How to Attract the Best Life Science Marketing Talent
When you are hiring someone for your life science marketing team, do you want the best talent currently available (looking), or the best talent possible? Because the top performers aren't always looking to change jobs.
To find them, you need to understand what motivates them. And more importantly, you need to show that in a job description that stands apart from the crowd.
Harrison Wright talked to me about how to market your jobs to marketers. Not surprisingly, differentiation is key. So why do all job descriptions sound the same?
In this episode, Harrison explains:
Why you need to differentiate your job descriptions
How to use first principles to write a "performance profile" that makes top performers raise their hand
Why years of experience is not a good criterion for qualification
How little things can add up to a job that is 30% more attractive
About My Guest
Harrison Wright is the founder of Affinity Biotechnology where he helps life science companies build world class sales and marketing teams.
the Transcript
This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.
Chris: My guest today is Harrison Wright, the founder of Affinity Biotechnology where he helps life science companies build world class sales and marketing teams. Harrison, welcome to the podcast.
Harrison: Thanks Chris, and thanks for having me today. It’s really good to be here.
Chris: My pleasure, I think this is going to be really helpful for everybody. Today we’re going to talk about a marketing method to attract better marketers to your team, which I think is interesting. I have had this challenge as well, creating job descriptions that get exactly the people you want. So Harrison tell me about the problem we’re trying to solve. What is the challenge we need to overcome when we’re looking to attract top talent?
Harrison: You know the problem takes a lot of forms, Chris, really it all comes down to differentiation, or more accurately, lack of differentiation. It manifests in various ways, you’ve no doubt seen this yourself in the past, but at large, brand name companies tend to result in leaders getting a huge influx of applications to their jobs, most of which either aren’t relevant or they aren’t good enough, or they aren’t fit or–actually there’s just so much noise there, that it’s difficult to tell who is or isn’t a fit, because all you’ve got to go on is one out 300 resume sometimes.
In small companies it often tends to be the case, they just get no interest at all or they get a little bit of interest. But it’s largely a wasted effort, so that’s how it tends to manifest. If we look at why this is the case, just going back in time a little bit, there was a time when everyone was saying the internet was going to change hiring. It’s going to change recruiting. And you have Monster.com and Jobsite and all sorts of job boards. We’ll never struggle to find candidates ever again, because they are right here on this job board. It will be nirvana.
What actually happened was that all you got was loads and loads of noise because there’s no barrier to entry to apply to a job anymore. All you have to do is say, “Oh yeah that looks interesting, click”. I know that a company has to do is go, ” Oh we’ll just stick this out here, and we’ll see what happens with loads of candidates.” That noise has created so many problems that you see, not just in the job description and application process, but for example, when I was doing this years ago, when LinkedIn was quite new, you found some people that were quick takers on LinkedIn, and some people have didn’t have a LinkedIn profile yet.
The people that had LinkedIn profiles were getting approached all the time. So they were very hard to get hold of. They wouldn’t necessarily reply to your messages very often, but if you went to headhunt somebody who wasn’t on LinkedIn, chances are it rarely ever happened to them, so they always were very, very receptive, like, “Wow, I’ve been headhunted. That’s amazing.” The more somebody gets approached the more noise there is when it comes to jobs hiring, recruiting, the less receptive they are to that message, because they’ve heard it all before.
If we relate this back to job descriptions what we see is, you take any company’s job description and largely, they all look the same. It’s a case of, ‘we need somebody with this many years of experience in this field, to do this.’ And this will usually be a long list of responsibilities, that even if you sit and read it for five minutes, you can’t actually, necessarily figure out what the job is. And then with some of them you might have a little section on the end where they sell the company, which in many cases, just, “We’re a dynamic forward thinking organization who embraces this, that and the other.” So, the problem is lack of differentiation.
Chris: A question just popped up, so I’ll ask it, do small companies get fewer applicants than larger companies? You hinted at that, I’m not sure if that’s relevant or not, but I’m just curious. Is there a challenge for smaller companies to get as many applicants as a more well-known company?
Harrison: Yeah, they do. Because if you look at a Fisher or a Covance or any company like that, lots of people will keep an eye on their jobs or apply for their jobs. But just because it’s Thermo Fisher or Covance. It doesn’t necessarily mean that those applications are going to be good and relevant, but they get them. So from a large company perspective, the differentiation challenge for them is to make sure they’re getting the right people interested. For a small company, sometimes that’s a challenge too, but a lot of the time, it’s getting people to apply at all.
Chris: Right.
Harrison: And that’s the same method we’re going to talk about. A larger company can use to greatly refine the people that are getting interested in their roles and a small company can use to get people that are actually gradable. They do regardless of whether they have a big brand in the market or not.
Chris: How do you recommend companies differentiate themselves. How should they be looking to attract talent differently than what they’re currently doing?
