By Barney Horne
In this series of articles, I share my thoughts on using recruitment agencies, both as a Quality Assurance (QA) professional when I was looking for new opportunities, and as a manager when I was hiring QA professionals for my departments. This first article deals with why you should consider using a QA specialized agency in a world where many companies have their own recruitment departments, where we all have access to platforms such as LinkedIn and Glassdoor, and where we are told our budgets cannot support agency fees for an occasional hire in QA.
Like many in our industry, nearly all of my career moves were thanks to opportunities presented to me by head-hunters. I have also used recruitment agencies successfully to fill key positions in my departments. Is the reason why I am such a fan of recruitment agencies because they have greatly benefited my personal career? Well yes, and no. Yes, my career was indeed helped along thanks to intervention at key times by recruiters who found the perfect fit for my next position. But no, not all recruiters that I encountered were so switched on.
Without naming names, let me share some examples of the sort of approaches that were not good advertisements for recruitment agencies. Throughout my career I have been contacted on a regular basis by recruiters, and one approach guaranteed to make me instantly delete the email is the “scatter-gun” approach, when the recruiter has fired off a mailshot to anyone and everyone they have in their QA contacts list. I then found that the “exciting QA position” being promoted turned out to be completely unsuitable. It could be for a position in a GxP other than my own speciality; or for junior QA auditor position when I was already leading a department; or a position for a non-QA operational role. This is just lazy: everyone can access LinkedIn and a moment’s work would show the recruiter that the approach is a waste of time.
Recruiters can also let themselves down during the recruitment process, often exhibiting an apparent lack of understanding of the GxP work space. Using a recruiter to hire should be a short-cut to finding high quality potential candidates. Yet I recall an occasion when I provided detailed, well-written job descriptions and additional pertinent information to a recruiter, only to sit through multiple calls taking them through what I wanted in painstaking detail.
Having shared the horror stories, let’s look at what makes a recruitment agency really stand out. We are all keenly aware that the pharmaceutical industry is a demanding place to work, requiring a highly skilled and motivated workforce. From that starting point, you also have to understand that us QA folks provide a specialized and quite unusual area of work: we rarely bring the company much revenue and we spend a lot of our time giving bad news. But we love our jobs, because we do 3 vital things: find where our company’s operations are going wrong; provide the data, information and best practice advice to help operational improvements; and present complex regulatory and quality risk / benefit challenges in a way that can facilitate good decision making. QA professionals combine wide-ranging technical knowledge and experience with well-developed communication and interpersonal skills. This leads me to my first requirement for a really good recruiter in that that they must understand how a QA mind works.
Second, the recruiter must have a good knowledge of the GxP workspace and the many ways that a QA professional can fit into that space. Some (like me) have their primary focus in one GxP area and thrive best in larger pharmaceutical companies and CROs. Many have preferred specialities, such as auditing, quality documentation, total quality management, computer validation, quality engineering, etc. Others are comfortable across many or all the GxPs, and such valuable “all-rounders” may be the only QA person in a smaller company. In all these situations it is absolutely vital that the QA person hired is the right one. To be effective, a recruiter must be able to quickly understand what a company is looking for in their QA opening and then communicate that clearly to potential candidates.
Thirdly, there is so much in recruiting that goes beyond technical aspects, which can be summarised in one word: "fit". The ability to understand what a company wants in terms of the job position, the company and the quality culture, and marry that to the QA professional’s skills, character and career expectations is a skill that cannot be underestimated.
Finally, a recruiter must be able to present a realistic shortlist of suitable candidates promptly, then when the perfect match has been found can drive the process to completion quickly and smoothly.
I have one last thought about choosing an agency for QA, and that is to consider using a specialist QA recruiter. To me this is more than a person in a recruitment agency who specialises in QA, but rather a company that dedicates itself to serving the needs of QA. One such company is GxPeople Global, with whom I have worked successfully in the past: they have the contacts, insight and expertise that make it the “go to company” when hiring key QA positions. When you are considering your next career move, or starting out to hire a QA professional into a new role, take a look at the various agencies out there, and ask yourself: can they do all of this for me?
Read Part 2