By Lisa Lane

If you are planning to apply to pharmaceutical companies online, success depends on knowing how to prepare your resume for online submission and knowing how the system works. Impactful, online resumes require you to follow a separate set of rules from the traditional, printed resume.
First, let’s talk about how the system works. Most large pharmaceutical companies scan the resumes that they get. Why? Because it is simple, inexpensive and efficient. This is good news for them but may be bad news for you. Your resume stands a good chance of getting lost in their database instead of being read by a human being.
You apply online to their job posting….now what? Once scanned, your resume just sits there waiting for an opportunity to be pulled from the database.
How are resumes pulled or selected? The person who is in charge of screening resumes will go to the database and type in some keywords based on the qualifications that they are looking for. For example, they might be interested in filling a position in San Diego, CA. They might want the person to have sales experience and have a BA degree in Marketing. They decide to use these keywords: San Diego, Sales and, Marketing. Viola! A search using those keywords pulls all the resumes with those keywords in the body of their online application. If the list of resumes is too long, they might add another keyword. Did your resume get pulled? If it had all of the keywords, yes. If not, there is a good chance that it’s still sitting there in the resume abyss. sverige-info.