How Technical Depth Goes Beyond What Appears on a Resume

A resume tells you where someone has been. It tells you what titles they’ve held, what companies they’ve worked for, what platforms they claim to know. In Biotech and Pharma IT, I see resumes every day that look exactly right. The experience is there. The tenure is there. The technical keywords line up.

And then you get on a call with the person and something feels off.

I’ve been placing technology leaders for close to thirty years. The resume has always been a starting point, not a finish line. You look at it, you get a sense of the person’s background, and then you start asking questions. What you find in those questions is almost never what the resume prepared you for. Sometimes it’s better. Sometimes it’s a completely different story.

But right now, something has changed. The gap between what a resume says and what a person actually knows has always existed. AI has made that gap harder to close than it’s ever been. And if you’re hiring technology leaders in Biotech and Pharma and you haven’t figured out how to account for that yet, you’re going to make some expensive mistakes.

The Resume Is the Front Door. It’s Not the House.

When I’m working a search, I trust that people are telling me the truth about their technical background. That’s not naive. That’s just how this works. I’m not a technical assessor. My job is to find the right people and get them in front of the right companies. The company’s job is to validate the technical depth.

And most good companies know that. They have their own process. They bring someone in, they ask the hard questions, they test what the person actually knows versus what they said they know. That’s where the actual picture comes out. What the resume said, and what’s really there.

What I tell companies is this. The resume is the front door. It gets you into the conversation. But you can’t make a hiring decision based on the front door. You have to go inside. You have to see how the person thinks on their feet, how they handle a question they don’t know the answer to, whether they can articulate where their knowledge ends and where someone else’s needs to begin. That’s the information that tells you who you’re dealing with.

In Biotech and Pharma IT, that counts for more than in most industries. These are environments where the technology has to work. You can’t bring someone in who looked great on paper and on a screen and then find out six weeks later that they can’t do the job. By then you’ve lost time, you’ve lost money, and the work has fallen behind.

AI Is Making It Harder to See What Candidates Actually Know

The interview was supposed to be the thing that went beyond the resume. It was the part of the process designed to show you what the resume couldn’t. Now candidates have figured out how to game that too.

Lots of times what’s happening now is candidates get on a Zoom call or a phone screen and they’re running the conversation through AI. The question gets fed through, the answer comes back, and everything sounds polished and perfect. It’s tough to tell right now. That’s just where things are.

The tell is in the delay. If someone says ‘I didn’t hear you’ on every single question, and then all of a sudden they’re answering everything perfectly, something is going on. You feel it before you can explain it. The answers are too clean. There’s no hesitation. There’s no ‘that’s a good question, let me think about that.’ Just perfect answers, every time.

Hiring managers call me back after those screens and say the same thing: I felt something weird. He was answering things kind of funny. I couldn’t put my finger on it. And they’re right to trust that instinct. What they’re picking up on is that there’s no actual person in the conversation. The answers are there, but the thinking isn’t.

This is a serious problem for Biotech and Pharma companies specifically, because the technical roles in those environments require people who can think through problems, not just recite solutions. A candidate who can feed your questions into AI and read back the answers has told you nothing about whether they can do the job. They’ve just told you they know how to use AI. Which is not nothing, but it’s not what you’re hiring for.

The signed agreement idea has come up. Some companies have tried having candidates sign something that says they won’t use AI assistance during the interview. I don’t think that changes much. If someone is willing to misrepresent themselves in an interview, they’re not going to be stopped by a signature. The problem runs deeper than that.

Bring Them In. Put Their Hands on the Keyboard.

The fix is simple, even if it takes more time. Bring them in. Face to face. Put their hands on the keyboard and see what happens.

If someone did great on the phone or Zoom and then you bring them in and they fall flat, that tells you something. More often than not, they were cheating. And you’d rather find that out in the room than after they’ve started the job.

What you’re looking for in a face-to-face technical conversation is not perfection. Nobody knows everything. What you’re looking for is how they handle the things they don’t know. Do they say ‘I don’t know that’ and then show you where their knowledge ends and what they’ve actually done? Or do they try to bluff their way through it?

The candidates worth hiring are the ones who are honest about the edges of what they know. I tell people this all the time. Don’t fudge it. If you don’t know something, say you don’t know it. Say here’s where my knowledge ends, here’s what I’ve used, here’s what I’ve done. That’s the answer that builds trust. Trying to fudge your way through something you don’t know just comes across terrible, and experienced hiring managers see through it fast.

In Biotech and Pharma, where the technical environment doesn’t forgive gaps and the margin for error is low, that honesty counts for even more. You want people around you who know what they know and know what they don’t. The person who overstates their capabilities in an interview is the same person who will overpromise and underdeliver on the job. The in-person screen is the fastest way to find out which one you’re dealing with.

What I’m seeing more often now is hiring managers bringing candidates in face-to-face after the remote screen. They sit them down, put their hands on the keyboard, and see what happens. If they can’t get it, they can’t get it. That’s your answer right there.

 

About The Author:

Steven Swan is the founder of The Swan Group, an executive search firm specializing in technology leadership placements in Biotech and Pharma. With nearly thirty years of experience, he has placed CIOs, CTOs, and senior IT leaders across clinical-stage startups and large established life sciences organizations. 

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