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Job Talk

Tooling Up: The Finer Points of Giving a Job Talk

By 

David G. Jensen

June 20, 2008

In the early part of your job search, you are fighting people who want to screen you out of consideration. That isn't the case on interview day. Your job talk audience wants you to succeed.

My personal income goes up and down based on how many people our recruiting company's clients decide to hire. That's why I've paid a lot of attention over the years to preparing candidates for their big interview. You'd think that senior staff such as directors and vice presidents would know how to interview, right?

Wrong. They get hung up just as often as newbies on that most deceptive of interview elements: the "job talk." These are the seminars given by company applicants on interview day, and they are often judged entirely differently than other types of presentations.

Recently, I talked with John, a candidate for a director of manufacturing position for a mid-sized and growing biotech company, a couple of days before his interview. Although John already had 10 years of experience in industry, I reviewed the major highlights of his interview schedule and some things to be cautious of. He asked a lot of thoughtful questions and made notes, as he hadn't interviewed in many years.

But during my job-talk advice, he seemed to lose interest. When he commented about his many years of experience in giving seminars, I should have realized he was overconfident about giving his job talk. And sure enough, he blew it. John forgot that the type of communication required for a job talk is entirely different from delivering scientific talks or presentations at management meetings.

These were his key mistakes:

• The audience makeup was significantly different from what he expected.
• The topic of his presentation didn't address the major concerns of the audience.
• Softer issues such as his eye contact, appearance, and presentation "voice" were not optimized for the job talk.
• He didn't close the deal with the audience.

In the rest of this column, I'll talk about each of these points.

Know your audience

Recently, I gave a presentation for a branch of the U.S. government. My host and I had discussed the audience makeup at length, but I made the mistake of not clarifying her role. I assumed--the operative word here--that she was another scientist. Only later did I learn, after a string of my usual human resources jokes, that she was an HR person herself. I learned a valuable lesson about ensuring that I know something about everyone who is sitting in my audience.

John expected to talk to chemical engineers about chemical engineering issues. But his audience--as will yours--consisted of people from a broad range of disciplines: scientists, HR staff, and management types. John didn't take the time to make these attendees comfortable with his subject material.

Job-talk audiences have a different set of priorities than your "usual" talk attendees. For John, they were there to determine his personal style and capabilities. Is he likeable? Can he present his ideas clearly? Would he be a good leader? Can he put together a team?

My suggestions: Use fewer slides than you'd normally use in a scientific talk and spend more time with them to ensure that everyone in the audience is up to speed. In addition, drop the use of jargon that might be specific to your niche or clarify it before you use it.

Address the concerns of the audience

Everyone in the audience for your job talk has a slightly different reason for being there, but figuring out what's important isn't that hard. If you're auditioning for a management job, the audience will expect something different from what they'll expect at a job talk for an entry-level science position. But one thing every important member of the audience has in common is that they're less interested in science than they are in you.

The people present for your job talk aren't there to hear a strictly technical presentation; they want to know whatyour involvement was on projects, where you collaborated with others, what kinds of thought processes you used to develop your strategy, and so on. And most of all, they'll want to know what kind of person you are.

In this case, my client wanted confirmation that John was a leader, and that's what he should have tried to convey in his presentation. Instead, he delivered a "me, me" talk, focusing on his expertise in one issue that companies face in manufacturing biologics. Although that would have been important if they wanted to hire a consultant, it didn't convince anyone that he could pull their team together and make that department work well.

When you are developing your talk for interview day, consider all that you know about the job you are interviewing for and everything that might be on the minds of the members of the audience.

Remember the soft side of the presentation

Another important aspect of the job talk is that this mixed audience will make decisions about you, many of them subconscious, based upon softer issues than your technical knowledge. Eye contact with members of your audience is more important in this presentation than in any other. Smile and project humor, because you will want to be seen as a person who would be easy to work with.

John maintained very poor eye contact. He didn't engage everyone in the room, and when he did look at the audience, it was to connect with the same one or two people. He left much of the audience feeling lost.

