Life Sciences Following from my recent post Recruitment differences in Health and Science last week I was invited to talk in Barcelona at the Personal España fair and exhibition about the differences that specialist recruiters have compared to generalists.

Basically I can identify three characteristics: consultants must have previous experience in the field, they understand and speak the language of clients and candidates and they also keep updated on the latest developments in the various segments of the industry. In short, both parts perceive that the consultant is “one of them”. This is not unique to Life Sciences; it happens the same with Finance, IT, etc.

In parallel, I was preparing a .ppt (with the help of Javier de Inocencio) presentation for the Life Sciences practice of my network Penrhyn International and had to summarize the advantages of these characteristics: Penrhyn-life-sciences-practice-presentation

1) A specialist recruiter can enrich the briefing with the client and even offer some benchmarking from the very beginning of the search.

2) Knows what target-companies to approach and whose not: it is more efficient. Complementary to this, can identify “lateral candidates”, the non obvious, sometimes temporarily in Consultancy, Services, another country, another function, etc.

3) Gets spontaneous referencing that is extremely valuable along the project.

4) Can focus the personal interviews on real key issues, avoiding generalizations and clichés.

5) When the practice consultants have complementary backgrounds and are based in different locations, they can also offer a true “global view” of the sector.