Thank God that the worst thing that can happen to you in your search for a pharmaceutical sales job is that you don’t land your dream job and end up in a job that you like… but don’t love. I mean, considering the grand scheme of things, like major sickness, world hunger, or that occasional bad bottle of wine-it’s not too bad but it still stinks!

Kindly remember that the only reason you’re in the hunt with thousands of others is that pharmaceutical sales is “one of the most sought after careers in America” (according to Money Magazine) and you want this career more than anyone else! Don’t give me that “I think that I have what it takes. If I don’t actually land a job, that’s ok too.” baloney. How many pharmaceutical sales job seekers have told me that? If you don’t land a career in pharma sales now, you probably won’t be trying again anytime soon!

Unfortunately, you can make lots of mistakes when searching for a pharmaceutical sales job. You can create a terrible resume that no one will read. Now that really stinks! You can go the route of thousands of others and wait for a reply from Mr. Monster Job Board while you pray day and night for a call. (When he doesn’t call, you are really starting to feel like even your dog might not want you!) You can pretend to be looking for a pharmaceutical sales job…..how can you find a job when you are working so hard at the one you are already at 12 hours per day? Poor marketing of yourself and not knowing where to begin is the worst mistake that you can make in a pharmaceutical sales job search.

When you take the wrong route, you get experience in rejection. No calls for interviews at all. A simple mistake in the approach moves all of your hard work you put into your job search from the “I landed interviews” side of your list to the “I learned from my mistakes” side. So here’s how to correct it.

The first consideration in any-and every-job search campaign is to devise a plan of how you are going to land interviews. The better you are able to aim your approach, the more interviews you will land. And…the name of the game in landing pharmaceutical sales interviews is to market yourself to the max. In other words...get the word out and get it out big time! If it’s the last thing you do, your goal is to make that one extra person stop, look, pick up your resume and the phone, and call you with that interview for your dream job.

Anyone can put a resume together and pass it around to a couple of people and post it on a few job boards. Problem is, if you don’t know how to load your resume with keywords so that it will be found among thousands, your chances of landing interviews, even if you are “the one for the job” could be slim.

In a search for a pharmaceutical sales job, the more perfect your resume, the more you get it out to the right people in the right places, the more you will land interviews. The more interviews you land, the better your chance of landing a job. Simple as that.

An example: Suppose you are perfecting your resume and are hoping to get it out to a couple of recruiters who might be able to help you. You send your resume to a couple of local recruiters who are pros at placing pharma reps. You land one interview. Yippee….that’s a start!

Now take the same scenario, but this time you fill your resume with a pharmaceutical sales specific objective, list your salary requirements, load your resume with quantifiable achievements and then send it to recruiters all over the country. Your resume now shows accomplishments in hard numbers, they love it. A recruiter in Florida knows about an opening in your town of Detroit, Michigan, and gives you a call. So do 15 other recruiters. Ok, you’re warming up!

Now, you try a different track: Instead of just posting your resume online, you load it with the keywords that the recruiters and HR people are looking for. They actually find you! You get 3 more calls for interviews! WOW! You laugh all the way to your interviews when you think of how smart you are compared to your competition. Suddenly, you are having a great time at this job search stuff and you are having a blast lining up your next interviews. Can you say “Future Pharmaceutical Sales Rep?”

You are really working this job search right! You decide to take it one step further and reach out to more companies than your competition. Instead of applying to the 20 companies like Merck and Pfizer, (who typically get 1000 resumes per posting) you decide to apply to companies like Pam American Labs. A company that doesn’t normally post their openings online and averages 25 resumes per opening. Rather than wait for them to post an opening, you send them a resume. (Imagine that!) You do this with 200 other smaller companies and the calls for more interviews start to roll in. WOW…. even your ex-girlfriend is starting to think you are smart!

This is just a glimpse of how to really make an impression and land interviews. The competition for pharmaceutical sales jobs is fierce. Knowing where to start and how to outsmart the competition is the key to landing your dream job.