I’ve seen it a dozen times or more. The best candidate for one of the jobs that I am filling—in fact, sometimes the ideal candidate—walks away with a polite “thanks” instead of a job offer. Another prospect gets the job because of an outstanding presentation during the job talk segment of the interviews. Similarly, I’ll be in the audience listening to budding entrepreneurs pitching their technology at an audience of investors in a shark-tank atmosphere. Many great ideas go unfunded as a result of poorly delivered presentations.

These talks are important! In any circumstance, even in a mundane project meeting, you need to make a winning presentation that will help you stand out and even more importantly, get your point across.

The suggestions that follow about your “believability” have very little to do with the science that you present. It’s expected that you will do well on that side of the equation. After all, you’ve been through an extended education and have presented your science many times in the past. However, when it comes to giving a standout talk, there’s a lot more than science to consider.

Job talks define your potential
Let’s use the example of what I call “job talks,” or the presentation you are asked to give when in an interview. These are a really good example of the importance of getting it right, because they have such a significant outcome associated with them.

After receiving your interview agenda, you will likely see that you are asked to deliver a presentation first thing in the morning. That’s an indicator right there that your talk is important! It’s set up that way so that your interviewers know right away whether you are their kind of hire.

But it’s not an audience with the same expectations that your fellow biologists might have in your lab. A cell biologist delivering a talk at an academic meeting would likely be presenting only to other cell biologists. That same person presenting a job talk to a company, on the other hand, could be speaking to a regulatory staffer, an engineer or two, and maybe even a business developer, in addition to the obvious cell biologists.

Some of these attendees will be there because they are technically engaged with the cell biologists, perhaps scaling up those scientists’ work in the case of the engineers—or writing technical documents as the regulatory person would. Others will be there not because they have a direct technical connection to the research, but because the hiring manager has asked a few important voices in the company to attend and provide feedback. Sometimes, an official hiring committee with members from various departments will be present in the conference room.

The company has a mixed audience in the presentation because you will be expected to work well with people of many different backgrounds. Some people, often those who have kept the “academic mentality” even though they work in industry, will fail in this regard. They’ll go into a job talk and deliver the old standby presentation, using the same material as if it were just a part of their Ph.D. studies. That’s a deal killer!

The question you need to ask yourself is, what would a chemical engineer, or a regulatory affairs officer, or a representative from the business team have to say about your hard-core cell biology talk? It’s not about the science—it’s about you. It’s about the critical thinking skills you exhibited in your work, and it’s also about how you sound and how you carry yourself as you speak and handle the Q&A. There are decisions being made in the background about your “believability” as one of my favorite books, Bert Decker’s, You’ve Got to be Believed to be Heard, describes it.

Decker has always described this attribute as those things a person does or says that work in their favor to eliminate the distance between the speaker and the audience. Believability makes them feel comfortable, allowing your message to be heard, to sink deep tap roots into the thinking process of your audience.

Get advance information
No matter what kind of presentation you’ll be delivering, it’s best practice to ask your host or the human resources contact person what the group will look like and what disciplines are represented. Depending upon how much information you get back, you might be able to look up audience members and find out what their scientific interests are.

Knowing the audience makeup in advance—or at the very least knowing that there will be people from varied disciplines in the room—will allow you to take certain steps to ensure that the audience is following along. Pause every now and again and look at your audience. If they look confused, consider how you can adjust your approach or whether you should open the floor to questions to get everyone back on board. When practicing in advance of your talk, think about the words you’ve chosen to say and the way you look and sound when you deliver those words. It’s that whole package that sends signals about your believability, and, in a job talk, your value as a prospective colleague.

The question your audience members are asking themselves, subconsciously perhaps, is, “Would I enjoy working with this person?”

Key ingredients of your believability
If there’s any one element of a successful job talk that stands out, it’s whether the presenter came across as a problem solver. If you have a graduate degree, your work illuminated some aspect of a scientific niche and solved problems. And in your career since then, you’ve come across a great number of hurdles. You need to talk about those hurdles and how you got over or around them. Don’t simply talk about the results. Even though you might think the result is the most interesting part of your work, it’s not as interesting to a potential employer as your critical thinking skills.

It’s important for you to make sure the audience understands the issues you were tackling and what your approaches were to solving those problems. Make those hurdles clear, and then show them the thinking/analysis skills that you brought to the table in order to work up a solution. Let your focus on creative solutions impress them with an unspoken point: that you would be an effective part of their problem-solving squad if they were to hire you. You are believable; you exhibited good thinking skills and you followed that insight along to a solution.

Another “must have” element of your job talk is the passion that you demonstrate for your subject matter, as I was reminded when a client recently debriefed me on two good job talks. About the first, the client said, “He delivered a steady, workmanlike talk, kept to the requested time and answered questions well. But it really didn’t stand out to our chemists who felt that his niche was a bit too far afield to translate well to what we do here.” The second review, on the other hand, went something like this: “Her presentation was well-done, and she seemed to have a good handle on the steps it takes to deliver results. She was very passionate about her work. It was clear that when she’s on the trail of something that interests her, she can produce. We’d like to bring her in to meet the executive leadership.”

Both talks started and ended in the requested 40 minutes, with 20 minutes of solid Q&A. No stumbles, and they both had good presentation skills. Both candidates’ fields of expertise were somewhat arcane to the company’s interests. What was different?

Perhaps it was a smile, better eye contact with the audience, or a bit more enthusiasm about describing problems and solutions. Those little differences brought the message home. As a result, the job talk that day was the single most important element of that candidate’s successful interview.