Before you leave for your interview, practice the presentation many times, getting the timing down. (Most talks last for 35 to 45 minutes plus 15 minutes for questions.) Make sure that you work all traces of nervousness out of your voice and keep the content of your slides readable from all areas of the room. Make sure that you incorporate areas in which you've excelled in the work personally, as well as examples of when you've collaborated with others in a team.

Close the deal

In the early part of your job search, you are fighting people who want to screen you out of consideration. That isn't the case on interview day. Your job-talk audience wants you to succeed. They have an open position that needs to be filled and obligations on their team that are not being met because of that open slot.

All you need to do in this short period of time is convince them that you are the right person for the job. If you succeed at this, they will support you. By John's conclusion, the audience knew that he was an expert in manufacturing-related quality issues, but he had given them no evidence of his ability as a leader.

That's why it is critical to include detail in your presentation that is derived from the company's job description and any other information about the position you've been able to learn. Prove to them that you can tackle the job's particular challenges and become a contributor from day one. The audience wants a reason to hire you. Give it to them!

about writing conference abstract

21down voteaccepted

from:  http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/7428/how-to-write-abstract-for-conference-when-you-have-no-results-yet Don't write results you don't have. Neither in the present, past or future tense. Just don't do it. Yet, I agree with you that there are circumstances where you do need to write an abstract on on-going work. For example, many big conferences in my field now ask for abstracts to be submitted up to 10 months in advance of the conference itself! If you are a post-doc staying on a 12-month project, you want to present something but you might not yet know how things will turn out. So, two techniques I propose: Just write about the methodology, and present your goals in a general way, without “predicting” particular results but insisting on the importance of the topic. That is, emphasize strongly your points #1 and #2, and then describe point #3 as you would your “results”. Things like: In this particular study, we compare the efficiency of methods A and B on given subsets of a reference database. We use a large number of different criteria for measuring efficiency, including …, … and … We also discuss in detail the implementation of subprocess X in method B, because its has not been specifically optimized in the existing literature. I know it sounds vague, but that's the best you can achieve honestly, without pretending to know what you expect to find. Bait and switch: if you have existing results in a closely related study, you can incorporate them as part of your results. Mix this approach with above, so that you have at least a few specific results to list in your point #4. Then, when you will make your presentation, just present your new results alongside the old (some people would remove completely the old results, but that makes it too much of a “bait and switch” for my taste). It is, after all, quite common for people to include newer results in orals/posters that they obtained after the original submission. It is not frowned upon, as long as you keep a decent agreement between the original abstract and the final content. from:  http://scientopia.org/blogs/drbecca/2012/05/09/the-art-of-the-ambiguous-conference-poster-abstract/ Outline of vague abstract: 1. Such and such is an important question in neuroscience. 2. Prior work from our laboratory suggested that such and such might be due to this and that. 3. In this poster we examine the effects of this and that on such and such. 4. Our experiments suggest that the role of this and that in such and such may be complex. from : http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2010/01/how-to-write-a-scientific-abstract-in-six-easy-steps/ How to write a scientific abstract in six easy steps 26. January 2010 · 14 comments · Categories: humour, research methods Here’s the abstract for a paper (that I haven’t written) on how to write an abstract: How to Write an Abstract The first sentence of an abstract should clearly introduce the topic of the paper so that readers can relate it to other work they are familiar with. However, an analysis of abstracts across a range of fields show that few follow this advice, nor do they take the opportunity to summarize previous work in their second sentence. A central issue is the lack of structure in standard advice on abstract writing, so most authors don’t realize the third sentence should point out the deficiencies of this existing research. To solve this problem, we describe a technique that structures the entire abstract around a set of six sentences, each of which has a specific role, so that by the end of the first four sentences you have introduced the idea fully. This structure then allows you to use the fifth sentence to elaborate a little on the research, explain how it works, and talk about the various ways that you have applied it, for example to