Harrison: As it relates to job description, and some people are going to listen to this and think, ” That’s crazy, I’ve never heard this before. That’s a really bizarre idea.” But the idea is, when we call it a performance profile, you take out all the stuff that’s in there about the years of experience, the responsibilities, the duties, and so on, and you frame it in terms of the work that actually needs to be done. The performance goals that need to be achieved, the projects that need to be executed. It might look something along the lines of, for a product marketing manager, we need somebody to orchestrate the launch of X product, and this will take the form of XYZ over this time frame. We need somebody to deliver this project, and we need somebody to solve this challenge. And everything else feeds into that, rather than we need somebody with five to seven years’ experience in product management and we need somebody who’s worked with X, Y and Z product.
The reason to do it that way is that, it’s actually two-fold from a marketing perspective. People often say to me when I first contact them. They say, “Well, Harrison we need to put five to seven years’ experience on that, we need to put these duties on that because, how do we know if this person is qualified? We need to make sure the right people are actually going to apply for our jobs”. My response to that is, “Well, you do but you’re doing it this way now, but are the right people applying for your jobs?”, maybe a few, but the vast majority of them are not the right people.
The reason to do this way, is that it solves two problems at once. On the one hand, if we actually look at what drives people that exceptional in what they do, the top talent, or however you describe that term, what really drives them is the work itself. It’s the challenge, the opportunity, the development they are going to get, the reward they’re going to get from executing that work well. Being recognized for it, and how it’s going to help them in the future. I’m sure you probably saw that same motivation in yourself, Chris, when you were an employee yourself.
Chris: Yeah, Sure. You’d rather think about a project and a goal rather than a list of skills that you’re going to apply in some unknown way. Honestly in my experience looking at job descriptions, for jobs that I’ve applied for or not, I see this all the time, the list is so long and you’re thinking, “What really is the priority, are they going to get all that stuff done, or are they just looking for every possible thing they might ever need?”
Harrison: Exactly. And that’s the point really, is that, what you see a lot of companies do these days as they notice there’s a huge competition for talented people now. You see this particularly with the big tech giants. But also a lot of other firms. They talk about the great company culture and benefits they have. They will put in there about how, “We have great team nights out every month. So we have a ‘work hard, play hard’ culture. We have a pool table and a dart board and a breakroom and you can get beer on a Friday afternoon in the office”. I look at this stuff and I think, Yeah, that’s all great, but does anybody really, who wants to spend 40, 50, 60 hours of their life every week, maybe more to do something they don’t like, just so they can have a beer in the office at 4 o’clock on a Friday? You know, this isn’t the stuff that really drives people. And if it is, then you’ve got a problem there.
So why not take the opportunity to appeal to them through the actual work, the stuff that they need to do. Which means you are going to get people who really enjoy their work. You’re going to get people who are driven by the work itself as the best people tend to be. And you can simultaneously use that as a qualification tool. Because you don’t need to specify a number of years’ experience, or experience with a certain product or whatever to qualify a person or to make sure that they are capable of doing the job. That can better be achieved through performance objectives. By the same token you can use the performance objectives to market the job. So, it’s really a win-win for everybody when it’s put in that way.
Chris: Right. Why do you think companies currently right job descriptions the way they do, and what kind of candidates do they end up with as a result?
Harrison: There’s a few reasons I think why they do it they way it is, and one of them, may be its biggest is that, by and large why does anybody do what they do? You get a smell percentage of people in any field that look at things from their own perspective and figure out a new way of doing things. By and large, most what we do because our predecessors did it that way. Unless something comes along to disrupt the status quo, and then everybody follows the new person. But why do so many business people sit in the office and make a hundred cold calls a day selling products? Is it because its the best way of doing? No. But it’s the only way they know, it’s what they were taught to do it. I think its largely true with job descriptions. If we look 30, 40, 50 years ago, this sort of approach worked, because there was a lot less noise in hiring, people didn’t change jobs very often, the culture was different and it was expected that you were grateful to have a job and the onus was on the employee to make himself worthy of the company, whereas it is much the other way around now. Companies have to compete a lot more and they have to do a lot more to be appealing. But there is also a lot less job search activity out there, and a lot of jobs that are less complicated than they are now, which means that using skills and years of experience to qualify them could actually work a lot better than it does today. So there’s that tradition there and that tradition is just simply kept up to a place where it doesn’t belong anymore. So that’s one reason. But you also, again going back to the larger corporates, a lot of companies use these Applicant Tracking Systems, Taleo and the like, I’m sure you’re familiar with them.
Chris: Yeah.
Harrison: Yeah. They need to feed their keywords into there so they go into job descriptions, and then they get these applications through, when they come to the other side of Taleo with the number of times the keywords appear and so on. It’s just a big key word filtering exercise.
