What You Should Know About Talent Recruitment Cycles in Biopharma

What You Should Know About Talent Recruitment Cycles in Biopharma October 24, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff

College students traditionally graduate in May or June and that would typically have them looking for work in April and May, or even sooner, and possibly entering the workforce in June or July. So expectations are that companies would go on a bit of a recruitment binge in April and May to accommodate the surge.

Some industries do just that—for example, investment banking. The life sciences and biopharma does not appear to do this, at least not industry-wide. But that doesn’t mean that life science companies don’t have recruitment cycles.

Common Recruitment Cycles

For many larger companies in any industry, recruitment and job openings are often closely linked to internal budgets. Philip Mericantante is the co-owner of Adante Staffing, located in Wakefield, Massachusetts, that focuses on recruiting executives and staff in the life science industry. “The first quarter is always busy because they get their budgets. Summers slow down. So we’re seeing a pickup right now (October), the beginning of the fourth quarter. It will slow down around the holidays. A lot of these companies shut down around the holidays. But the busiest time of year for us for the last couple of years has always been Q1,” Mericantante says.

This is a fairly common hiring practice cycle in many industries. Hiring budgets and operational budgets — often linked — are set at the end of the year, as well as the recruitment goals. And recruiters, just like sales professionals, are often incentivized by their managers to hit or exceed their quotas.

Oftentimes those positions are set up on three-to-six-month cycles. In other words, once head count is approved by finance, departments may have three to six months to fill those positions. This timing is important because the end of that first cycle could loosely overlap the spring period when graduates are typically hitting the job market, and the beginning of the second half of the year, once the summer doldrums are over, overlaps with graduates who finished in the summer.

Simy Rajan, a “Connector at YoConnect.com,” commented on the Quora website, that “A company that is under the second type (finance approved) are in a time-bound pressure from their finance departments to fill the position within a quarter or two, or lose the headcount. They tend to interview fewer people but hire more candidates. It doesn’t mean that the minimum requirement is lowered or they compromise on quality. Large enterprises are classic examples.”

Summer and Holidays

And despite the fact so many grads hit the job market in spring, summer is generally considered a poor time to find a job. The reason for that is, of course, that people typically take vacations in the summer.

But it’s not really written in stone. Whereas Mericantante notes that summer is slow for him, Don Tinker, senior associate, Life Sciences, with executive search firm Hobson Associates, in Cheshire, Connecticut, says, “From a cycle perspective, our two busiest quarters are the fourth. It’s the jones-ing effect. They’ve got to get everyone on staff January 1, especially in sales and business development. They’ve got to have everybody on staff so they can hit the ground running. They have their targets, budgets are finalized, and they know what they need. If they need another program director or an operations professional, they know how many projects they have and how many people they need when it starts on January 9. This (fourth) quarter has always been our busiest.”

And Tinker also has a slightly different perspective on the holidays, from about Thanksgiving to the end of the year. Although many companies don’t appear to be hiring or interviewing during that period, he observes that many executives are busy interviewing and signing contracts during the holidays. “Usually deals are getting closed, so people are signing offer letters that week and going in and resigning when they go back into work at the beginning of January.”

Some of why Tinker sees unusual levels of hiring around the holidays may have to do with his firm’s specialty, which focuses on director level and above, or $100,000-plus positions. More technical positions may have a slightly different cycle.

Recruiting When There Are Jobs

Loosely speaking, there are two types of approaches. One is the recruitment cycle approach. The other is simply when a company has a need for a specific position, so they look for someone to fill that job.

Mericantante, whose recruitment firm is in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area, one of the two busiest biopharma hubs (the other being the San Francisco Bay Area), says, “There’s always that need to fill the position. This is a pretty busy industry. I would say that 95 percent of the time, when I ask when they want to fill a position, they say yesterday. There’s your normal demand, but there are spikes in the first quarter.”

Stacey May, director of Public Outreach for the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS), agrees. She speaks from the perspective of a professional association that has a significant career and professional development component. “There tends to be a need on an individual company basis, or as part of an academic transition cycle. We have not found that spring is our hot time. Because our members are across the career spectrum, we’re not seeing a lot of —for example— openings when students graduate, because that’s not a foregone conclusion. It used to be that people would graduate in May and they would look for jobs in July, but that paradigm has long since gone out the window. Not all the jobs are in the more entry level/graduate level positions.”

Events and Associations

There are certain cycles related to trade shows and trade association annual meetings. “We’ve got the (CRO) partnership show back in April, which is the beginning of the busy season. All of April until the Drug Information Association (DIA) meeting in June is the culmination of a lot of final interviews,” Tinker says.

Some of the bigger trade organizations hold multiple meetings throughout the year. These are not only excellent opportunities for networking, but often there are career-related tracks, job fairs, and the presence of recruiters and human resources representatives.

May points out that the 2016 AAPS Annual Meeting and Exposition will be held November 13-17 this year in Denver, Colorado. The association has between 9,000 and 10,000 individual members in industry, academia and government, and this meeting brings in around 8,000 people. The organization has a national biotechnology conference held in the spring, May or June that attracts between 1,300 and 1,500 people.

“We have a series of professional development sessions,” May told BioSpace. “Last June we approved a new mission to advance the capacity of pharmaceutical scientists to develop products and therapies that improve global health. We’re really taking that incredibly seriously, the capacity picture. Some of that capacity is related to advancing scientific discovery, exchange and learning, which is part of what the meeting is about. But part of it is also about expanding professional outreach.”

So AAPS has an online component to careers on its website, but professional development programming at its meetings. “We find that in order to increase our capacity, it really is important to meet them where they are on their career spectrum,” May says.

Examples of career-related offerings at the AAPS annual meeting include an onsite career center, resume review, and a mentoring breakfast. “All of these,” May says, “are meant to be provided as part of that professional development package. But a recruiter can go there and really see a pool of qualified candidates in rapid succession, as opposed to going on LinkedIn and finding people based on certain endorsements or keyword searches.”

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