Rethinking Life-science's talent search

With the ever changing evolution of the gig economy, many industries have had to adjust to meet the demands of the market to continue to ensure that they were still hiring top talents, that goes for industries like Pharma and Biotech. As outlined in this Pharma Exec article published this year, Pharma has been considered the employer of choice for a long time, an industry where many employees would jumpstart their careers as they sought the opportunity to grow within a company or move comfortably to another industry employer. 

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Just-In-Time Delivery: Transforming Life Science Talent Engagement

Today, more and more life science companies are accelerating their development timelines through the use of a leaner, faster-paced approach to talent recruitment and team-building. This model is made possible by both advances in recruiting technology and the influx of many highly skilled consultants who have actively chosen to make consulting work their "full time" job.

Known as “Just-In-Time Staffing,” the concept derives from “Just-In-Time Manufacturing,” a production process pioneered in Japan in the mid-20th century. The Economist describes this just-in-time model as “supplying parts only as and when the process [requires] them.”

In the case of life science staffing, the idea is to de-risk your development by accessing specialized consultants with deep experience in your specific therapeutic area and/or treatment modality. These are the experts who have been there and done it before, so they can help you avoid the pitfalls that other companies have experienced (e.g. manufacturing process complexities, patient and endpoint selection, negotiations with FDA). 

Additionally, by bringing on expertise that has the right experience, you dramatically reduce on-boarding time (compared to FTE hires) thereby enabling them to deliver work product much sooner.This approach is almost always more cost-effective and flexible than hiring new, full-time employees who may not be able to flex around your changing talent demands (or who may need a good deal of ramp-up and training time) as you move onto your next stage of development.

It’s estimated that for every new life science product or therapy that comes to market, access to the right talent at the right time could save these pioneering companies a full two months in development time. 

However, when it comes to finding top consultants, even today many life sciences companies are being held back by antiquated hiring processes. Traditional methods such as posting on job boards, reaching out to personal networks, hiring a recruiting firm, and sharing the job on social networks will cost most companies, on average, a full two months to find a consultant.

During this protracted consultant search, most hiring managers and their teams will spend upwards of 45 hours on both the review and vetting of candidates. Moreover, in many cases, the level of expertise and experience of the final candidates can often be disappointing.

Recently, however, more and more life science companies are adopting the Just-In-Time Staffing approach to bring on the right consultants with the right skills – at just the right time. The groundswell behind this new approach has been attributed to two key factors:

1)  Recent advances in digital technology have allowed for industry-wide mapping of both skills and experience

2)  There is a growing cohort of highly skilled life science professionals who prefer to work on a consulting basis, rather than a full-time one. 

At Clora, we’ve been at the forefront of this new life sciences approach since our inception. Today, forward-thinking life science companies rely on Clora for their just-in-time staffing needs because we employ sophisticated tools, including algorithmic recruitment and machine-learning to sort and rate thousands of these top consultants across today’s digital labor marketplace.

The Clora platform eliminates multiple rounds of manual candidate searching and vetting, so you can reduce your time-to-hire to just seven days. You’ll only need to spend three to five hours screening candidates, as they will have already been expertly matched by our platform, and then personally vetted by our industry experts.

This rapid time-to-hire will enable you to bring on the right consultants with the right skills at the right time, and then quickly build a different team of experts when it’s time for your next stage of development or your next product. 

Find out how Clora can help you make the most of Just-In-Time Staffing.  We can help you de-risk the dynamic, ever-changing challenges of your development by bringing you the flexible, specialized consultants you need to accelerate your success.

Rahul Chaturvedi
ABOUT THE AUTHOR | Rahul Chaturvedi
CEO, Clora

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