I want to tell you about a moment I have watched play out dozens of times, in dozens of organizations, across many functions in this industry.
A role opens up — or a role gets created without ever being posted.
Someone gets it. And somewhere in the building, a woman with a stronger resume, more relevant experience, and arguably better judgment sits at her desk wondering what just happened.
If this has happened to you, your first instinct was probably to question yourself. Maybe I need another certification. Maybe I should have been more vocal. Maybe I’m invisible.
I want to offer you a different explanation. One I have seen confirmed over and over, both from inside the talent review rooms and from coaching the women sitting outside them.
You were not passed over because you were less qualified. You were passed over because you were less positioned.
Those are not the same thing. And confusing them is costing women in this industry years.
The Qualified Hire vs. the Strategic Hire
Here is a distinction that I watched shape promotion and selection decisions consistently during my decade inside pharma and biotech.
There are two types of candidates in any selection process.
The most qualified hire and the strategic hire and they are not always the same person.
The most qualified hire has the credentials, the experience, and the track record to do the job. In a strong applicant pool in pharma and biotech, there are usually several of these. A PhD, a decade of relevant experience, solid performance reviews, cross-functional exposure.
The strategic hire is the person the decision-makers already have a mental picture of at the next level. They have heard her name in the context of a business challenge. They have seen her take a position in a room where most people hedged. They know not just what she has done but what she is being built toward.
She may have a slightly less impressive resume, but she’s positioned.
When those two candidates are in the same pool, the strategic hire wins almost every time. Because the decision was already half-made before the process started.
The qualified hire looks at the outcome and sees an unfair process.
The strategic hire created the conditions for that outcome long before the role was ever discussed.
This is why I say adding more certifications, LinkedIn learning, or even degrees, is not going to solve the root cause of why you’re not getting the role.
‘Apply and Hope’ Is a Positioning Problem in Disguise
When I ask women how they approach their job search, I hear a version of the same answer: I look at what I’m qualified for and I apply.
I understand the logic. You have real expertise. You want to use it. You find roles that match your background and you put yourself forward. This seems like the responsible, measured approach.
Here is the problem. When you apply to roles based primarily on what you could do rather than what you actually want to do, you end up competing on qualifications alone. And in pharma and biotech — an industry full of PhDs, people with global experience, and straight-A achievers who have been delivering excellent work for a decade — competing on qualifications alone means you are blending in, not standing out.
I have worked with women who have applied to fifty or a hundred roles. They do not have fifty or a hundred dream jobs. What they have is a targeting problem dressed up as a job search.
When you are not clear on exactly what you want and why, your positioning gets vague. Your interviews get vague. Your LinkedIn gets vague. And vague does not get selected in a competitive market — it gets screened out.
Clarity is not just a nice-to-have. It is the foundation of positioning. You cannot position something you have not defined.
Case Study
A client came to me after hearing no more times than she could count.
She had done everything that well-meaning managers and HR partners suggest. She took stretch projects. She asked for the role change and was told her work was valued but the timing was not right. She went back and completed another certification. She got excellent performance reviews. Her senior leadership told her directly that her work was impressive.
And still, she got excellent feedback and all the reasons why she couldn’t move into her desired role.
When we dug into what was actually happening, the issue was not her performance. It was the way her work was landing with the people who mattered. Her contributions were being seen as valuable execution — excellent outputs from a reliable contributor. Not as strategic impact from someone already operating at the next level.
There is a difference between your boss saying “we really need this work” and your boss’s boss saying “we really need her.” The first is about a deliverable. The second is about positioning. Jen had the first. She was missing the second.
Once she understood the distinction, she changed how she communicated her work — not the work itself, just how it was framed and to whom. She wrote her own job description. The same leaders who had said not yet said yes within a few months. Same woman. Same experience. Different positioning.
Put this into action
If you recognize yourself anywhere in this article, I want to offer you one reframe to start with.
Stop asking: am I qualified enough?
Start asking: am I positioned well enough?
Qualifications get you into the conversation. Positioning determines what happens inside it — and whether the conversation happens at all.
The women I have watched move fastest in this industry are not the ones with the longest resumes. They are the ones who got clear on exactly what they wanted, made sure the right people associated them with that specific kind of impact, and stopped waiting for someone to notice them and started making themselves impossible to overlook.
You are likely just one positioning shift away from a very different outcome.
To make this even more tangible for you, consider this: If a senior leader two levels above you had to describe your professional reputation in one sentence right now — not your performance, your reputation — what would they say?
Is that the sentence that gets you the role you actually want?
