Employers have adjusted to higher salaries. That also means they’ve become adamant they get specific skill sets, according to Greg Clouse, BioSpace recruitment manager.
You’re unlikely to see the phrase “jack of all trades, master of none” applied to the candidates biopharma companies are seeking these days. When companies hire, they want people with very specific skill sets, according to Greg Clouse, BioSpace recruitment manager.
“Nobody’s just hiring a good scientist and then training them up into what they need them to do,” he said. “If they want a specific skill, they want that specific skill.”
The reason for that, Clouse noted, dates back to the COVID-19 job market. It was more difficult to get candidates then, so companies offered higher salaries.
“As a reflection of that, people said, ‘Well, if I’m going to pay this much money, I want exactly what I need,’” Clouse said. “That attitude hasn’t really changed. They haven’t loosened that back up. People still want exactly what they need.”
What They Need: People Who Hit the Ground Running
Whenever Lori Rouleau talks to a hiring manager, they tell her they want to hire a specialist, said Rouleau, founder of biotech recruiting firm Truss Group Life Science. They also tell her “We need someone who can hit the ground running.”
Rouleau often works with small to medium-sized businesses, including startups. She told BioSpace that once startups receive funding and owners move from being entrepreneurs to hiring managers, they look to fill in gaps in their businesses.
“They need to hire skills they don’t have, so they have to hire a specialist because they can’t do everything,” she explained.
Medium-sized companies also need specialists, Rouleau noted, as hiring managers might be good in one area of the business but not another.
“So, where is the gap?” she said. “That’s the job, the gaping hole that they don’t have.”
Filling Specialized Roles at Triumvira
Triumvira Immunologics Inc. USA is among the biopharmas looking to fill specialized roles, according to Donna Rill, its chief technology officer. Rill is the hiring decision-maker for most of the small clinical-stage immuno-oncology company. She told BioSpace the cell and gene therapy field has different expectations than the classical biopharma industry, in part because there’s a lot of variability in cell therapy products.
“The complexity comes in a little bit twofold in that while you can drive toward automation and get certain aspects of the manufacturing process to be very black and white, very cookbook recipe-type approach, there’s aspects that require intuitive thinking that if you see this, then you do this,” Rill said. “So, there’s a lot of decision trees in the process of manufacturing.”
To find the people it needs and improve the recruiting process, Rill shared that Triumvira has honed its job descriptions over the past four years. One example is the way it now describes its manufacturing science and technology (MSAT) roles.
“The job descriptions became much more specific to what we needed and delineated even specific instrumentation used, specific assay development used that wasn’t in there before, whereas if you go online and you look for classical MSAT positions, they can be pretty generic,” Rill said.
Tailoring Resumes to Job Descriptions
Job descriptions are top of mind for Clouse, as he’s been telling candidates to rewrite their resumes to reflect what’s in those descriptions. For example, he shared he was recently working with a candidate who’s pursuing an engineering job with a company that wanted someone with a very specific background. The candidate had it, but she didn’t communicate that through her resume. Clouse had her revise it.
“You’ve got to do things that reflect that specific need that the company has because they won’t talk to you otherwise,” he said.
In addition to tailoring their resumes, Rouleau noted that candidates should also identify and communicate how they can help the company solve problems and reach their goals.
“They’ve got to be able to point to something concrete and salient that says, ‘I have your back. I’m going to mitigate your risk,’” Rouleau said. “‘Together, me and you are going to soar. We’re going to be so successful.’”
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