A Guide for Pharmaceutical Industry Professionals
Read Time: 3 min.
One of the most important job marketing tools in your career is your curriculum vitae (CV).
How you tell your story, who you are, what you can offer a prospective employer, and highlighting relevant, transferrable skillsets are all important components to consider when crafting an effective CV. The hiring manager or recruiter takes 10–15 seconds to review that CV. Having effective content and layout makes all the difference to power forward in your career.
After reviewing hundreds of CVs, interviewing candidates, and helping professionals break into the industry, I have identified the key elements that make a CV and candidate truly standout:
LOGICAL FLOW
This makes it easy to read and helps the reader quickly get as much information from you as possible. Suggestion order:
Contact Details,
Personal Summary
Core Industry Skills
Professional History
Education
Awards/Achievements/Certifications
Publications (if any)
Presentations (if any)
LAYOUT
It has to be simple and visually appealing. The idea is to make things scannable and easy to read. This means avoiding packing your CV with too much information, making it visually crowded and just hard to read simply because it's hard to focus on any given piece of information. Suggestions:
Always make the sections pop—bolded, in all caps, and larger than the body. This helps the reader easily navigate through the CV.
The use of white space is important; you don't want to make things look crowded.
Margins should be no less than 0.7 in.
Avoid long sentences and paragraphs longer than three lines.
Use bullet points for easy scanning.
Use a free ATS scanner you have the right keywords and your CV is easy to scan.
Personal or Executive Summary
This is a must. This is the section where you answer, "Why should we hire you?"
You want people to pay attention to your "value proposition" and who you are. This section ought to highlight your pertinent accomplishments, encounters, etc. Suggestion
Highlight and bullet point 3-5 relevant accomplishments to focus on.
Be succinct and include a quantitative form of outcome whenever possible, i.e., saved clinical providers 30% of their time in patient care, decreased inappropriate medication use by XX and saved the clinic/hospital/patients $$, revamped health care policy and pathways, etc.
Core Transferable Skillsets
Spell them out and list them. Again, make sure all are relevant to the new role. Suggestions:
Therapeutic area: List
Core Skills: List
Other proficiencies (if any): this could be language, technology, etc. anything unique and valuable that you want to bring to the attention
Review target job roles and pick out three main skills to include.
Professional History
Make these sections efficient, impactful, and meaningful to the new role.
Avoid listing expected day-to-day duties. Words like "responsible for" are real snoozers. Everyone seems to start with these words. Instead, use active words like "created, developed, collaborated, trained, managed, identified, etc." These words connote a proactive persona versus the "I am here, and I am just doing my job" persona.
Other suggestions:
Create 3-5 bullet points for each job experience. No more than 2-3 lines long. You don't want these buried.
The first line of the paragraph and the first few words should contain a key point or term to grab attention. Again, think scannable.
Avoid fluffy, empty words like "exceptional leader," "results-driven," etc Instead, use the opportunity to show and quantify your accomplishments and outcomes.
Publications / Presentations
Don't skip these! Most people don't even include them. You just need enough (i.e., 5–10 or pick a few relevant or more recent ones) to demonstrate your ability to speak, educate, and write. These are in-demand skillsets in today's world.
Conclusion: Your CV is your most important marketing tool.
Investing time to effectively develop your CV is critical for that next career move. It demonstrates your brand, and your story and highlights your value proposition.
Good luck out there!
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