Recruiting for Resilience

Helen Mary Meldrum

doi:10.4018/ijamtr.288506

Abstract

Bringing a safe and effective pharmaceutical product or medical device to market requires an astonishing amount of time and money. This research features interviews with the Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), Chief Scientific Officers (CSOs) and Chief Medical Officers (CMOs) of many of the most successful life science firms in the USA with the goal of to capturing their thoughts on the recruitment of new hires. The executives screened candidates for emotional commitment as an essential quality to complete the long process of bench science, regulatory clearance and product positioning in the market. They sought to hire experienced team members who thought of set-backs as problems to be solved on the way to providing life-altering options for patients. These C-suite leaders needed to create a productive workplace culture, enhanced by a diverse group of professionals with a variety of experiences and temperaments. Participants noted that shared vision and resilience played a greater role in predicting performance than any particular skill-set discernible from a resume.

Highlights

Creating a new medical product in the USA is a laborious, expensive venture with a highly unfavorable likelihood of success
If a new medication advances to clinical trials, there is a 90% chance of its not being approved by the Food and Drug Association (Papapetropoulos and Szabo, 2018)
To be in biotech and survive the failures, you have to be aligned with a purpose that’s greater than your salary, and title

Summary

Introduction

Creating a new medical product in the USA is a laborious, expensive venture with a highly unfavorable likelihood of success. If a new medication advances to clinical trials, there is a 90% chance of its not being approved by the Food and Drug Association (Papapetropoulos and Szabo, 2018). The cost of advancing to product approval is increasing, with some studies indicating the bioscience industry will have to spend an average of $16 billion per new product by the year 2043 (Seyhan and Carini, 2019). It is common to see PhDs and MDs as corporate officers (Bauer and Cohen, 2012). Success in this high-risk, highreward industry requires a rare mix of business acumen, technical expertise, and an interpersonal style that will mesh with the company’s culture.

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