Chief Scientific Officer for a Growing Opthalmic, Inhalation & ENT Pharmaceutical Company

Our client is a niche pharmaceutical company with state-of-the art sterile manufacturing facilities. Heavy investments were made in their manufacturing plants and R&D centre along with a team of coveted chemists and scientists. They were looking to identify several members of their executive leadership team and board. One of these roles was for a Chief Scientific Officer. This individual was expected to drive several critical processes including formulation development, clinical trials and technology transfer.

There were a number of challenges to finding the right candidate for this role. First, the target pool of candidates was small given the academic qualifications and career track record required to be a Chief Scientific Officer. These executives were in high demand in the market and convincing someone to change the status quo was going to be a challenge. Secondly, the company was very small relative to its more established peers and did not have much of a brand awareness within the potential pool of candidates. It developed products in niche therapeutic areas and perhaps unjustly suffered from poor market perception of its Managing Director and the organization. Identifying and attracting the right candidate for our client was going to be difficult, so the company’s board decided to seek the assitance of Ray & Berndtson to help them fill this critical role which was vacant for close to one year.

On getting a brief for the mandate, our team decided to first do some fact finding to understand current market perceptions of the company and its Managing Director. We also toured its greenfield manufacturing plant to get a sense of the quality of its facilities, that we believed would be an important ingredient in attracting the right candidate. We were able to conclude that several of the market perceptions about the company were unfounded. On the contrary, we were able to collect sufficient evidence to build an appealing story to scientist candidates who we understood from similar such experiences to always be interested in knowing about a company’s research capabilities. With this information, we reached out to these candidates in the market.

After a comprehensive shortlisting process, three candidates were interviewed by the Managing Director. One was selected to be offered the role, but after a few days, the client decided to hold off on making the offer and made the offer to another candidate from an internal reference. While we expected our shortlisted candidate to be made the offer, we accepted the client’s decision. Three months later, the vacancy re-opened due to some external development at which time our team presented 3 additional and qualified candidates within a two day timeframe. One candidate was selected and made an offer. Following a brief negotiation process, the candidate accepted the offer and joined the company three months later. In the year since, the candidate has been successful in his role and recently launched a new R&D facility for the company that is expected to contribute to the company’s future growth.