Talent Logistics Turns Biotech Winter To Hiring Spring
By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma
After our "Biotech Winter" – a period starting circa 2021 with tens of thousands of layoffs throughout biotech and pharma, stagnating investment, slow newco formation, and higher interest rates — the season has finally started to change.
Is it springtime for biotech?
For one thing, says Chris Frew, founder/CEO of BioBuzz Networks, a life sciences talent community/recruitment platform, “We have demonstrably entered a turning point in biotech hiring.”
Reductions of professionals in some segments of the industry has not led to appreciable increases in the worker pool in others.
This certainly, if not most representatively, includes at CDMOs.
To be clear, the biotech winter derived fundamentally from macro-economic factors, such as high interest rates (and inflation), and as they say in finance, “money sitting on the sidelines” in anticipation of better days to come.
As the subhead in a Wall Street Journal article described it in April 2022: Biotech Stocks, Once Booming, Enter Bear Territory
Even prior to this recent chill, there had been a growing worry specifically about CDMOs maintaining a skilled workforce. (Covid was a major catalyst.)
What now happens to hiring as the biotech industry kicks back up, and workers are in increased demand because of, for example, an increase in biotech investments?
A New Hiring Model
“Interest rates globally have been falling for over a year. That alone is predictive of more business investment,” says Frew.
“The biotech sector is poised to blossom again. We’ve already seen a return of later stage investing that’s breathing new life into the market.”
But how will companies attract top talent and scale-smart under, as Frew puts it, “the expectations of a new workforce”?
Frew’s premise is the imbalance in our human resources market lies with (a) traditional hiring platforms (you know them by name), and (b) outdated “funnel-based” practices that pour prospective candidates into the top to see which few come out at the bottom.
These formats, he says, cannot meet biotech's unique needs, especially as companies today look to fill specialized roles and “fractional positions rather than full-time jobs.”
Fractional hiring? We will return to that topic in full force in part two.
For now, Frew explains how he’s solving for our challenges via an emerging “talent-marketplace hiring model.”
This model is “community-driven and focused on long-term, flexible relationships with individual professionals.”
What’s that mean?
Frew describes a hybrid-grassroots marketing strategy to engage and educate professionals (not always those already in our industry), to demonstrate what, for example, a CDMO is and how it performs.
Parenthetically, I’ve been chasing down this topic for years, asking:
Does anyone reach out to individual university students or professionals in other industries to explain how a CDMO serves the biotech industry and patients, and why they might want to work at a CDMO?
Frew’s businesses (he’s also CEO of recruitment firm Workforce Genetics) do just that, and I want to know how that messaging is created and effectively reaches intended targets.
“We wake up every day thinking about that,” he says. “What we’ve come up with so far was proved effective during Covid, when labor was really tough.”
“We worked with companies like Catalent, Lonza, ABL Biomanufacturing, Emergent, and directly with pharma, such as Kite Pharma,” Frew continues.
“Our approach is a combination of storytelling and marketing principles in combination with working collaboratively with local workforce development agencies and universities, and directly with end clients.
“We provide talent logistics, connecting an emerging and existing workforce with the right opportunities.” Storytelling connects the employer to the industry in the minds of candidates.
“It clarifies the positions and skills needed. These stories can be about patients and the impact of the medicines and therapies being developed. Other times, this storytelling includes “a day in the life of a cell therapy specialist,” or programs and initiatives a company has implemented to train employees, such as the Catalent training center.
Open (or soon-to-open) positions at CDMOs are also targeted on the BioBuzz platform, which allows direct hiring and “flexible, freelancer or contract work.” (Again, more on this subsequently)
A Recruiting Success
Frew mentions two recent insights:
- Companies removing specific academic degrees as a requirement for employment.
- CDMOs working with trade schools and bootcamps.
Bootcamps are typically 8-16 week, hands-on training programs on laboratory or biomanufacturing skills. They can be designed to kick-start a new career in the field, such as “Biotech Basics for English Language Learners” offered by Montgomery College in Maryland.
“There are some truly effective skill-building bootcamps with curriculums influenced by industry,” Frew explains. “That’s an important message to reinforce with your readers.”
These alliances are most successful when, for example, a CDMO works proactively to identify position openings that will be coming online. He cites the Wistar Instutue program in Philadelphia.
“Every new bootcamp cohort,” Frew says, “starts with identifying companies committed to hiring new technicians from the bootcamp. This is a good example of starting with demand.”
“Our platform then helps to identify individual prospects and informing them of the specific bootcamp.” The search for these prospects includes at “ancillary industries.”
A biotech client of BioBuzz opened a new facility in Maryland, and received a grant from the state to train and develop a workforce. BioBuzz put together a campaign to first get the word out to job seekers about what “biomanufacturing” is, talk to them about the company culture, the specific jobs available, etc.
“We targeted mechanics, nurses, phlebotomists – those with a procedural-based approach and who understand concepts of repetitive work. We then helped them understand roles within the industry that might be of interest, what the training would be like, and matched them to the company involved in the training accordingly.”
Frew adds, “This company has grown to 500 employees in three years.”
“This is our approach – it’s talent logistics,” he iterates. “The traditional talent pipeline model just doesn’t align with how the workforce operates today. A logistics method represents what today's dynamic workforce needs, and how professionals want to be approached.”
And as we’ve been alluding, both employer and those prospective employees see fractional hiring as a way to meet workforce demands.