The problem you’ve got is what they’re doing is they’re casting a wide net, but they’re not necessarily casting the right net. The way I’d liken it to… imagine if Bio-Rad decided to advertise in the middle of Super Bowl. Sure, they’d cast a wide net, but would that actually give them many benefits? Would there be people that would actually buy things from Bio-Rad? And the same here, what you really want to do, is rather than encouraging everybody in the world to apply, what you want to do is to focus it towards the people you really want to apply.
The other side of this is that by and large, when you write these cookie cutter job descriptions that look same as each other, if people do apply to that, they’re largely going to be people who do need a job or maybe sometimes they’re even desperate for a job, but if we look for the best people, yeah, occasionally they’ll look for a job. Sometimes. But most of the time they don’t need to. They are happy where they are, or if they do move on, it’s because somebody came to them with a job. Now, how are we gonna capture those people?
And that’s through differentiation. And what better way to differentiate than appealing to what really matters to them – the challenge, the opportunity, the progression and so on. I know now I’ve diverted quite a bit from your original question Chris, but I think largely it’s just because of tradition, and also because- well mostly people don’t really think about it. It’s just how things are done. They don’t actually realize there is a better way.
Chris: I think you did a good job of describing how the world has changed and how people look for jobs and the competitive market and so on are different and of course even the type of jobs people do. I mean- I’m doing a job that didn’t exist when I was in college, so there is a large part of it right there and I think it’s very smart for people to think about. And then the other thing that I really like that you said is, “How do you attract the people that aren’t really looking for jobs?” Because the people that might be really good at what they’re doing could probably only be pulled away by luring them with a more attractive project. Something- because they’re good at what they do. They’re happy, They’re probably successful on their job and they’re not out looking for employment. But they’re always, if you’re a top performer, looking for a more interesting challenge. So writing your job description in a way that would attract some of those, seems very smart to me.
Harrison: Yeah. You’re absolutely right. And you bring up something there that is quite important there actually which is, that this pulls through to the remainder of the process. So, you know, in my earlier years in recruiting quite often, I didn’t even bother with writing job adverts because, the way we went to recruit people was always through getting on a phone to them. More commonly in this day in age we use email marketing methods, but the principle’s the same. We were looking for people who weren’t looking for jobs, so quite often I used to not bother writing an advert.
But actually, there is a great reason to do so because even if the people you hire didn’t apply for the advert, which is often the case, even for the companies on their hiring sprees, they fill a lot of their jobs through networks and so on. It serves as a reference point and quite often I find that when people are hiring, they go out to look for somebody, but they’ve never really sat and thought about what the work is and what they have to offer and the real details of that and how they can be applied to a person and their wants and needs. For the person writing it, it helps to clarify that a great deal initially. But it also enables you to articulate that stretch, that better project to the individual. So we always advise our clients that when putting an offer to a person, they should offer them something that’s measurably a 30% improvement on what they’re doing right now.
When I first talk about that concept to people, they always thought, “I can’t afford to give them a 30% pay raise, that’s insane.” But I’m not talking about in terms of money, I’m talking about the responsibilities. If they’re a sales person it might be the size of their territory, or the size of the team they’re managing, it might be the actual task they are taking on, it might be in future potential or some form of promotion.
But if you can measurably put to somebody a 30% better prospect than what they already have, it’s very hard for them to say no to that, and make them see in crystal clear terms. And what this allows you to do, because you’re defining everything in such a quantifiable terms in the first place, hopefully you are understanding in quantifiable terms what the person is doing now, you can use those as reference points, and then show them how they are getting a bigger project and better deal and actually, going back to small companies again, it’s quite often the case that they don’t hire very often.
They’re not very accustomed to marketing or selling their vacancies to people. Well you put yourself in the candidate’s shoes. They might see an advert for something “Content Manger position, I’m already a Content Manager, what do I need that for?” Nobody really want to make a sideways move even though- unless they’re particularly unhappy where they are right now, but by the same token, companies always want to hire people who are confident in the job right now.
So how do you get that differentiation? Well, if you can quantify this things, a few small things here and there, bigger territory of a sales person, bigger remit, bigger team, more upward mobility, it doesn’t take many small changes to provide something to somebody, that actually, is a pretty compelling progression for them, even if it does’t look like it on face value. There is absolutely an application there as well.
Chris: I like it. You talked about writing a job description, or not a job description, a performance profile specifically, and say, “We’re setting out to launch two new products in the next year and we need someone to manage the inbound and outbound marketing for this and share other things that we want this person to achieve.” Obviously most of those are short to medium term goals and then of course your job might evolve from there, but it does give you a flavor of what you’re looking for. Do companies fear giving away elements of their plans and their goals with this method? And how do they get around that?