teach generations of new graduate students how to write clearly. This technique is helpful because it clarifies your thinking and leads to a final sentence that summarizes why your research matters. [I'm giving my talk on how to write a thesis to our grad students soon. Can you tell?] Update 16 Oct 2011: This page gets lots of hits from people googling for “how to write an abstract”. So I should offer a little more constructive help for anyone still puzzling what the above really means. It comes from my standard advice for planning a PhD thesis (but probably works just as well for scientific papers, essays, etc.). The key trick is to plan your argument in six sentences, and then use these to structure the entire thesis/paper/essay. The six sentences are: Introduction. In one sentence, what’s the topic? Phrase it in a way that your reader will understand. If you’re writing a PhD thesis, your readers are the examiners – assume they are familiar with the general field of research, so you need to tell them specifically what topic your thesis addresses. Same advice works for scientific papers – the readers are the peer reviewers, and eventually others in your field interested in your research, so again they know the background work, but want to know specifically what topic your paper covers. State the problem you tackle. What’s the key research question? Again, in one sentence. (Note: For a more general essay, I’d adjust this slightly to state the central question that you want to address) Remember, your first sentence introduced the overall topic, so now you can build on that, and focus on one key question within that topic. If you can’t summarize your thesis/paper/essay in one key question, then you don’t yet understand what you’re trying to write about. Keep working at this step until you have a single, concise (and understandable) question. Summarize (in one sentence) why nobody else has adequately answered the research question yet. For a PhD thesis, you’ll have an entire chapter, covering what’s been done previously in the literature. Here you have to boil that down to one sentence. But remember, the trick is not to try and cover all the various ways in which people have tried and failed; the trick is to explain that there’s this one particular approach that nobody else tried yet (hint: it’s the thing that your research does). But here you’re phrasing it in such a way that it’s clear it’s a gap in the literature. So use a phrase such as “previous work has failed to address…”. (if you’re writing a more general essay, you still need to summarize the source material you’re drawing on, so you can pull the same trick – explain in a few words what the general message in the source material is, but expressed in terms of what’s missing) Explain, in one sentence, how you tackled the research question. What’s your big new idea? (Again for a more general essay, you might want to adapt this slightly: what’s the new perspective you have adopted? or: What’s your overall view on the question you introduced in step 2?) In one sentence, how did you go about doing the research that follows from your big idea. Did you run experiments? Build a piece of software? Carry out case studies? This is likely to be the longest sentence, especially if it’s a PhD thesis – after all you’re probably covering several years worth of research. But don’t overdo it – we’re still looking for a sentence that you could read aloud without having to stop for breath. Remember, the word ‘abstract’ means a summary of the main ideas with most of the detail left out. So feel free to omit detail! (For those of you who got this far and are still insisting on writing an essay rather than signing up for a PhD, this sentence is really an elaboration of sentence 4 – explore the consequences of your new perspective). As a single sentence, what’s the key impact of your research? Here we’re not looking for the outcome of an experiment. We’re looking for a summary of the implications. What’s it all mean? Why should other people care? What can they do with your research. (Essay folks: all the same questions apply: what conclusions did you draw, and why would anyone care about them?) The abstract I started with summarizes my approach to abstract writing as an abstract. But I suspect I might have been trying to be too clever. So here’s a simpler one: (1) In widgetology, it’s long been understood that you have to glomp the widgets before you can squiffle them. (2) But there is still no known general method to determine when they’ve been sufficiently glomped. (3) The literature describes several specialist techniques that measure how wizzled or how whomped the widgets have become during glomping, but all of these involve slowing down the glomping, and thus risking a fracturing of the widgets. (4) In this thesis, we introduce a new glomping technique, which we call googa-glomping, that allows direct measurement of whifflization, a superior metric for assessing squiffle-readiness. (5) We describe a series of experiments on each of the five major types of widget, and show that in each case, googa-glomping runs faster than competing techniques, and produces glomped widgets that are perfect for squiffling. (6) We expect this new approach to dramatically reduce the cost of squiffled widgets without any loss of quality, and hence make mass production viable.