"Fractional Hiring" At Your CDMO. Okay With You?
By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma
We need a flexible hiring marketplace – a new ecosystem – to generate increased awareness by professionals and students of positions in the biopharma industry.
“It’s no longer about simply posting full-time jobs,” says Chris Frew, founder/CEO of BioBuzz Networks.
“Those jobs still exist,” he says, “but there are tens of thousands of independent freelancers and consultants who might take on positions, but nobody's consolidated them into a talent community.”
That's part his mission at Biobuzz.
Fractional Hiring Supports The Industry
For example, Frew starts us off, along with those looking for scientific, technical, and project management roles, there are executives and senior directors who have been laid off (see part one) and decided they don’t want to go back to a full-time role.
As one such professional put it to Frew, “I’m interested in working with your hiring platform to take gigs I can’t find through my own network.”
Many of these “gig” opportunities may in fact be at CDMOs.
But let’s interject here: Do you want “gig workers” at our service providers?
Frew says you should.
The alternative – the status quo – he’ll explain, will result in the continuation of longer project timelines, or worse, an inability to place work at a CDMO at all.
Today, sponsors and CDMOs can more efffectively promote “contract jobs,” for a sales manager, technical writer, or a nights-and-weekends technician/engineer.
These adaptive openings in biopharma are providing access to a growing number of professionals who simply will not apply for a full-time role.
And it’s not just current professionals. Students are looking for hiring platforms to help get part-time work in fields such as bioinformatics, engineering, or in the lab.
Frew cites a CDMO client that hired a student as a cell-culture technician to work on weekends, in an effort to increase their capacity to better serve their biotech clients.
“When we talk about frational or flexible hiring,” he says, “it’s a benefit to the student acquiring experience, and also helps an organization grow at scale.”
And, conversely, these roles can lead to full-time employment down the road.
Education The Goal
But the starting point for all of us, as we learned in part one, is getting that student’s attention in the first place. We won’t rehash those stratagems here.
Let’s jump to some of fractional hiring results.
BioBuzz has hired into a biotech fractional bioinformatics workers, and fractional biochemists as well, “which was really cool,” says Frew.
“This organization was stuck on a certain assay they couldn't figure out. They had someone come in on a fractional basis, less than a hundred hours, and it proved very helpful.”
“This particular hire was a recent PhD who didn't have a job yet. There are many like this coming out of academia into a market that was not very friendly the past two years.
“Until now, nobody has consolidated this talent pool into a talent community, and that's part of our mission. We are not a transactional platform simply to monetize a job.”
Frew explains that today, the industry, individual professionals, and rising students want to use a marketplace model emphasizing building community “to create a destination for freelancers or any others to find fractional or flexible roles.”
Like It Or Not
Those roles, says Frew, are indeed increasing, and when pressed, he says they do not come with any stigmas or negative connotations that “temporary” or “part-time” might once have included.
But that, dear reader, as I’ve interjected, is subjective. How many “flexible workers” before you get a bit nervous about the development and manufacture of our clinical material at a CDMO?
Nonetheless, and until counter sentiments arise, the trend is, well, the trend.
“Whatever you think,” says Frew, “we do need to get used to this, and our mission is to ensure it does work successfully for the biopharma industry.”
Frew believes this paradigm shift will provide a dynamic and scalable worker model we’ve never had before.
“The overall hiring logistics visual we practice at BioBuzz represents what today's dynamic workforce looks like,” he says.
In fact, Frew reminds us, we have been an industry predicated to a large extent on the ability of CDMOs to scale up and down, and a flexible workforce has always been desirable.
It just has not been readily available, and until recently never been nurtured.
Regarding that nurturing, BioBuzz hosts monthly “manufacturing meetups,” webinars on different biomanufacturing careers, weekly career workshops, and also partners with bootcamps in various markets.
The organization often invites people without direct experience in our industry to learn what we are all about – and of course they don’t have to be interested in fulltime positions.
“And we tell them to bring a friend,” Frew says.
“We're out there every day in the community, hosting and participating in events,” he adds.
“We work with grassroots organizations, including community colleges, and economic development agencies. We're going to a high school in Montgomery County (Maryland) in two weeks. We have a full time talent community manager who's only job is to just get the word out and nurture our communities of talent.”
As we wrap up this two-part discussion, we should note this is not, in a word, revolutionary. Other industries, famously IT, have used a similar approach to hiring for decades.
So perhaps we should say finally, after persistent challenges with hiring/firing skilled workers, the differing goals of a significant number of today’s students and professionals is propelling us to a soundly strategy option.
One thing is certain. We are not going to outgrow our reliance on scalable CDMO models and development and manufacturing outsourcing.
Or, on second thought, with more fractional hiring available to biotechs … maybe someday we will.