As a recruiter, one of our main responsibilities is working directly with hiring managers to truly understand the pinch points of their hiring process, project, and company mission and how we can work together to deliver successfully.
What obstacles could be standing in our way?
Although every manager has their own unique situation, there are most certainly trends across the industry. We have found it useful to report on common challenges on a yearly basis, to give reassurance to other managers, ensure we keep our service up to date and also build our experience to allow us to support more companies with the same problems. Over the past few weeks, we have been reflecting on 2023 so far, the start of 2024, and what we believe to be the biggest challenges faced by hiring managers right now.
Before we share our thoughts, and for comparison, I wanted to go back to 2020 and the results of the report we put out to our network that year. Here are what managers considered to be challenges, in order of highest level to lowest:
- 1. Recruiting / retaining talent
- 2. Obtaining investment and funding
- 3. Access to market, getting treatment to patients
- 4. Regulations
- 5. Access to latest technology
- 6. Patient consent in using data
These are all still relevant, but there are some significant new areas testing us which we have listed below:
- An evident first addition would be related to diversity in people and teams, diversity in clinical trials, as well as diversity in data being used to drive discovery and translational research. It is a huge topic which still requires substantial attention, but it is being discussed more openly than ever and everyone we work with are taking the right steps to address diversity challenges.
- Secondly would be the home / office flexibility for current employees and new candidates. We are still navigating the back end of the pandemic and the companies who are starting to bring people back on-site VS companies who have fully embraced remote and flexible working. There is an imbalance here which is making it difficult to hire new people or make change within current teams. When it comes to recruitment, talent pools are severely restricted if we can only look for local candidates or those willing to relocate. We explored this in an earlier article Remote vs. Hybrid vs. On-Site: Which Works Best?
- Third must be the assessment of technical candidates. With the increased application of tech and frequent use of terminology in AI, Data Science and PhD topics, it has become considerably harder for hiring managers to accurately assess CV’s and skill sets. This is something that will continue to evolve and we are advising candidates how to best build their CV’s to reflect their technical abilities.
Taking the above into consideration, we feel the new challenges would look like this, in order of highest level to lowest:
- 1. Recruiting / retaining talent
- 2. Obtaining investment and funding
- 3. Diversity in people, teams, trials, and data
- 4. Managing home / office flexibility
- 5. Assessment of technical candidates
- 6. Access to latest technology
How do you feel our assessments matches up to your personal experience either as a recruiter or hiring manager?
As always, we welcome your thoughts and comments! Please contact us via our contact page here or via our LinkedIn page.
