Overcoming the Life Sciences Talent Shortage: How we helped a Top CRO Hire

Our Boston-based Michael Page Life Sciences team began a partnership with Pharmaron in 2021, a Contract Research Organization (CRO) and premier research and development (R&D) service provider for the industry. The roles they wanted to hire for were challenging given the skills and experience needed were niche. But we succeeded and we think the story is indicative of the great recruitment service we can provide our clients.?

Pharmaron’s Brief to Us?

Pharmaron’s Chief Business Officer was looking to grow her team by hiring six Business Development professionals. These permanent commercial positions would be responsible for growing sales across the company’s services, so the candidates needed not only the right business acumen and interpersonal skills, but also Discovery experience in the biotech or biopharma industries.??

This was a challenging search as the market was very candidate short at the time. Top candidates for these positions would be very specialized, and therefore scarce and in huge demand.??

Also, we needed to consider the dynamic nature of the industry. Because there are always new capabilities being added to desired skillsets, the hiring needs of companies like Pharmaron are always changing. This made exploring different candidate profiles a necessity.??

Our Approach: Collaboration and Transparency?

Our focus, as always, was on collaborating with our client and maintain transparency throughout the process. We began with our national database of candidates. We advertised these six roles to those candidates who had both the technical and soft skills Pharmaron’s BD team needed. Then, we expanded the search by reaching out to our global network of specialized recruiters, encouraging them to send any relevant candidates our way. This helped us to build an initial list of candidates to share with our client.?

Throughout the process, our team made a point of staying responsive and agile. We incorporated Pharmaron’s feedback on the candidates we shared with them in order to develop more robust shortlists for each of the roles.??

Once we had those shortlists in place, we evaluated each candidate’s skills by comparing them to the agreed-upon core competencies. We also took into account Pharmaron’s science-driven culture to ensure each candidate was a fit.??

The Results?

We filled all six specialist roles: three candidates were placed in Boston, San Francisco and North Carolina, and the remainder three positions were filled with fully remote hires.??

With the success on this project, we continued our partnership with Pharmaron to complete two additional placements, this time, for technical roles: Process Engineer and Principal Scientist. Ellen Cabral, Senior Director Global Marketing at Pharmaron shared: "What’s important and notable is that Michael Page Life Sciences team listens. Through listening and incorporating feedback, they have consistently been successful in identifying the right candidates for key positions at Pharmaron. They have supported us very well in securing talent to meet our hiring needs."?

We were very pleased with this partnership and hope to have many more successes like this as we continue to support biotech, biopharma, CROs and CDMOs in Boston and across the US hire top Life Sciences talent. If you’d like to talk about our recruitment services, click here or reach out to me directly.?