Career Advice

The Other Side of the Table: An Inside Look at the Industry Hiring Process

Amanda Riojas

Author’s Note: This article describes one manager’s experiences in interviewing candidates for industry positions, for a specific company and for a specific team within that company. It may be that not all companies, or not all managers within the same com­pany, use these techniques. This manager and the entire HR department of Brewer Science, Inc. follow best practices for hiring candidates, including ethical standards, diversity and inclusion, and all Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) federal guidelines.

Let’s face it: After you’ve spent your entire educational career in academia, the industry hiring process can seem like a bit of a mystery. Pleasant technical conversation and a manager who sounds like she would hire you on the spot often end in an HR conversation explaining that you didn’t get the job and a thank you for applying. How? Everything seemed like a “yes.” The manager seemed to like you, you had all the technical skills they requested in the job description, and the two of you even talked about what it would be like when you got the job.

When hiring in industry, there is an abundance of little details that a manager considers before adding you to the team, and the specifics of industry culture and corporate dy­namics are not always communicated effectively in academia. As an early-career chemist and the manager of a technical team, I’m going to give you an inside look at the thought processes and deliberation that I personally use in hiring researchers for my team. This article includes an example resume—follow along with my notes so that you can create a one-page resume that conveys the message that you want to send to a potential employer. By providing a step-by-step walkthrough of the actions going on in the background, I want to empower you to be more comfortable with the inter­view process and give you the unique ability to put the hiring manager at ease.

"Communicating science to a general audience is an essential skill in many industry positions; if you want people to buy your product or invest in your technique, you must be able to communicate your science to a nontechnical audience."

The Application Is Done. Now What …?

You’ve filled out the paperwork and online forms. You’ve at­tached a resume and cover letter—in the requested formats, of course—and now the wait begins. As far as you’re concerned, you’ve just sent your personal details off into the ether, but from the employer’s side, there are lots of things going on.

First, HR is working its magic. If this sounds really wishy-washy and hand-wavy, it’s meant to be. Many companies have proprietary techniques, which they use to analyze where a candidate fits into a company, how a candidate might fit into a team, and how that candidate might work under this manager or that one. My company is no different, and unfortunately, this process is confidential. The most I can say to prepare you is that HR is looking at the type of person you appear to be and whether your personality fits into their company.

Next, we wait until the hiring manager comes back from vacation. Just kidding. Sort of … . Some industry managers, especially those on the road to executive or “C-suite” status, travel quite a bit. This is also common for those managers who communicate often with a customer and must travel to the customer’s location for meetings and technical discus­sion. For you, this means waiting until a space opens in the manager’s calendar. Only then can HR send over your resume and hope that the hiring manager has enough time to review your qualifications. Let’s say it takes two weeks to get back from travel—HR sends your resume over, the hiring manager takes a week to get back to them with a “yes,” and then she or he is jet-setting again. Two plus one, plus another one, carry the five … and that’s how companies end up contacting you a month later to ask if you would be available for a phone interview.

The good news is that with scheduling out of the way, the hard part is over! The steps to employment are straightforward:

1. The phone interview. More and more, this is becoming the “Skype” interview. Though I still have traditional phone interviews with candidates, I prefer Skype. On Skype, I can see you, the candidate, and get a better sense of your reactions to my interview questions. The details in the background also tell me about your personal interests and hobbies.

2. The technical presentation. This is your chance to meet the team you’ll be working alongside, if you’re hired. It’s usually a 20 to 40–minute technical presentation, like your oral disser­tation but without the screaming and arguing. During your talk, you’ll tell us how your specialized expertise is perfect for the position; we’ll take you to lunch.

3. The follow-up. Once the technical interview is over, the team will generally take a few days to review and discuss your work and then decide whether you might be a good fit for the group. Either way, you’ll probably hear from HR within a week.

It all happens much more quickly than it sounds like it does, but I can break down each step of the interview process even further to provide insight into the skills that the hiring manager wants to see, the details and verbal cues that you want to include, and how you can prepare.

The Phone Interview

Before our call, I’ll spend about 15 minutes prepping with your resume. At some point, I already studied your resume and requested the phone interview, so I don’t spend as much time reviewing as you’d think. Mostly, I’m looking for your Facebook and LinkedIn handles so that I can have an idea of the personality beneath the science-y awesomeness. In in­stances where you, the candidate, do not provide social media information, or if your resume has been scrubbed of personal details before I receive it, I’m going to use what I know about you—your name, educational background, internship experi­ence, etc.—to find you on LinkedIn.

Why is your social media use important? If I can’t find an online presence for you or can’t see your profile due to security settings, this can work against you. Out of curiosity, I will wonder about the reasons why I can’t find you or why you don’t share your professional information publicly. As a Latina in industry, I’m a strong proponent for advocating for yourself, for your research, and for your company. When can­didates don’t do any of those things, it makes me think that they are not proud of the research they are doing or confident about the field they are pursuing.