Harrison: It’s a good question, Chris actually. Occasionally there can be some reticence I’ve found, but at the end of the day what matters is the principle. If you’re interviewing somebody, and you’re considering whether or not to hire them, if you’re going to use this process properly, you need to figure out whether they’re capable of whatever their performance objectives are and their specific form. But if you’re using it for marketing purposes, there’s absolutely no reason why you couldn’t just make it slightly vague, and it doesn’t give away anything confidential but it still retains the essence of what you’re trying to convey.
Chris: What kind of results have you seen with this approach? Can you give us some examples?
Harrison: Yeah. I have to say pretty incredible results actually. Since we’ve adopted this process, we’ve seen typically for any given job, 60% increase in applications. But more so than that, and bear in mind, naturally this is going to be subjective judgement, but in terms of the number of top 20% talent as we would define it, recruited, that’s been anywhere between 100 to 400 percent increase in the number of those candidates recruited per vacancy depending on the role.
Chris: Nice. So then obviously the benefit to the employer is having a wider choice of finding exactly the right person they need, and even more likely to find an even better person than what they would have found before, especially if you’re getting four times as many people who are in that top 20%.
Harrison: Absolutely. This is less statistical, more anecdotal, but what I see quite a lot of as well and you never use to see doing things the old way, is I can just…maybe there is a little bit of an interest in hearniong more from somebody, I can just send them an excerpt of the formal profile. And they would come back to me and say, “I wasn’t actually looking but this sounds actually amazing, I need to look at this.”
The only way to get that- the only way we used to get that kind of interest from somebody who wasn’t necessarily looking was, if we had a lengthy conversation, I would explain these kinds of things to them, or they’ve met with the company and the company had a done a really good job of conveying this information. But in this format, it’s right there on the page, you know.
I think the best application of that is for firms that don’t necessarily have a large brand in the market where they can’t afford to pay particularly high salaries, but they can massively differentiate by hiring this way. Without spending any extra money. This is something you can implement in a day. So I think is a huge overlooked opportunity for a lot of firms.
Chris: I like the phrase, ‘You can implement in a day’. For other reasons, that resonates with me, and I just like the whole idea. So many things that we make way more complicated than they need to be, and honestly a day of thought around many problems, a focused thought can actually get rid of these things, and then you’re on your way. It its free like you say to write- it costs just as much to write a good job description as it does to write a crappy one.
Harrison: That’s exactly it. You mentioned about first principles earlier, Chris, and that’s absolutely what it is, and from the perspective of hiring, this is really just the case of getting the right foundation in place before you do anything else. I have seen it in pretty much any field you can imagine. You tend to get 80% of you results from the 20% of the work you do upfront, the ground work. And when you get this ground work right, everything else is so much easier. Both from the attracting people side, for getting your offers accepted side, and down the line you can even use it as a management tool. So this can serve as template for your performance reviews and everything else.
So it’s actually quite difficult for me to explain what I mean, but if you look at things like when we are talking about how job descriptions often have five to seven years’ experience on this. That’s not starting from first principles because generally speaking, somebody down the line has made an assumption that, “Well, I guess if we have people that have at least five to seven years’ experience they can probably do the job”.
That’s not the starting point. they didn’t look from the ground up and say, “How can we identify who can do this job?” There’s every possibility that you can find somebody with three to four years’ experience could do just as good a job. So this is all about looking from the ground up. What is the right principle to base this selection off of and then building up on it.
Chris: Yeah. I love that five to seven years thing. Honestly, when you look at these job descriptions and I’m thinking, “If I’ve been doing this for five to seven years, then why would I want to move. Why would I want that job again?” Either I’m content and I’m going to stay in the job I have forever, or I’m looking for something new. But if I have to have five to seven to move to that job and do it for another five to seven, I’m not the person you’re looking for.
Harrison: Exactly. You know I digress, but there is meme that goes around in the IT world. Because quite often you get IT recruiters who put out jobs needing five to seven years’ experience and the technology has only existed for two to three, that’s quite funny.
Chris: All right. Harrison this has been a really interesting conversation. I think its going to be really helpful to all of my audience of marketers or even sales people to rethink how they’re trying to build their teams. And I love the first principles thing about, “What do we really need on our team to take whatever initiatives we’re working on and make them go faster and better and so on. Where can people find out more about you and what you’re doing?
Harrison: There’s a couple of routes really, you can find me on LinkedIn, Harrison Wright, or you can look on our website which is www.affinitybiotechnology.com. You’re welcome to email me as well at mailto:mhwright@affinitybiotechnology.com. I’ll be more than happy to help out.
Chris: Okay. Well as always, I will put all those links in the show notes, if you want to get in touch with Harrison, you’ll know where to find him. Thank you once again Harrison, for a fantastic conversation.
Harrison: Chris, you’re more than welcome. Thanks again for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
Chris: My pleasure too. Bye-bye.
Harrison: Bye.
