6 Healthcare Executive Resume Tips to Land the Interviews You Want

6 Healthcare Executive Resume Tips to Land the Interviews You Want

Developing a branded executive resume, that differs from the medical CV, can improve your job search results to help you land that coveted healthcare executive position in pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device industries. 

The following healthcare resume and job search tips, as demonstrated in this Chief Medical Officer Resume Sample – Medical Affairs, will help you obtain the results you seek:

Healthcare Executive Resumes that outline human capital management, profitability successes, market share increases in addition to their impressive academic and association credentials will generate the most calls for interviews. Successful leaders in Medical Affairs, Clinical Operations and Medical Scientific Liaison positions will use their resumes to market themselves as cross-functional leaders that have made an impact across many aspects of the business—not just the scientific areas. A successful healthcare executive resume will utilize visual impact, robust scientific content and measurable operational achievements to tell an impressive story. Here’s how to create a branded resume for healthcare executives with the following 6 steps:

1.  Utilize a captivating summary, not an objective, outlining your strategic leadership abilities and implementation record.

Leading pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies hire healthcare executives who can successfully and consistently create or identify products that will be the next revenue generator for the firm. Use this prime real estate on your resume to outline how your skill set and achievements can benefit the prospective employer, by not only keeping the product pipeline full but demonstrating success moving products through he process with external regulatory agencies and internal departments on a global and local scale.

2. List your interpersonal skills alongside strong business achievements and clinical experience.

Show you are a well-rounded business person, not just an accomplished scientist. Don’t have readers get lost on your resume by focusing only on numbers and measurement. Your healthcare executive resume will be read by not only scientific professionals in medical affairs, research and development, clinical operations, but your resume will also be reviewed by financial, operational, marketing and human resources leaders. You must appeal to all of these audiences. We know you have impressive, measurable achievements, but don’t let the scientific metrics outweigh your business results and human capital accomplishments. Be sure you highlight how you identified and nurtured key opinion relationships and negotiated the firm’s position before regulatory entities. If you have experience working successfully within domestic US and global environments, outline those interpersonal skills, as well.

3. Show how you attract top talent and manage teams to achieve results.

Effective healthcare executives  don’t aim to do everything themselves. They can recruit top scientific and operational talent to achieve the desired corporate goals.  Your healthcare executive resume should outline how you effectively influence key decision makers, cultivate vendor relationships, possess sharp negotiation skills and manage people to get the right products to market and kill stalled projects that are draining precious corporate resources.

4. Outline the scope of your therapeutic expertise and research, as well as your corporate results.

While your professional resume will highlight your corporate achievements, ensure you dedicate space to outline your publications, research, grants obtained, association leadership and ongoing projects that contribute to you being a respected knowledge source within your fields. Also, be sure you showcase your achievements in a way that is digestible for the prospective employer in which you are interested. For example, if you created a $4 Million dollar product line for a $74 Million firm, but now you are applying to a start-up biotech firm, you may want to focus on starting a product line and downplay the overall size of your previous employer. If you focus  on the size of your previous employer, the prospective employer may not think you are suitable to a start-up firm. Either choose to highlight achievements that are within the fiscal scope of the prospective company, or consider using percentages to outline your accomplishments. Another option is to focus on downplaying or highlighting the size of product lines in global, regional or local scopes to compliment the size the job prospects in which you are interested.

5. Demonstrate effective project management skills and multi-functional collaboration abilities.

As an executive in a pharmaceutical, biotech or medical device organization, leaders are interfacing with manufacturing, labeling, marketing and operations executives in addition to the corporate scientific community. When these departments operate collaboratively, the right products get to market in the proper timeframe with few delays or operational hiccups. By citing business results and how those results were achieved, healthcare executives can show their effectiveness.

6. Be sure your resume reflects who you are as a person.

Content on your resume, social media profiles and communications should be consistent with your personality, beliefs and work style.  If you are an extroverted person, being super assertive on your resume with bold statements can be in line with who you are and supported when the interviewer meets you and your robust personality. However, if you are more of an introvert, you may want to have a document that is heavily rooted in factual content and has an understated, yet sophisticated layout to ensure the person who the interview meets reflects the person they read about on paper. . You need to ensure that your resume will be in line with the person who shows up on the interview. Always be who you are on paper, online and in person.

The resume of a successful healthcare executive must not only demonstrate that you know how to establish strategic plans and maneuver successfully within external agencies and internal leadership, but it also must outline how you have communicated effectively with managers, lenders, shareholder, vendors and others key financial partners to solidify its company’s future.

Be Well!

Lisa