How to find talent in digital health in America today? International biotech firms wishing to enter or scale their operations within the U.S. biotech and pharmaceutical market will need to hire top-quality leaders to manage them. Biotech success in America depends on skilled and knowledgeable local scientific and commercial leadership.
Unfortunately, many foreign biotech companies consistently underestimate how difficult it is to locate and hire qualified leaders to oversee their U.S.-based operations. If they cannot find good leadership in the U.S., their efforts to enter or scale into the country will result in several costly mistakes. In some cases, their efforts to do business in the U.S. biotech market could ultimately fail without adequate leadership.
Do you want to know why it’s so difficult to recruit in life sciences in the USA? Here are five primary reasons:
1) Extreme Shortage of Senior Scientific and Clinical Talent
The U.S. biotech industry doesn’t have enough qualified senior scientific and clinical talent to fill essential leadership positions in Research & Development, Clinical Development, Regulatory Affairs, and CMC (Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls). The scarcity of such talent in most U.S. cities makes it quite difficult to scale from a foreign country to America.
2) Concentration of Talent in Elite Hubs
The U.S. biotech market is not a geographically dispersed market like most others in the country. Instead, it is a heavily concentrated market with a small percentage of talent in competitive, elite hubs in a few locations. The concentration of top candidates is in elite hubs like Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, and Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. It forces foreign companies to scale their operations to these hub locations to be closer to top talent in their market.
3) Compensation Shock and Equity Expectations
One of the biggest challenges facing foreign CEOs and investors is the considerably high compensation and equity expectations of U.S. biotech executives. When foreign leaders discover U.S. talent expectations regarding equity, cash packages, and bonus structures, they become quite shocked. Foreign leaders must be prepared to accept these expectations and invest more money in their American hiring practices if they want to attract the qualified talent needed to run their U.S.-based operations.
4) The Cultural Gap Between U.S. and Foreign Management Practices
U.S. executive management practices are often different from those in other countries, especially in the biotech market. Foreign leaders need to find U.S. executives who are not only skilled but can also bridge the cultural gap between U.S. executive expectations and foreign management styles. A qualified American executive will understand key leadership areas like FDA timelines, communication patterns, autonomy, and decision-making.
5) The Strategic Risk of a Mis-Hire
Some foreign leaders are too afraid to hire a U.S. executive due to the strategic risk of mis-hiring a Chief Medical Officer (CMO), Head of Clinical, VP Regulatory, or VP Commercial during IND, Phase I-III, or pre-launch stages. Such a mis-hire could result in wasted time, costly delays, ineffective trials, data management issues, failed market access, and the inability to develop a stable commercial infrastructure in the U.S.
How Foreign Companies Can Structure a Successful U.S. Leadership Search
Foreign companies need to execute a well-structured plan to successfully search and locate qualified U.S. leadership to run their American operations. Here are the main steps involved in this critical search process:
1) Define the Role with Precision
U.S. executive job descriptions cannot be translated from foreign equivalents because market and cultural realities differ. Foreign leaders must write job descriptions that clearly define the needs and responsibilities of the U.S. leadership roles that they need to fill. U.S.-relevant job descriptions are more likely to resonate with qualified American talent.
2) Map U.S. Biotech Hubs
Given the tight concentration of biotech hubs in the U.S., foreign leaders need to map all existing hubs across the country. It will help them better prepare their scaling operation by pinpointing all the locations where elite biotech hubs exist in the country. That way, the companies will be closer to local qualified talent that doesn’t have to come from out of state to work at their facilities.
3) Screen Candidates
Screening potential executive candidates requires more than a standard background check. Foreign leaders must screen candidates for both scientific depth and understanding of American business culture. Scientific depth refers to a candidate’s actual skills and experience in the biotech and life sciences fields. Business cultural understanding refers to a candidate’s autonomy expectations, communication patterns, and decision-making style.
4) Build a Search Process
In the biotech field, pretty much everything revolves around FDA regulatory approvals, clinical patient trials, and market readiness for commercialization. Foreign leaders must build a search process aligned with these important FDA, clinical, and commercialization milestones.
For instance, it could mean setting a goal to fill the VP Regulatory Affairs role within the first year to satisfy the FDA requirements when submitting an investigational new drug. There might also be a goal to hire a CMO or Head of Clinical within the first six months before planning the start of patient enrollment for the clinical trials. Then, of course, you would need a VP Commercial role filled within the first year before you commercially launch the clinically tested drug.
Hire a U.S.-Based Executive Search Partner
How to find the best life sciences executive recruiters in the U.S.? You don’t have to search for the answer to that question any longer because the answer is here.
Foreign biotech companies don’t have to be alone in their search for qualified U.S. leadership. There is great value in working with a U.S.-based executive search partner when entering the U.S. biotech market, where the top 2% to 3% of biotech leaders are aggressively courted and highly selective.
Pact & Partners brings decades of international executive search experience with thousands of global placements. Amid several other industries, Pact & Partners is now fully dedicated to helping foreign-headquartered life sciences companies hire the best U.S. leadership teams to run their local American operations. You don’t need to stress out over your search for qualified U.S. talent any longer.
Let Pact & Partners be your executive search partner in America and do all the difficult searching, screening, and hiring for you.
