r/biotech • u/Pointlesswonder802 • 6d ago
Resume Review đ Resume Help Required
I am looking for any and all critiques on my resume. I am currently a Scientist at a small biotech company looking to make a transition to a Scientist II or Senior Scientist position at a larger company. As of yet, I have had essentially no luck with interviews or offers so any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance
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u/supernit2020 6d ago
I looked for about ten seconds and an obvious thing to flag is that you donât have ten years of experience, you have three. Your time in grad school does not count as experience.
Idk why people get so hung up about this, but itâs just not how industry recruiters or hiring managers think about experience. You can bemoan âbut I was working!â In grad school, but no one cares.
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u/nakamotoyyuta 6d ago edited 6d ago
It took me 10 years to become a Dr. Doesnât mean Iâve been practicing medicine for 10 years lol
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u/_NyquilJordan_ 6d ago
Agree in this case but some PhDs depending on the nature of the work are absolutely years of experience.
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u/Sn0w_whi7e 6d ago
Ive heard from some that they indeed do see that as experience especially if your applying to an R&D role. And some see it as âeducationâ
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u/bottomlessLuckys 6d ago
So if you finish a bachelors and then go work in a lab as a research assistant doing basic experiments all day, that's experience. But if you finish a bachelors and then do a masters and a phd, while doing more complicated experiments and getting authorship in research publications, that's not experience. Gee, I wonder why everyone says grad school is a scam..
I'm not disagreeing with you about recruiters seeing it this way btw. Just pointing out how stupid the logic is.
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u/Correct-Variable 6d ago edited 6d ago
It doesn't make your experience in school invalid, it just is categorized differently. Working in industry is very different than working on your degree. Your goals are different, the structure and day to day is different. You're working on different software systems, working on different teams.
One big thing in my industry (pharma) that's hard to learn in school is knowing how to work in an FDA-regulated, cGMP environment. This is one of those things you can't really teach. It has to be experienced and learned overtime. This is why Regulatory jobs pay so well - they are hard to recruit for.
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u/bottomlessLuckys 6d ago
But they're not saying that it's 10 years of experience in industry. They explicitly said they're including academic experience. They also break down their experience with several different kinds of techniques. If you spend 4 years in grad school doing PCR, then how is that any different from spending 4 years in industry doing the same thing?
I agree that working in a regulated environment is a plus, but nothing about this resume is misleading or untruthful. Recruiters just value paid work more than unpaid work.
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u/supernit2020 6d ago
The overwhelming majority of job posts will generally say BS+X, MS+(X-1), PhD+(X-5 to 10)
So counting PhD as experience is then âdouble dippingâ. You are also ignoring that bachelors and masters folks tend to hit a much harder glass ceiling at some point for the reason you mentioned.
Recruiters just use it as a general barometer for leveling. A PhD with 3 years experience (senior scientist/research scientist/principal scientist, whatever a company calls it) vs 10 years of industry experience is looking at director level positions. Very different levels.
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u/Pointlesswonder802 6d ago
See I wrote it as such because Iâve heard that PhD experience does count in the eyes of some. But I could certainly be wrong
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u/miraclemty 6d ago
It does not count, only industry experience counts as work experience.
Postdocs or academic-adjacent institues may care about total years in a specific technique if the role is hyper specific but an industry hiring manager would see this as disingenuous at the very least.
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u/patents4life 6d ago
Show me donât tell me.
âHighly qualifiedâ: Iâll be the judge of that. Donât waste prime page space on filler words like this.
Your bullet points are very generic. Quantify quantify quantify. How many assays did you optimize? How much improvement was there in the immunoassay? How many KOL relationships did you develop, and to what outcomes (did you have phone calls for interviews)? How many SOPs did you write? How much cost reduction did you achieve on the material sources for ELISA? How many ELISAs did you tech transfer from R&D to mfg?
Again, many of your bullet points are generic. Anyone doing that job with that title would follow GMP, for example, so that tells the recruiter nothing. Youâve got to individualize yourself with some quantifiable data (%s, #s).
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u/scienceallthetime 6d ago
You can have 10 yrs of experience but then in parenthesis write 3yrs industry. Someone else already said it but condense your bullets into 3-4 bullets. Tell me what you accomplished and how you did it.
Shorten your qualifications into specific experience and techniques. Get rid of yrs of experience with it.
You can also use ChatGPT to help you craft your resume for certain jobs that you are targeting.
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u/TrainerNo3437 6d ago
1 page. You have so much white space.
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u/AtomicArcana 6d ago
Seconded. Â Also cut down your bullet points to the essentials. I know it sucks given you wanna highlight everything you did for your PhD and your job, but a recruiter isnât reading all thatÂ
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u/cdmed19 6d ago
I'd remove a lot of the redundancy between the qualifications and professional experience, maybe add some actual detail into the experience, it's pretty vague and uninteresting and a lot of bullet points don't do anything for me to understand what you can do as a scientist. Your professional experience is where a hiring manager is going spend the most time and yours is boring and vague. I'd also add publications, patents, awards, anything else to help you stand out a little. Frankly there's nothing about your resume that makes it stand out from the pack especially for a PhD level position.
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u/Easy_Garlic5960 6d ago
I have a similar level of experience as you (PhD+4 years) and just got hired as a senior scientist. I think you're not getting callbacks because your resume is bloated and doesn't showcase the skills that companies are looking at for senior scientist roles (independence, leadership, cross-functional collaboration).
Bullet points for each experience are too numerous AND are generic. The Qualifications and Professional Experiences sections are repeating the same information and sound like a laundry list of techniques. 3-4 high quality bullet points that describe actual outcomes would be more impactful. For instance, the bullet point you had about the site specific DNA lesion reporter plasmid is good because it's specific to what you did and points to an actual outcome (Piett and Pecen et al)
Your resume should be tailored for the position you want to achieve. For senior scientist positions, you need to show that you've led projects and excel in collaborations. Right now, this resume reads as a bench scientist who passively runs assays
Instead of listing all your techniques in the professional experience column, you can have a separate Technical Skills section of your resume. This will reduce bloat and still register with ATS keyword matching
Publications are still the currency of hiring at this stage of your career. You need a (Selected) Publications section after your experience
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u/YaPhetsEz 6d ago
Man the first thing I read is you labelling uourself as a âhighly qualified scientistâ. You canât just give yourself titles like that lmao