Biotech Clusters Must Prevent Their Pools From Drying Out.
There is significant competition in the fight for the skills, experience and talent to transform fledgling biotechnology companies into sustainable enterprises with something more than big ambitions. The small and agile biotech company has many advantages to offer the adventurous and entrepreneurially minded life science professional. Using these attractive characteristics effectively to appeal to talented people takes consideration and analysis as well as huge amounts of time and effort if you?re truly going to hire the quality required to drive the business forward and execute your plan.
Because biotechnology companies are largely in clustered hubs across Europe, often supported and backed by an association or group whose mission is to raise awareness of the cluster, these companies have a great opportunity to ride this publicity wave and deliver their message of opportunity to candidates with impact.
Yet to do this, companies need to concede the protectionist attitudes they take to talent they recruit. It is advantageous to all the companies within the cluster to attract great people as it will make all the companies stronger and more successful by attracting other great talent and stimulate stronger International interest.
It is widely acknowledged that people and skills are critical in executing any business plan but to attract high quality talent to the dynamically changing world of biotech, it sometimes requires those same individuals to think about their contingency options should things not work out. Who else is there that can provide them with a career?
This is where clusters have a distinct advantage. By accepting that people will give you good service but will want to move on at some point, they can work on keeping the talent locked into the cluster rather than losing it to external markets. Recruiting is currently so difficult, expensive and competitive that by creating an open talent forum where cluster companies can broadcast their opportunities and open their doors to those people ready for a fresh challenge, you can strengthen the cluster by retaining skills rather than losing out to competitive talent markets.
But how?, as company executives and investors you regularly convene to discuss trends, alliances and industry developments. You network, share ideas and swap contact information and all these prevalent concepts are well ingrained in modern business and acutely employed across these biotechnology clusters. Take these principles, develop them and apply them to recruiting and careers and you begin to provide the connectivity conditions similar to large companies. People can then move around to progress their careers and acquire the experience they feel they need to achieve their longer term ambitions. You begin to build up the loyalty and ties people feel with the area and the companies that comprise it, which can only enhance the ability of the respective companies to attract other great people from the global talent markets. So preserve your talent pool and work with your fellow cluster companies to find ways to offer opportunity and lock in the skills of the world?s best talents.
Ryan