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The Vital Role of Flexible Workers in Driving Life Sciences Innovation
Angela Arriaga | August 16 2023
A funding crisis is looming over the life sciences industry. Not only is it endangering the industry’s ability to fully recover from the pandemic, but it’s jeopardizing its critical pipeline of innovation.
Although life sciences organizations initially saw record levels of fundraising from venture capital, IPOs and deals during the pandemic, those funds have since dried up due to a combination of reduction in venture capital (VC) expenditure and market inflation. VCs are now holding off on investing until treatments are further advanced in the trial process, which presents issues for all businesses, but especially small and medium-sized companies. Meanwhile, talent remains pricey and grows more competitive.
As a result of these increasingly challenging macroeconomic conditions, more businesses are expanding contingent workforce initiatives to generate cost reductions while maintaining momentum on new innovations and technology. Here’s a quick look at how life sciences organizations can take a more strategic approach to workforce management that yields a more skilled workforce, increased cost savings and greater innovation.
Expanding Your Skills Inventory
Consistently driving advancements in the realm of life sciences requires ever-evolving skill sets. As strategic businesses are looking for new opportunities to expand their skills inventory, many are evolving their approach to hiring and moving away from an emphasis on specific job titles and degrees.
Hiring for specific skills rather than education or experience enables life sciences organizations to more precisely fill talent gaps, without the cost premium charged by expensive degrees that are often irrelevant for the position. Skills-based hiring can also contribute to DE&I and diversity hiring initiatives, as it often opens up a much a wider pool of available diverse talent. (Learn how you can leverage talent intel to reach your organization’s DE&I goals)
Additionally, applying skills-based hiring to the contingent workforce can drive greater flexibility and agility in the face of uncertainty around funding and advancement of trials. Rather than committing the resources to adding newer technical skill sets to their full-time staff, bio-enterprises can hire highly qualified people on a contingent basis and then assess the longer-term need for these skills.
But before doing any outside hiring, businesses must first understand what skills they already have in-house. As part of Magnit Strategic Advisory services, we have created advanced technology that ingests job catalogs from clients and uses AI and machine learning along with parsing techniques to identify skills within descriptions. This enables businesses to undertake detailed talent inventories and assessments of their existing full-time employees and contingent workers. Learn more in our solution brief.
Increasing Cost Savings
Expanding access to external talent pools is critical to overcoming skills shortages, but what if you could address some talent gaps from within your existing workforce? Looking for skills in-house can reveal opportunities for redeploying contingent workers to fill gaps at a lower cost than hiring new talent outside the organization.
By leveraging advanced analytics and skills mapping to accurately match existing workers with open job roles, companies can also reduce expenses from onboarding, off-boarding and retraining costs. Furthermore, a skills-based approach can better enable businesses to identify professional development opportunities for employees, which can improve the overall worker experience and lower costly turnover.
Partnering with a vendor-neutral Managed Service Provider (MSP) will also significantly contribute to cost savings, since it ensures all staffing agencies are treated equally and creates a competitive talent sourcing environment. (Learn more about choosing an MSP to drive success). By combining these strategies along with best practices for retention, coupled with market rate intelligence, life science organizations can find creative solutions to drive cost savings in a challenging marketplace.
Accelerating Innovation
Drug trails are increasingly becoming more hybrid and less centralized in order to enhance efficiency, data collection, patient recruitment, and overall trial flexibility, and this shift can be a great opportunity for life science companies. They now have more leeway in exactly how they bring new medications to market, as well as how they choose to set up their workforces to support them. Organizations can also collaborate with pharmaceutical clients to perform trials, allowing them to streamline their own staffing.
Acquiring more funding will continue to be a challenge for the life science industry. But by utilizing the full power of the contingent workforce to accelerate innovation, implementing a skills-based hiring approach, and choosing the right strategic partners, life science companies can continue to reduce costs, remain flexible and spark innovation for the future.
See how contingent talent can optimize your organization’s success in our quick start guide.
Disclaimer: The content in this blog post is for informational purposes only and cannot be construed as specific legal advice or as a substitute for legal advice. The blog post reflects the opinion of Magnit and is not to be construed as legal solutions and positions. Contact an attorney for specific advice and guidance for specific issues or questions.