Senior Vice President Discovery Biology – India’s one of the top 5 Pharma Major

Situation

One of the India’s top 5 Pharma Major has shared a mandate to HumaQuest Team to source and place a position as Senior Vice President – Discovery Biology for its R&D and drug development unit. This position was vacant for more than 6 months and company has tried all major Consulting players, but they couldn’t fulfill this role. Finally, they shared the same with Team HumaQuest. .

Task

The candidate should have more than 20 years’ experience in Biologics research and should have Post Doc in Life sciences and should spend at least 15 years in US /Europe in leading R&D based innovative pharmaceutical company in Leadership role.

Action

We, first read the requirement and had a discussion with TA lead to understand the key expectation from this role. Then we started mapping the competition and identified talents in similar capacity in Indian Pharma space however since the skill set and Biologics research in India is minimal, we initially could map and reach out through our network to 4-5 such Senior leadership level people in India, approached them through a network as their profile is not available in portal or any other platform and R&D people are also introvert and their profile also, they keep confidential many often. With lot of difficulties, we finally could establish contact, discuss profile and share JD and take their consent but with our utter surprise client informed us that they don’t want anyone who is currently in India, but they need someone who has 10-15 years exp in working in abroad in Biologics R&D space. So, we got all these profiles rejected.

We never gave up and finally, we could reach out two Leadership level resources in US through some of our CXO level connections through networking and finally after series of conversation, we could motivate them and bring back to India as they were Indian but US citizens.