Our objective view of the life sciences industries means we can provide bespoke, current insights into the availability of people with specific skills and experience, competitive salaries and benefits packages, and the career paths that people generally take in different parts of the industry.
Background:
One of our key clients, a growing gene therapy organisation in Stevenage, asked for our input into their strategy for creating a new spin-out scientific team, to be made up of people with specialist expertise and educational backgrounds relating to viral vectors. They needed to know the likelihood of being able to hire such individuals and how best to approach them.
Solution
In the niche area of cell & gene therapy, it is important to get it right first time when approaching candidates to sell a job opportunity to them. The salary needs to be pitched correctly, with a competitive benefits package; and beyond this there needs to be clear communication about the opportunity, including the specific scientific challenge and how the position will evolve.
We therefore commenced our project with a meeting with key representatives from HR and scientific teams, making note of their requirements. We then assigned this project to our internal Business Researcher, and two Next Phase consultants, to speak with different individuals, use our internal database and conduct internet-based research, to compile a detailed report. The turnaround time for this was 3 days.
The Result
The client used our findings as justification to revisit their original salary structure, recognising that they were around £2k-£3k off in their initial salary benchmarking. We also worked with their marketing department to decide on specific wording for their advertising and press releases, to ensure their public posts were as enticing and competitive as possible.