The war for talents is about to begin. Are you ready?
Companies that operate in the sector of medical engineering and life science face a huge challenge: Finding and keeping the right people. But are the leaders in your company already aware that skilled employees are the most vital resource in the near future and treat it accordingly?
Let us assume that you are the captain of a ship and your vessel has just hit ground. Water is getting in and you are looking for a solution: you could either use pumps to get rid of the entering water or simply seal the leakage. It is obvious that the first approach doesn’t really solve the problem, especially if the capacity of the pumps is slower than the amount of water that gets in. The management and HR departments of medical engineering and life science companies face a similar situation. Their challenge lies in recruiting enough capable engineers and physicists to satisfy their growing demand and to replace the usual fluctuation. They turn to Executive Search companies like us and try to improve their recruitment procedures. But better recruitment is comparable to the pumps on a leaking ship. It simply does not solve the problem if too many skilled people are leaving the company or if the number of available talents is decreasing constantly.
Companies that face a challenging environment when it comes to recruiting skilled employees should rather take a holistic approach to human resource management. Figuratively speaking, to seal the leak means to enhance the recruitment process and convince the right people to join your company, to develop talented employees that you already have and last but not least to ensure that both groups find the best environment in your company and stay there for the longest time possible. The last aspect goes way beyond any recruitment measures and aims right at the heart of your corporate culture and leadership. Do your managers know that skilled and motivated employees are the most vital resource and that your company cannot afford to waste it by bad leadership?
I meet top managers and executives of medical engineering and life science companies on a regular basis. They keep telling me that they try to fill 60 to 80 vacancies at any given time, sometimes even up to 150 vacancies in larger companies. These companies are not searching for “anybody” but very skilled people such as engineers and physicists with a certain experience in their profession. This lack of experts poses a serious threat to the growth of their companies. Some of them are even thinking about moving parts of their business to countries outside Germany to improve their chances for further growth. Therefore, they turn to Executive Search and recruitment companies in order to fill the gaps. But, it is obvious that even if every company is increasing its efforts to find and recruit the right people, the total number of available talents does not rise.
Companies, not only in the highly competitive sectors of medical engineering and life science, have quite an arsenal of suitable weapons at their disposal to win the war for talents. It is the job of any manager to make proper use of them. The good news is, that one company's gain does not mean another company's loss. Because, a lot of these measures aim at increasing the pond of talents rather than drying it up for ones own sake.