Hiring practices to expand compbio talent pool for biotech/pharma

In an earlier article , I articulated my vision for a robust computational biology (compbio) talent pipeline for biotech/pharma. The final and arguably most important element of this pipeline is, of course, getting compbio talent hired into industry roles.

Here are a few suggestions for how biotech/pharma can adjust hiring practices to access a larger, richer compbio talent pool.

Realize Who Our Competitors Are

Anyone equipped to do good compbio work would already code in Python/R, have a solid foundation in modern statistical and machine learning methods, and can think through a nuanced data problem. That means they are also competitive for data jobs in literally every other industry. This is not typically the case of, say, a someone trained in molecular biology techniques who would mostly be considering roles in the life science sector. So when we evaluate an applicant for one of our open compbio roles, we should assume that most of them are simultaneously applying to data science/software engineering roles in other industries, such as tech and consulting. They have options.

I won't soon forget the time when one of the top candidates for a compbio role I was trying to fill was poached by another industry. This person had great work experience in grad school: omics data analysis combined with a collaboration with Nvidia. I finished an initial call with him one day and was about to schedule the next interview. Then he tells me that he would like withdraw from the interview process altogether because he got an offer for a machine learning position in the UK and he had only one day to accept the offer.

Knowing that our compbio talent pool is coveted by other industries should prompt us to be much more aggressive and proactive in recruiting. That means showing up to those on-campus recruiting events and job fairs, having a system in place to quickly filter for top candidates, speeding up the interview and offer-making process, and, most importantly, increasing compensation so it is truly competitive with other industries. Otherwise, our top candidates might just get snatched from our hands.

Dissociate Skills from Credentials

Many entry-level compbio roles in biotech/pharma expect the job seeker to have a PhD. Even if the job posting says a master's or bachelor's degree is acceptable, it will still add that a PhD is preferred. This expectation is probably the single greatest obstacle preventing aspiring computational biologists from filling industry roles, killing a large fraction of our talent pipeline. Who knows how many promising bachelor's and master's-level scientists have been turned away at the door due to the credentialism they perceive in our industry?

Look, I get it. Most of my compbio colleagues have PhDs, and they are productive, mature scientists. It's hard to go wrong with PhDs. I'm comfortable stating that as a matter of fact. Nothing new to add here.

But a PhD is only a proxy for skills. And we should be hiring for skills, especially the ability to reframe biological questions as computational problems, not degrees.

Let's think through this a bit more. If we examine the developmental history of industry computational biologists with PhDs, we would find that many of them already possessed the ability to think deeply about compbio problems as a second- or third-year graduate student, long before they actually obtained their PhDs. And many of these PhD-holders have continued to advance in their computational problem-solving skills since they started working in industry. In other words, the PhD is simply a milestone marker, a snapshot of a single moment, somewhere along a their lengthy trajectory of skills acquisition. The PhD did not magically make them more skillful overnight, and their skills did not stop developing once they had the PhD. We should be assessing where they are in their skills trajectory rather than whether they have a degree.

When we can dissociate skills from degrees, we can be more creative and expansive in our talent search. It would help us more critically assess candidates at all degree levels, thereby enriching our talent pool. I would love to see a future in which degrees are no longer mentioned on compbio job postings.

There are lots more to say on this topic. A separate article will be dedicated to this.

Give Offers Earlier

Many of our top candidates are in a degree program, which means we can reliably predict when they can start a new job: in May or June when they graduate. Certain industries that compete for our talent, like consulting, time their recruiting efforts accordingly to maximize yield. They make offers in the fall to students who expect to graduate the next spring. That's 9 months before the job's start date. Even academia make offers early. People applying for PhD programs receive offers as early as January for a September start date. People applying for postdoc positions often receive offers 6-12 months in anticipation of the start date.

Biotech/pharma doesn't yet have this practice. We post jobs sporadically throughout the year, when we need to fill a position right away or in a few months. So by the time we are finally ready to interview people, a significant portion of our talent pool has already accepted job offers from other industries. If we can give offers earlier, that would immediately give us access to a larger talent pool.

Hire Our Interns

This seems obvious. If we have put in the work to select a handful of summer interns from 1000+ applicants and to mentor them for 10-12 weeks over the summer, shouldn't we have some incentive to hire them after they graduate? Like, isn't that the whole point of internships? This is what happens in every other industry.

But no, not in biotech/pharma. If you, outstanding STEM major from UCLA (the best public school in America, obligatory 8-clap , go Bruins), landed an internship with us over the summer, we would write you strong recommendation letters for PhD programs, but we probably won't hire you after you graduate. Because credentialism (see above).

If we just hired our interns, we'd already have a broader talent pool.