The quest for talent in the life sciences and for professional talent overall seems to be heating up just like the weather. Just this morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported another 227,000 jobs were added to the economy in May. Furthermore, according to the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), venture capital in Q1 for biotech was over a billion dollars and venture investment rose 28 percent in the medical device sector to $558 million. In other words, VC investment was a pretty healthy amount. Because of these facts, and despite all the talk of merger mania in our industry, the fact remains that candidates are hard to come by for several key roles within life science organizations from bench level scientists and engineers to the C-Suite.
According to this article, in order to compete remember three important things: (1) Streamlined hiring processes are the most successful in attaining top talent. That doesn’t mean sacrificing thoroughness for the sake of expediency, but it does mean that the longer a process lasts for whatever reason(s), the more likely candidates are to be turned off or to be lost to other opportunities. (2) Make sure that branding of the company remains consistent throughout the entire process. If there are conflicting messages being given by different actors, you can kiss that impact player goodbye. (3) Compensation packages need to be aggressive not just market competitive. If a candidate is interviewing with you, they are likely interviewing elsewhere and you will have to put your best offer forward to attain top talent, since they will have more than one offer to choose from. At the Life Science division of The Richmond Group, let us be your partner not only in finding candidates, but also in improving your hiring processes so that you can win the war for talent.