Big pharma needed a non-pharma cutting edge tech guru

One of the world’s largest pharmaceuticals wished to make their organization more nimble and progressive. To help achieve this, they required someone with a tech company/non-pharma background and superior experience driving innovation. This person would ideally come from a company like PayPal, Apple, Google, etc, and would work cross-functionally within the organization to identify ways to change processes, leverage technology, and achieve greater efficiencies in the business.

We needed to identify a top tier candidate willing to change career path and product domain to enter the healthcare arena. Non-innovative company candidates would not be acceptable as the client was precise about the kind of company they’d consider candidates from. There was a very small candidate pool as a result.

In addition, all candidates expressed a strong preference to meet the business leader as a first step in the interview process in order to gain a full perspective on the role. The client, however, required an HR meeting at the front end of the interview process and would not modify their process. Ultimately the search hinged on both identifying the right candidates and pitching the opportunity in a way that would elicit strong curiosity and interest to the point where top candidates in their field would consider a role completely outside their sphere of experience and potentially risky to their career progression.

Although our work covered a limited cross-section of the market due to the specifications, we identified 4 candidates worth introduction. Of the qualified candidates in the market, only these 4 were open to consider a career change and each of them we successfully persuaded to consider the role.

The successful candidate had worked at Facebook and precisely met the client’s idea of what the role required. Despite 2 competing offers each of which was more in line with the candidate’s career path and comfort zone, the candidate opted for the challenge represented by our client’s role.