Questions to Ask Pharmaceutical Company
Twenty questions for a scientist, clinician or graduate talking to a pharmaceutical company about a job, at an interview, a site visit or a careers fair. They cover the pipeline behind the role, what happens when a compound fails, publication and patent terms, compliance culture, pay and hours.
The questions
Open any question for the note
What is in the pipeline at the moment, and what phase is each programme in?
Why ask it
Most of this is public for a listed company, so asking lets you check the version you were given against the version in the annual report. A recruiter who cannot describe the pipeline is not close enough to the science to tell you what the job involves.
Which of your products carries the revenue now, and when does its exclusivity end?
Why ask it
A company with one product approaching loss of exclusivity behaves very differently from one with a broad portfolio: hiring slows, cost programmes arrive, and early research is usually cut first. The date is public and the answer you get tells you how openly it is discussed internally.
Which programme would be first to go if funding tightened?
Why ask it
Almost nobody asks this, and the reaction is informative even when the answer is guarded. What you want to know is whether the work you would be doing sits near the centre of the company's plans or at the edge of them.
How much of the science here is internal, and how much is in-licensed?
Why ask it
Companies that mainly acquire and develop assets offer very different careers from those that discover them, with more work on trials, regulatory submissions and diligence, and less at the bench. Neither is worse, but candidates often find out only after arriving.
Would I be on one programme, or moved between them?
Why ask it
Single-programme roles give depth and carry the risk that your project ends; rotating roles give breadth and less ownership. Ask which this is, and ask what happened to the last person who did it.
What happens to a team when its compound fails in phase two?
Why ask it
Attrition is normal in drug development and the honest answer describes redeployment, a defined transition period, or in some cases redundancy. A company that has never thought about it, or that implies failure does not happen here, is telling you something about how candid the place is.
Who would I report to, and how many people does that person already manage?
Why ask it
A manager with twenty direct reports cannot supervise your work in any real sense, whatever the training programme says. Ask to meet them before you accept, and notice if that is difficult to arrange.
How much of my week would be laboratory or clinical work, and how much documentation and meetings?
Why ask it
Regulated environments generate a great deal of writing, and the proportion surprises people leaving academia. Ask for a percentage split or an account of a typical week, and expect the documentation share to be larger than the job advertisement implies.
How much of the work is outsourced, and would managing contract organisations be part of my job?
Why ask it
Much preclinical and clinical work sits with contract research organisations, so the role can turn out to be vendor oversight rather than science. If that is the case it is better to know now, and it is a genuine skill worth being paid for.
What decisions could I make without escalating them?
Why ask it
This is the practical measure of seniority, more reliable than a title or a grade. Ask for two examples of decisions someone at your level took last month, and note whether the examples are about the science or about scheduling.
How is an unwelcome result handled here?
Why ask it
Ask for an occasion when data did not support a programme and what followed. You are looking for evidence that internal challenge is normal and survivable; long silence, or an answer purely about process documents, is not encouraging.
What happens when someone raises a safety or compliance concern?
Why ask it
Every company has a written procedure, so ask instead what happened the last time it was used, and whether people go to their manager or straight to the hotline. The gap between the two answers is where the real culture sits.
What is the publication policy for work I do here?
Why ask it
Important for anyone who may want to return to academia. Ask who decides, how long review takes, whether negative results are published, and whether you can present at conferences under your own name.
Who owns intellectual property arising from my work, and is there any inventor recognition?
Why ask it
The company almost always owns it, which is expected. What varies is whether inventors are named on filings, whether any award scheme exists, and how invention disclosures are handled, and those details are worth reading in the contract rather than hearing summarised.
How many people have joined this group in the last two years, and how many have left?
Why ask it
The ratio matters more than either number. Rapid growth with high departures usually means the work is not what people were told it would be, and the person interviewing you may well be the third to hold their own job in three years.
Has this site been through a restructuring recently, and how secure is its future?
Why ask it
Site closures and relocations follow mergers and pipeline failures, and they are decided far above the hiring manager. You may get a careful answer, but asking flags that you know how the industry works and gives you something to check against recent filings and news.
What does progression look like, and when was someone in this role last promoted?
Why ask it
Career frameworks look generous on a slide. A specific instance, with a date and a timescale, is the only thing that shows the ladder is being climbed rather than displayed.
How is the bonus determined, and what did it actually pay in the last poor year?
Why ask it
A large part of pharmaceutical pay can be variable, tied to company performance you cannot influence. Ask for the target percentage and the historical range, and treat any bonus figure as optimistic until you know how it behaved when a trial failed.
What are the hours really like around a submission or a database lock?
Why ask it
Ask about the peaks rather than the average, because the average is unremarkable and the peaks are what people leave over. Useful follow-up: how often those periods came round last year, and whether they were foreseeable.
What would you change about working here if you could?
Why ask it
Ask everyone you meet separately and compare. Consistent answers about a real irritation suggest an honest organisation with a known problem; entirely positive answers across four interviews suggest people have learned what they are allowed to say.
Talking to a pharmaceutical employer
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Preparation that changes the conversation
- Read the company's own pipeline page and, if it is listed, the most recent annual report and quarterly results commentary. Both tell you which programmes management is talking about and which have quietly disappeared.
- Search regulatory registers and public trial registries for the programme you would work on. Knowing the phase, the indication and the comparator lets you ask about the science instead of about the company.
- Note any recent approval, rejection, safety label change or acquisition. These drive hiring and reorganisation more than anything on a careers page.
- Look up the people interviewing you and their publication history. It shows whether the group publishes at all, which answers a question you would otherwise have to ask.
- Write down your two or three genuine constraints, location, on-call, travel, laboratory work, and raise them early rather than after an offer.
How the setting changes what to ask
Large established company
Ask about scope of the role, the size of your manager's team, how work is divided with contract organisations, and where decisions get made. The risk is not the company failing, it is being one of forty people on a programme with a narrow remit.
Small or clinical-stage biotech
Ask how many months of cash the company has, what the next funding milestone is, and what happens if the current readout is negative. Options are part of pay here, so ask about strike price, vesting and what happens on acquisition.
Generics and manufacturing
The work is quality, process and regulatory rather than discovery. Ask about inspection history, shift patterns, and how deviations and recalls are handled, since those define the job day to day.
Contract research organisation
Ask how many client studies you would carry at once and how utilisation targets are set. Billable hour pressure is the central fact of these roles and rarely appears in the interview unless you raise it.
Careers fair or short conversation
Pick two questions, one about the pipeline and one about what the person actually does all day. Long lists do not survive a five minute queue, and the person you are talking to is usually a scientist rather than a recruiter.
Questions to leave alone
- Unpublished trial data, interim results or anything a listed company could not say publicly. Asking marks you as someone who does not understand disclosure rules.
- Requests for a view on a competitor's compound or litigation. Nobody can answer, and it makes the rest of the conversation cautious.
- Anything that invites the interviewer to speculate about a merger or a site closure. Ask about the site's history instead, which is a matter of record.
- Pay in the first screening call if you have been asked to hold it, though you should ask for the range before a final interview.
- Personal details about staff turnover framed as gossip. Ask about numbers joining and leaving, not about individuals.
After the interview
- Write down the answers the same day, particularly on programme stage, reporting line and variable pay. These are the points that get remembered inaccurately later.
- Ask to speak to someone doing the job now, without their manager present. A company that refuses has answered a question.
- Check contract terms on notice period, restrictive covenants, publication approval and intellectual property before signing rather than after.
- Compare the offer on base salary rather than on the total headline figure, then treat bonus and equity separately as amounts that may not arrive.