Indian pharma is facing for significant rise in the demand for leadership talent. This is going by the capability of this sector to double its revenue from $65 billion in 2024 to $130 billion by 2030.
Rahul Shah, co-founder & director, WalkWater Talent Advisors, said, “As the industry grows there will be significant rise in the demand for leadership talent. While there is a huge demand for critical talent in the sector, the competent pool remains limited, and organizations continue to face challenges in attracting these individuals”.
The huge talent gap is evident in the API (active pharmaceutical ingredient) industry for commercial- business development leadership. Here, candidates with experience, leadership and networking with global companies across regulated markets are desired. Similarly in pharma formulations, hiring leaders for regulatory affairs continues to be a big challenge, he added.
In this scenario, as one of India’s fastest growing Executive Search and Talent Advisory Company, WalkWater worked with a cross section of clients across formulations, API, CROs, diagnostics, life sciences and healthcare sectors. “We specialize in analysing the challenges and help companies by providing talent related competition benchmarking data to help our clients plan their talent strategies better and more effectively,” Shah told Pharmabiz.
Pharma organizations are increasingly seeing the value and benefit of working with executive search firms who bring strong domain understanding of this sector. Our services help the pharma companies enable key decisions on talent acquisition, retention and critical resource planning. The testimony of this is repeat customers even as we continue to partner with some of the largest players in this industry. We also work with marquee PE & VC firms helping their portfolio companies in the pharma sector to build their leadership teams, he said.
Though the talent related challenges among these sectors remain similar, the dynamics of hiring leaders & expectations differ from industry to industry. We are a bespoke executive search company and we specialise in designing and developing strategy according to the need of our client.
Specifically, the pharma is highly regulated and seeks competent individuals who understand the nuances of the sector for some of the key roles. Hence our strategy for pharma related searches will be different from other sectors, said Shah.
There is an trend of clients engaging with sector specific Executive Search firms who brings in subject matter expert in the pharma & lifesciences sector. Clients are also seeking to work with Executive Search firms who are well connected to global talent across the largest geos including Americas, Europe, China, Latam and South East Asia.
Skill shortage continues to remain as one of the major challenges in the pharma industry. Hence the sector experiences higher than average time to hire. Some of the core industry specific critical skills sets that are seeing talent shortage include – R&D, regulatory affairs, quality, global business development etc, said Shah.
Source: Pharmabiz