You are in the running for a job
The recruiter liked your resume, talked with you about the job, and passed on your resume to the person who will be your boss.
That sentence has 4 nouns that need to be defined:
Recruiter: a recruiter is the person who makes initial contact with you because they have seen your cover letter or online resume (in Linkedin, AMWA, Monster, your own web-site). The recruiter can be employed directly by the company who wants to hire you, or be part of a recruiting firm for which the company outsources recruitment services. You need to know from the recruiter
1. the name of the company
2. why the company is interested in you: is it because of therapeutic area expertise, writing skills, where you live, what?
3. if the company wants you onsite ever, and how often, and where
4. the pay rate per hour you will be given
Resume: the most important document you will ever write. You need to target your resume to the audience: you do not lie, embellish, or fake. Lying on your resume: I have seen some of this in the MJoTA mentorees, and in a friend of MJoTA was never a mentoree but claims to be: this is very disturbing. All associated with MJoTA have spectacular backgrounds, you do not need to embellish. MJoTA Mentorship exists to fill the gaps missing in your resume.
Job: a job can last 5 hours, which is how long it should take you to prepare an abstract for a professional meeting (and charge $500), or 50 years. Jobs are short-term contracts or long-term contracts.
Boss: your boss is the person you report to directly. When you are working on a job you are working for a single human being, whether the company has 2 persons associated with it, or 2 million. When you are a MJoTA Mentoree I am your boss. If you do feel that you cannot work with the person you are interviewing with, cut short the interview immediately. The phone interview goes 2 ways: you are interviewing them because you are willing to sell them your time, and they are interviewing you because they are willing to give you money.
If all the above is in place, and the job is your dream job, your immediate task is to convince the interviewer that he or she can trust you to not jeopardize his or her job. That is the bottom line. They don't want you to sink the ship. How to do this:
1. Work on your speaking voice. Your voice is all they can connect with, unless you are on web-cam and they can see you. If it is shrill or complaining or demanding, they can hear this. If your voice is you and you don't feel like taking speech therapy lessons, you can only apply for jobs where all communications are by email. This works best with jobs outside the United States
2. Research the company from head to toe. Comb through the web-site: what is their therapeutic area? What do they do best? What is their corporate philosophy? Where are they? Where is their headquarters? Comb through the FDA and ClinicalTrials.gov for information about marketed products and ongoing and completed clinical trials.
3. Immediately put the interviewer at ease by talking about a commonality. I can generally do this with anyone, because I was trained in Sydney when I was a volunteer greeting Asian students. We were told to immediately say something about yourself that sounds personal but really is not. Silly example: with anyone Greek, I tell them I grew up in a Greek neighborhood, or something along those lines. Important not to babble. Remember haiku. Your at ease conversation should not do into depth, just something short and sweet to make the interviewer understand that you are recognizing their humanity. Do not complain, or talk about anything that may be seen as a liability, like you have a sick dog that needs 24/7 care. This is when you need to come across as confident and caring and take-charge in a way that can only improve the interviewer's standing. I have offered role-playing webinars, but you were all too busy, but the offer stands. We will need 3 people in the webinar plus the facilitator. One will role play the interviewer, one the job seeker, and one the recruiter.
4. MJoTA Mentorship offers you the opportunity of being able to present your portfolio to the interviewer by GoToMeeting. All connection details for setting up a GoToMeeting is in the shared mjota@rocketmail.com e-mail. Another plus would be using a webcam and a service like Yahoo so you can be seen looking neatly pressed and professional in your neat clean office with your neat clean office equipment and reference books.