Resume Round-Up: How to Create or Update Your Resume for Pharmaceutical, Biotech, or Medical Device Sales Jobs

Last week, while sitting on my front porch reviewing a pharmaceutical executive’s resume, I jotted down a brief list of tips for writing resumes. Deborah St James edited and expanded the list. Here are our top tips:

DO

• Use active verbs immediately after the bullet points used to describe your job: organized, planned, supervised, coached, completed, etc.
• Be consistent. Find a good template and follow it. Also, use a style guide for correct punctuation, grammar, and spelling.
• Put all necessary information in the heading. Make it easy for the reader to quickly find you.
• Put your job title FIRST, then the company name, and then the dates of employment. If you’ve held multiple positions with a company, list the company name and total dates of service at the top of the heading, and then offer separate listings for each job.

For Example:

ABC Company, June 1993-present

Director, XYZ Product, April 2009-present

• Manage sales and marketing of XYZ Product, a (disease state) medicine…
• Oversee $X budget…

District Sales Manager, December 2003-April 2009

• Managed X Sales Representatives for X Drug…
• Coached representatives in developing business…

Hospital Account Manager, October 1996-December 2003

• Managed $X territory with X hospitals…
• Achieved formulary status for XYZ Product in every hospital in territory…

Sales Representative, June 1993-October 1996

• Detailed ABC Medicine to physicians in (specialty areas)…
• Earned President’s Council recognition…

AVOID

• Using adjectives and adverbs to describe your work as these can detract from your claims. For example, “significantly improved” could mean many different things. Instead, offer specifics such as percentages and rankings.
• Claiming anything you cannot back up in writing or with a reference.
• Using distracting or difficult-to-read type: unusual fonts, type that is less than 11 points, all caps, italics, and too much bold.
• Putting periods at the end of each bullet. These phrases don’t usually warrant a period because often they are not complete sentences.

For more resume writing tips, check out our book, Listen. Write. Present. The Elements for Communicating Science and Technology.

Please send us questions and blog topic ideas: Stephanie@ListenWritePresent.com

Cheers,

Steph

Top 5 Communication Tips

Book Signing Event at Hackney Library

Barton College, Wilson, NC

The book, Listen. Write. Present. contains over 245 communication tips. At a recent book signing at Barton College, we only had 30 minutes to speak, so we chose the most relevant tips for that audience. Now we’d like to share them with you:

1. Adapt to the audience. This tip applies to listening and responding when communicating with others, writing a cover letter, or presenting to a small group. What does your audience really want to know?

2. Narrow the focus of your topic. It can be hard to distill your content into one main point. Yet Twitter, texting, and common sense show us that others want only what’s relevant, not content overload.

3. Practice. Plan. Rehearse. Call it whatever you want...just make sure you do it! Practicing what you want to say prevents rambling, planning what you are going to write helps sort and prioritize information, and rehearsing a presentation takes away the jitters and helps you connect with your audience.

4. Give the punch line first. In anything you communicate, make sure you tell the listener, reader, or audience your main point BEFORE you offer supporting evidence or background information. For example, if you are pitching an idea to a group, plug the idea first, and then offer specific support: “I’d like to share three reasons why adopting ABC policy will benefit our group.”

5. Perfect your elevator pitch. This snapshot is the 30-second explanation of who you are or what you do or how you’ll fit into the organization. This skill is essential for effective job interviews.