In Cheat Sheet, a regular series, the people who hire for some of the country’s best jobs let you in on their formulas for finding the perfect employee. This week: Show you care about medicine as much as you care about design to land a senior manager gig at Johnson & Johnson. See all the cheat sheets here.
See all the cheat sheets here.
First Round:
30- to 45-minute phone interview with a recruiter who judges candidates’ leadership skills and fit for the role.
Second Round:
Phone interview with the hiring manager, who asks about technical chops and whether the applicant has the analytical background he’s looking for.
Third Round:
An interview with leaders in the global strategic design office, followed immediately by a second one with members of the product development team. Candidates have to give examples of times they have mined consumer data and made the findings accessible to a design team.
The Score:
The hiring manager decides on a finalist based on how the candidate interacted with the other interviewers, as well as the candidate’s ability to synthesize information.
Do prove you can knit together all kinds of information. “This person can take reports, patient-centered field research, meeting notes, and come up with a tangible solution out of all of it.”
Do convey your observational skills. “We need a person who can ‘experience audit’: look at people and situations and think of a design that hasn’t existed in that environment before.” A visual portfolio can help make this point.
Do tell a story with numbers. “You’ll work alongside people in development who are deeply into chemistry and hard sciences, so you need to be able to bring insights to that kind of environment.”
Don’t worry if you majored in English. “People with liberal arts backgrounds do pretty well, if that can be accompanied by other experiences with design.”
Don’t be vague. “Tell me a story about when you synthesized something. What was the result?”
Don’t ignore the human element of the job. “A lot of us come from a medical background. We value the ability to relate to illness.”
