Relocation

At times during a job search, you may find yourself looking outside your local region for open positions. Maybe you feel you must move to find new employment, or possibly, you just feel like moving to a particular city. There are different things to keep in mind in each of these cases.

If you are simply hoping to relocate to a specific city and would like to find a job in that new city, you will be helped tremendously by appearing to be an 'already local' candidate. This can be accomplished in any number of ways, namely having a friend or family member who will let you use their address on your resume.

This works because companies are much more likely to extend an interview offer to someone they feel is local and accessible. This may result in your making spontaneous travel plans to get to the interview on a few days' notice, but you will definitely get more interviews if you can use this technique. If need be, you should be able to push the interview back a little (giving you more travel time) by appearing to be busy in the short term. Maybe you have experiments running, meetings scheduled, vacation scheduled, etc.

Once the interview comes you can explain then that you are in the process of moving and that you have given them a temporary address. Maybe not perfectly true, but not totally dishonest if you truly are willing to move and ready to take the job as soon as possible.

This previous situation, as well as literally EVERY situation, is helped greatly if you are a highly skilled/highly demanded worker. In this case you may have a chance at getting interviews even if you are not a local candidate (though being local is always better) and the companies are even likely to pay for your travel. These are not usually entry-level positions, though they can be if the skill set is in high demand.

Jumping back a scenario, let's talk about those interested in relocating because they feel they must do so to get a good job.

All I can say is you have your work cut out for you. You will need to work hard and do things like tailor each cover letter and resume to suit the needs of each job for which you apply. I know, that's a pain, but I've done it and it works.

What also works is including terms and acronyms on your resume that you have seen in job descriptions of interest. At larger companies they tend to employ automatic screening tools programmed to dump any resumes that fail to include some of these terms. You should be able to figure out from the job description what terms they may want to see. Don't lie, but if there is any way possible, include these terms! My personal method is to include the term as something I learned about in a class. (Example: I took a regulatory affairs course and now I always include FDA and cGMP in parenthesis after the class name on my resume because we did study those concepts.)

Basically if you want to move and have no local addresses to use when applying for distant jobs, you're going to need to be efficient and lucky with your job search. Even if you spend 40 hours to get 1 interview out of 100 applications, in this economic climate you have to do the work. Using biopharmguy.com can help to make your job search more efficient.

Good luck!

-BPG

(originally posted December 28, 2008)