For candidates who mention prior experience with in­ternships or industry collaboration in their resumes, I’ll also be looking for any mention of the experience in their social media. Collaborative research experience in diverse and cross-functional teams is ideal, but many industry partnerships (for instance, the names of companies who might buy products from your previous employer) could be proprietary or confi­dential knowledge. If I see a candidate freely sharing that they “worked in an internship at [employer] developing products and materials for [industry partner],” I immediately know that I cannot trust this candidate with proprietary information.

Industry is still a “it’s not what you know; it’s who you know” kind of game. When scanning your resume, I want you to name-drop like a new Kanye al­bum. List big names in your field when you’ve worked with them, because if I personally know someone you know, I will immediately drop everything to give that person a call. We’ll talk about how long it’s been since we last saw each other, about how fast our kids are growing, and then … I’ll ask about their opinion of you. If I don’t know anyone you’ve mentioned, no problem—sci­ence is a big world. The red flag here is if you don’t drop any names at all, not even your adviser’s. This tells me that you didn’t want me to know who you worked under. As a Ph.D., I’ve seen how students fall out with their advising professors or how disagreements within research groups cause some bad blood. Whatever the circumstance, the lack of a name will leave me wondering whether a candidate might have a difficult or an overly combative personality.

During the phone interview, you want to keep the focus on you and why you’re perfect for this job. One reliable way to make a good impression is to communicate an ability to multitask ef­fectively. In industry, you’ll often have multiple high priority projects, and of course, every project manager wants his or her project to have the highest priority. An industry recruiter wants to see a candidate who can juggle mul­tiple projects at once and still complete tasks. If you only work on one project at a time, or if I notice that each of your publications is on the same topic, you might be someone who would be easily overwhelmed with multiple demanding projects. I’ll feel much more confident in a researcher who will understand how to prioritize projects when multiple collaborators want their results faster.

The Technical Presentation

Now you’re in the room with the entire team. I also like to invite a multidisci­plinary audience and the cross-function­al team members you would be interacting with once you were hired. This means you’ll need to explain your work on multiple levels: You likely have experience giving oral presentations to a technical audience. However, my team also works with internal custom­ers (nontechnical associates interested in the bottom line), as well as with HR staff who help to train new researchers, with executive management who need to understand how my team’s skills fit in the corporate structure, and with senior scientists who may have 15 or more years of experience in the lab. At the in-person interview, this means I want to see a presentation with lots of technical material that you can also describe in a more relatable way for the nonscientists in the room.

Since you’ve made it this far, I have no doubt that you’ll give a great presentation. Instead of concentrating on that, I will focus on your personality. Just as I researched your social media background, you should do your home­work on the hiring manager (whose name you’ll know by this point) and the company. Corporate websites and social media accounts are gems full of information where you can find out in which community events the company is active and for which social causes the company advocates. Pictures are espe­cially useful, as this can give you an idea of what “Joe” or “Jane Employee” looks like. What are they wearing? How old do you think they are? How diverse are the people represented in these pictures? Often, I’ll find candidates who have the perfect background and qualifications, but from conversation, I can tell that they’ve spent their entire lives in a city, and that they have no interest in living in the middle of a rural college town. Happy employees produce higher quality work and are less likely to leave for a compet­ing employer, so it’s in a company’s best interest to hire an employee who will be content with work conditions.

The final piece of the puzzle is how you fit with the team. Of all the aspects of the industry interview covered in this article, the question of whether your personality is a good fit may be the one thing that you can prepare for but not change. A good team is diverse; it includes a variety of backgrounds, cultures, experiences, and personality types, with all the members tackling a problem differently and having their own perspectives on pursuing a new project. So, take a look around at the current team and compare yourself. If it has someone with the same skill set or who comes from the same culture as you do, someone who attended the same university or is the same person­ality type, then I will have to carefully weigh whether to add you to the mix. You could relate well to the other team member who shares your background, or you may constantly argue with one another and disrupt the team dynamic. When you interview and think that you have all the technical skills and traits the hiring manager wants, it is frus­trating if you don’t receive an offer of employment, but now you know that it may not be because you were found lacking in some way. A manager may simply be ensuring that her team is well-balanced.

The Follow-Up

And, that’s it! At this point, you’ve done everything you can. There are no more interviews and, usually, no more ques­tions about your qualifications. Over the next couple of days, I will discuss add­ing you to the team with my manager, with her boss, and with the team itself. I’ll consider everyone’s input before deciding, even branching out to the collaborators who attended your presentation. Once the decision has been made, I’ll e-mail an answer back to HR, and they’ll give you a call.

I hope the decision is a “yes.” I hope this article helps you to figure out how industry interviews are subtly different from those for academic or government positions. Most of all, I hope you find that team where you fit.