If you are a sales professional or want to become one, or if you are looking for a new sales job, you will face one of the toughest interview processes of any job seeker.
A behavioral career opportunity interview is a popular interview tactic in the pharma sales arena. It focuses on finding out how the candidate handled (behaved in) specific job-realted situations. In healthcare sales, pathology sales, clinical diagnostics sales, medical device revenue, biotech sales, clinical laboratory revenue, imaging sales, or pharmaceutical sales, customer interaction is key—so how you handle people in a wide variety of situations, under pressure, in different circumstances, becomes a critical factor to hiring managers.
To help you, here’s a link to a movie that I made about how to handle behavioral interviews. Some of the main things to keep in mind are to have lots of stories ready that highlight how skilled you’re, and it’s important that you’re able to quantify your examples whenever possible. (What happened when you had an unhappy customer? How did you increase sales and by how much? How did you save the company X amount of dollars?) I’ve also provided a link to How to Survive a Behavioral Interview for more tips, and a lengthy list of possible behavioral interview queries for you to think about.
Important tip: make sure you have a brag book and a 30/60/90-day plan willing to go. A brag book will demonstrate how you handled particular situations, since you’ll hopefully include letters or e-mails from satisfied customers or happy managers, successfully completed projects, and lists/charts of how much money you’ve saved or made for the company. A brag book covers what you’ve done in the past…a 30/60/90-day plan covers what you’ll do in the (immediate) future. It’s a list, segmented in 30-day time spans, of what you’ll do to get tutored and up-to-speed in your new company so that you can be a successful hire for ‘em as fast as possible. For more information, click here. For a template of exactly how to do one, click this link.
Worthy luck.
Article courtesy of Peggy McKee - Owner / Senior Recruiter at the nationally
recognized medical and laboratory sales recruiting team of PHC Consulting.
© Copyright 2008 PHC Consulting | All rights reserved
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