‘Innovation is the key to solve such problems’

How is the manpower crunch adversely affecting pharmaceutical industry’s success story in India? Can you explain with some statistics?

Supriya Dikshit

The pharma industry in India is going through accelerated growth, high profile acquisitions. Traditional business models are losing differentiation and new opportunities and definitions are getting created. MNC’s are having great plans for India and are contemplating having expatriates based in India, as they see a gap in competency of the local talent to take on this exponential growth. Returnee Indians are been considered for most of these roles. However, one has not seen the growth plans being diminished due to manpower crunch, in fact there are innovative ways of addressing this issue and many companies are doing so. Shortage of talent on the leadership as well as technical and research and development (R&D) side affects the industry. Historically, people have moved within the industry and not come from other industries and therefore this has led to talent benchmark not being upgraded. Global pharma companies until recently did not focus on R&D and technology as much as Indian companies did. That is changing slowly.

Job switching is becoming a common trend across sectors, including pharma. Are these similar to those faced by the other industries?

According to me it is more or less the same. Opportunities are increasing, and also, newer/ sunrise industries and sectors are growing. Then there is also the entrepreneurial boom that is picking up within the sector.

Which methods should the management enforce to retain talented and skilled manpower?

I believe that management can retain their skilled manpower by enforcing opportunities, challenges, learning, growth as well as a good rewards and wealth creation model.

Tell us about DHR’s contribution to the Indian pharma industry?

DHR has a tremendous contribution to the pharma industry. In India, the experience has largely been on senior leadership teams with early stage as well as established companies in the life sciences and healthcare industry. We have delivered top executive talent in support of the numerous innovator companies, as well as the generics manufacturers, and have worked across geographies on key technical searches across R&D, clinical operations, regulatory affairs, sales and marketing, SCM, manufacturing, and strategy development in the pharma and devices space. DHR has a strong presence in the Asia Pacific region. DHR believes in client–centric partnership delivering customised solutions and it is a collaborative firm.

Being a consultant of DHR, what ethical standards do you suggest to your clients?

As a global firm, we have high level of values and ethics. This is exactly what we suggest our clients who are our business partners—to be transparent, high level of corporate governance benchmark, high level of integrity etc. We have senior candidates who ask us questions especially about culture, values, business practices of the prospective company.

Which sectors are facing large amount of talent crunch and why?

Leadership talent across sectors is in short supply and so is talent with global experience. As more and more Indian companies grow rapidly both organically and inorganically the demand for leadership talent is far outstripping supply from within the organisation. Also, as organisations expand their footprint in different parts of the globe they require talent with understanding of the local markets. The same is the case for MNC’s expanding into India where the talent focus for MNC’s is skills with matrix reporting, high influencing skills and talent who has worked in cross geographic environment. In the recent past a number of new companies and new sectors have emerged, telecom for example. The companies are forced to hire talent from existing sectors into the new sectors and not necessarily the best fit but deemed most eligible and available candidates, who could be younger than the ideal benchmark candidates. India is also emerging as a low cost sourcing hub for a number of sectors like automobiles, consumer durables, FMCG products, etc. India is also fast emerging as the R&D centre with companies increasingly looking at it for their innovation and product development. Especially for a specialist role, one needs to go out and seek talent with global experience which may not be always available. Additionally this demand supply gap seems to be evident across sectors leading to more and more cross- sector migration. This demand is more evident in sectors such as automobile, steel, infrastructure, pharma, finance, legal, FMCG etc.

How difficult do you find retaining valuable employees? How disastrous is it if they switch to your competitors?

It is tough to retain stars and valued executives as they are usually in high demand and are chased by very different sets of companies. These executives also need to be kept challenged and busy with different sets of opportunities. If your key executives move to competition, then you run the risk of them walking away with some of your key clients. However, companies across sectors do impose non-compete clauses in employment contracts with key executives. Some sectors have also seen competing companies actually having ‘no-poach’ agreements in place among themselves.

What suggestions do you want to put forward to an organisation when retaining becomes a problem?

The most important aspect is to keep the employees interested in what they do, develop a strong succession planning/talent development programme in the organisation. It is also important to determine critical competencies and experiment novel structures and roles within the company.

With the advent of the product patent era, R&D is a very crucial domain. What do you suggest to protect the R&D staff from being poached by competitors?

To retain the R&D team is very important from the point of view of the organisation. It requires continuous motivation. Innovation is the key to solve such problems. Customised value proposition – what attracts mid–level/ R&D talent may be different from business leadership.

Tell us about DHR’s global presence?

DHR International, a global executive search firm is ranked No. 1 in geographic coverage with offices in over 50 locations globally. Our global headquarters is in Chicago, US. We have close to 300 consultants globally. Our Asia Pacific headquarters is in Hong Kong and we have around 12 offices in the region.

What kind of hike do you foresee in the pharma industry by 2015? How will it help resolve the manpower crunch?

Cannot predict hikes, as they can be up and down since the times we are in are volatile from a business perspective. Industry average hike this year was between 10 – 15 per cent.

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