system for yourself that you can follow, that you can track, and that you can stick to. Try to have realistic goals and work towards those goals on a regular basis, but you really have to schedule this in. Maybe it's 15 minutes a day. Maybe it's 90 minutes a week. You know, maybe it's 25 LinkedIn connection requests a week.
Whatever it is, stick to it because what you don't wanna do is you don't wanna wake up one day at the end of the month and say, I didn't do anything in my job search. I'm gonna send out a 100 LinkedIn connection requests on this one day. It's too daunting. Work at it every day. Chunk your time. It's gonna make a huge difference. Let's go to number 6. Number 6 is very, very closely tied into number 5, and number 6 is daily engagement and networking. So now notice I said daily.
This is something that I really encourage you to do every day. You need to be active, and you need to engage on a daily basis. And I'm I'm really talking, I guess, specifically about either LinkedIn or email communication. Mitch told me when he did send out those emails, he literally went out and tried to find the email formula for each company. So for example, if he was sending an email out to, I don't know, let's just say gsk, and it's like first name dot last name@gsk.com. Whatever.
Like, he figured out the formula and then just started sending messages. It wasn't like he had a list of email addresses. So he took the extra step, took the initiative, and he went into engagement mode. So what types of engagement should you be participating in? Again, you're gonna send out LinkedIn invitations on a daily basis, maybe 5 to 10 per day. You're gonna either send or resend your CV to a recruiter.
Let's say you talk to a recruiter, someone like myself, and you have a conversation, and, you know, we are engaging in a job search. Well, a couple weeks later, just to stay in front of that person, it's not a bad idea to just resend your CV and say, hey, Tom. Wanted to send you my updated CV. I made some changes. Wanna stay on your radar. I'm still looking for positions. That's engagement. That puts puts you back up to the top of the list and be like, oh, yeah.
I don't, you know, wanna make sure I keep so and so in mind. So that's a really good activity. You wanna send out InMails to potential hiring managers and colleagues to to, again, maybe solicit inclusion in a in a job that might have just recently been posted. So, for example, you are doing your research and you find a position at x y z company. Well, go to LinkedIn. Do a search on who you're connected to within that company, and now you're gonna send a message to that person. Hey, so and so.
Pardon the intrusion. Saw this position posted on your website. You know, I think I'm a great fit. I would be greatly appreciated if you can forward this to the right person and, you know, maybe help me get, you know, in front of the right person. Whatever it might be, but be very delicate, be very gracious, be thankful, and, and keep it brief. But that's what Mitch did. That's what helped him be successful, And that's how you tie in the research piece with the engagement piece.
So these are some of the types of outreach that you want to continue on a on a daily basis or weekly basis. And if you're not sure what to do, there's always something to do because there's always some way you can engage. There's always research that you can do. There's always something you can do. On the engagement piece, one of the things I recommend, if you haven't already, is upgrade your LinkedIn membership to a premium account. Every everybody has access to LinkedIn as a free resource.
But if you spend, I don't know, $250 a year, $500 a year, I'm not exactly sure what what it costs nowadays, but you're gonna get upgraded features such as a number certain number of InMails, or you could buy InMails. And that gives you the ability to send a message to somebody that's not your first connection. It's great if everybody was your first connection. You don't have to burn any InMails.
But you're gonna be sending messages out to 2nd and third con third degree connections, and the only way to do that is through InMail. So I highly recommend you upgrade to a premium account. The other thing to keep in mind as we talk about engagement and networking, it's not a it's not just about the proactive outreach. It's also some of the passive outreach. And what I mean by that is trying to get visibility through activity.
For example, if you're on LinkedIn and you're working through let's say you're in an industry group or you're in a place where there's a some thought leader or somebody that you're trying to get their attention, like, comment, share their posts. I'll give you an example. Every week, I post announcements for the podcast. So I will I will post an announcement on Tuesday mornings of what the the current episode is, what it's about, and that sort of thing.
And those those announcements will get anywhere from 5000 to 10000 views. It'll get anywhere from 25 to a 100 reactions. It'll get, you know, different types of comments. And the funny thing, it's I noticed the people that are always engaging. They become visible to me. So people that like the post, people that comment on the posts, I see them. They're engaging. They're visible. That type of activity is huge, and it's somewhat passive. It's, obviously, it's active.
It's active outreach, but it's passive. And you're visible to them without, you know, hitting them over the head and sending them another message. So when you're doing your research and you're finding out who are the players, who are people you wanna get in front of, who are hiring managers, who are potential mentors, who are the people in your network that you wanna have more exposure to, well, that is a real easy way to get in front of people.
And it's not uncommon or it's not unacceptable to wish somebody a happy birthday on LinkedIn. If their birthday's listed, obviously, they're putting it there for a reason. It's certainly within bounds to congratulate somebody on a promotion or if they've switched jobs. That's all announced on LinkedIn. Again, that's more visibility. I do want to caution you guys to be careful not to overdo it. Because a lot of times, I see people that kinda take this a little too far.
