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Creating a new medical product in the USA is a laborious, expensive venture with a highly unfavorable likelihood of success. For example, if a new medication advances to clinical trials, there is a 90% chance of its not being approved by the Food and Drug Association (Papapetropoulos and Szabo, 2018). Products that do obtain sanction have been in development for about a decade. The cost of advancing to product approval is increasing, with some studies indicating the bioscience industry will have to spend an average of $16 billion per new product by the year 2043 (Seyhan and Carini, 2019). Likewise, medical marketing has expanded to an almost $30 billion annual expenditure for prescription drugs, disease awareness, health services, and laboratory tests (Schwartz and Woloshin, 2019).
The life science industries are anomalous. No other business affects whether people might live or die, or how quickly they can recover from an illness or injury. Because no other trade is under such intense pressure to innovate expeditiously, an understanding of the unique employment needs is necessary. Many life science leaders have a professional degree in the sciences. It is common to see PhDs and MDs as corporate officers (Bauer and Cohen, 2012). Yet success in this high-risk, high-reward industry requires a rare mix of business acumen, technical expertise, and an interpersonal style that will mesh with the company’s culture. New recruits must work within the goals, resources, and schedules of experimental science methodology. Additionally, the importance of excellent teamwork to the success of innovation is well documented (Hoegl and Gemuenden, 2001). Decisions about talent recruitment are an essential part of overall organizational strategy (Hatum and Preve, 2015).
Enlisting new employees is a vital part of spurring commercial success for biotech and pharmaceutical companies. The past forty years have established recruitment as a tool for improving aspects of organizational operations such as selection, onboarding, creating effective cultures, and job performance (Yu and Cable, 2014). However, the research on recruitment can also be characterized as too narrowly focused on a small segment of the labor market (new university graduates) and scholars continue to study attitudes more frequently than actual behaviors (Rynes, et al., 2014). These foci leave a gap in the recruitment literature in terms of addressing organizational-level outcomes. Further, strategic recruitment differs from traditional viewpoints by highlighting the assets found in the collective, individual and team characteristics that must be leveraged for effective project execution (Ployhart, et al., 2014). The extant recruitment research has not fully explored many of the factors that might accelerate sustained competitive advantage (Phillips and Gully, 2015).
Augmenting the literature on recruiting, human capital resources theory proposes that business performance is enhanced when organizations attract, select, and retain the most talented professionals who can align with company’s mission and objectives (Ployhart and Moliterno, 2011). Scholarship on human capital focuses on the aggregate value of individually contributed skill sets. Organizational cultures consisting of individuals with diverse experiences and backgrounds have proven beneficial in knowledge-intensive businesses (Jøranli, 2018). Meta-analyses regarding the value of human capital have concluded that organizations must acquire the best and the brightest employees to boost their chances of profitability (Crook, et al., 2011).