Life Sciences Recruiters Seek Out Diverse, Visionary, and Innovative Leaders for Top Companies
The national economic landscape is changing rapidly amid the COVID-19 pandemic, impacting every industry and sector. The life sciences will not escape unscathed as companies move quickly to develop new diagnostic tools, treatments, and vaccines to address the coronavirus. In response, life sciences recruiters like Slone Partners are particularly attuned to the shifting sands so as to identify and deliver the best C-suite candidates to our client partners at a critical time.
Recent research by Deloitte underscores the abundant opportunities right now for investors and companies in the life sciences. Life sciences recruiters are focused more than ever on identifying deep and diverse pools of candidates who possess not only the necessary scientific knowledge and leadership skills, but also those with the vision and foresight honed through their unique professional and personal development and experiences.
Life sciences recruiters like Slone Partners provide value to their client partners by building and maintaining relationships with companies and professional networks, developing robust and diverse candidate pools, and continuing to work with client partners throughout the on-boarding process to ensure that new executives have the support and resources they need to succeed. Slone Partners provides transition coaching for newly placed executive leaders through a partnership with Fortify Leadership Group.
The impact of COVID-19 on life sciences companies and their operations varies. Many biotech companies slowed operations during the pandemic, but are now ramping back up, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe. Certainly, as the economy reopens it will be incumbent upon life sciences recruiters to find diverse leadership candidates who are equipped and prepared to bring their companies back to full operational capacity.
Looking for top talent outside the traditional candidate pool is a key strategy for life sciences recruiters whose client partners see value in considering a diverse group of candidates working in a range of sectors, whose experiences and skills in empowering successful teams will transfer well to their organization. Robert Kaiser has written in Harvard Business Review about the value of versatile leaders with broad perspectives, arguing that they “promote a wider range of skills, and provide a network of colleagues with different expertise and points of view.”
A recent report issued by McKinsey also emphasizes the importance of “adaptive leadership” in the life sciences, citing the need to respond quickly to new sets of ambiguous challenges in which existing proven solutions aren’t sufficient. Life sciences recruiters must account for these complex dynamics when assessing the capacity of candidates to balance differing and sometimes competing priorities in executing their duties.
Life sciences recruiters also work hard to develop a nuanced understanding of their client partners’ mission and objectives, core values, and behaviors so as to select candidates who would be a good cultural fit within the organization. Assessing candidates based on their objectives, desires, and expectations is absolutely essential to completing a successful executive search.
In a commentary published last year in StatNews, Slone Partners CEO Leslie Loveless wrote about this issue, arguing that to attract the most talented leaders, life sciences companies need to create “a work culture that encourages innovation, rewards initiative, cultivates productive team work, and sets transparent and consistent goals and guidelines for performance management, evaluation, and promotion appeals to top-performing executives,” something that life sciences recruiters closely examine when building candidate pools.
Drawing upon her many years of experience working with life sciences recruiters and companies, Loveless has also advocated for more diversity throughout the C-suite, writing in the Boston Business Journal that “many companies are increasingly recognizing the high value brought by recruiting talented and ambitious diverse executives to their leadership teams…Diverse leaders help shape the internal culture of their organization and drive the innovative technologies and market strategies necessary to succeed in an industry where there is constant upheaval.”
As a professional agency that specializes in life sciences recruitment, Slone Partners has completed thousands of successful placements in top positions across many specialty areas in life sciences organizations, and utilizes a nationwide network of offices, life sciences recruiters, and search leadership to equip us to continue making the right placements for established and growing organizations all across the country.
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