You always wanna be professional and tactful in not only your approach, but in your engagement and how often you engage. Just be tactful, be professional, and I think and be gracious. I think it's it's it goes a long way when you show people, that you're grateful for their help and you're grateful for their advice or you appreciate them. So that's what I mean by being gracious. Keep all that in mind because I think that that's a real important piece of the equation as well. So what's number 7?
So we got through a lot of this stuff as it relates to activity and what you can be doing on a daily basis. Now what's the next step? Obviously, you have to eventually, at some point in time, you have to apply to jobs. And this is where it gets tricky because my advice to you is only apply to positions online as a last resort. What you wanna do is you really want to find job openings and then see if there's some way you can get your foot in the door through a contact within the company.
So when you do all of your networking, your outreach, you're looking for mentors, you're adding people to your network. Again, I'm gonna come back to the Mitch DiRisario, example. I mean, he had 30 new contacts of people that were willing to help him and colleagues that now were willing to help him. You wanna go and try to find people that you can actually get your resume into their hands.
They're gonna take that, and they're gonna walk it to the person that's gonna be responsible for the hiring or the HR person that's gonna be able to get it in the right place and in queue. Because a lot of times when you're applying to positions on the Internet, it's just this big black hole, and you may never hear anything. So people always say, well, you know, I got my job through networking, friend of a friend. That's exactly what that is. That's exactly what this means.
So this is how you really put it together. You put together your research, you put together your networking, and and this is where it makes a really, really big difference is when it comes time to apply to jobs. Number 8. Last and last but not least. One of the most important parts of your job search, just like anything else, is you have to follow-up. Nobody's gonna come to you. Very rarely are people going to come to you or seek you out.
And in all fairness, I know there's probably a lot of MSLs out there listening to this that are gonna say, Tom, are you kidding me? I get 4 to 5 phone calls a week from recruiters like you that are coming to me with jobs. You're absolutely right. We are seeking you out. We're pursuing you. And and that's great, but there's a couple of things. Number 1, not everybody's gonna be in pursuit like that. Number 2, those jobs may not be of interest to you.
They might not fit the career goal that you identified in step 1. It's not what you want. You may be looking for a management position, and you're getting all these individual contributor positions that aren't of interest to you. So how do you wind up putting yourself in the right place for that opportunity that's most interest to you? And, again, follow-up is key because so you've done all the work. You've done the research. You've kept track of everything. You've done the daily engagement.
You've put you you're putting all these pieces together. The one thing you don't wanna do is you don't wanna slip up at the very end and not follow-up on that opportunity in the right time. I've had situations where hiring managers or HR folks would say, you know, we we just we didn't really get the feeling that they were genuinely interest interested. We didn't hear from them after the interview.
We didn't we didn't get a thank you note from her after she left, and she they she never followed up. Or maybe you've sent your CV out and you sent it to somebody specific, and they said they would help you. It's okay to ask them again. Just be tactful. Don't do it the next day. Give it a couple days. Give it a week. Make sure that you're really tactful in your approach before you wind up, you know, overdoing it. But you you wanna make sure that you don't miss this part.
So again, I don't wanna belabor this piece. I think it's pretty obvious. But I also wanna make sure that it's a key part of your search process. And you don't forget that in addition to all the other steps, the final piece is really to make sure you're doing regular follow ups. Use your documentation. Use your journal or use your spreadsheet, and look at it regularly throughout your search.
Update it regularly and make sure that as you're doing that, you're you're keeping in tune with who it is you need to follow-up with next. Maybe put that on your calendar and say I need to follow-up with this person in 1 week, whatever it might be. Guys, this is how you make stuff happen. This is how people get jobs.
And the one thing and the the main reason why I wanted to have this podcast is because I speak to people every week that say to me, Tom, I'm stuck, or I don't know what to do next, or I'm getting frustrated, or this fell through and that fell through, or whatever. And they're not sure what to do next. All of these things that I just talked about with you, all of this activity, you can plug into your job search at any time. You can start over at any time.
That's why I call this the jump start, because this should jump start your job search. These are practical tips, activities, advice, action items that you can plug into your search at any time to get you going to get back on track. I know it works. I I'm telling you right now, I know this stuff works. It just has to be implemented. So I wanna wish you guys all the success in the world. I hope that this was really helpful. I hope you get a ton of interviews from this.
And as always, reach out to me with questions. Shoot me a note on LinkedIn. Let me know how you're doing out there. I get questions all the time. I'm happy to answer them when I and, obviously, I I try to get to everything as quickly as I can. But stay engaged with me. Keep me posted on how you're doing. But best of luck to all you guys, and, reach out to me after you get that job.
The best part of my day is when I see a note from someone that says, Tom, I just landed my first MSL position, or I just got the job, or I just decided between 2 two offers, and I'm really happy with my job search. Love to hear that as the greatest part of my day, greatest part of my week. I'm rooting for you guys. You got my back, and, good luck out there. 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.