Project reference · Healthcare · Talent mapping & specialist recruitment
Mapping a pharmaceutical market before the vacancy opens.
An international pharmaceutical company was building up its Ukrainian business and needed leaders in compliance, marketing and national sales who were not looking for a job. We mapped, discreetly and competitor by competitor, the people who could fill those roles, kept a short list warm for when each position opened, and ran searches for medical, sales-force-effectiveness and finance specialists alongside.
3 talent maps for leadership roles: compliance, marketing, national sales
Mapping
≈20 → 5–10 profiles on each long list, then interviewed for the short list
Method
7 role families searched, from medical advisers to finance
Searches
2010 → 2012 one client, two legal forms on its side, one team on ours
Continuity
The shape of it
Three years, two kinds of work
Dark bars are searches for an open role; orange bars are talent maps, which run before any role is open and feed the searches that follow.
The brief
What the client actually needed
The client was growing its team in Ukraine and its leadership roles were hard to fill: few people in the country had run compliance, marketing or national sales for a research-based pharmaceutical company, and most of them were content where they were. Advertising those roles would have told the market more than the client wanted it to know.
So the HR team asked for two things at once: searches for the roles that were open now, and a confidential map of the market for the roles that would open later, with a short list it could call the day a position was approved.
Why mapping
The search starts before the vacancy
A talent map is a search without a deadline. We agreed the profile and the companies to cover, screened the market for a long list, interviewed the strongest people in our own office so nobody had to be seen at the client's, and kept the short list current. When a role opened, the search began from people who already knew us. Alongside the maps we priced an outstaffing option, so a specialist could start on our payroll while the client's own company in Ukraine took shape.
The hard parts
Where it gets difficult
A market that is small and talks
Every candidate worked for a competitor. First calls did not name the client, interviews took place at our office, and the client shared lists of people it already knew so nobody was approached twice.
Medical roles need medical people
Medical advisers and managers come from clinics, hospital departments and trial investigators as much as from other companies, so the map had to reach beyond the usual industry names.
Two languages, one standard
Candidates were assessed in English as well as Ukrainian or Russian, against the client's own leadership capabilities and online tests, before anyone senior spent an hour on them.
Decisions that take time
When the client's priorities changed, roles were put on hold after candidates had passed every interview. We kept those candidates informed and interested until the client was ready again.
Research that comes before any hire
Mapping is months of work before a placement. We moved from a higher success fee to a fixed fee per map, agreed in writing, so both sides knew what a finished map was worth.
A client changing its legal form
Mid-project the client moved its Ukrainian business into a new local company. Agreements and acceptance papers were reissued to the new entity without stopping the work.
What we did
Profile, long list, short list, follow-up
- Step 1 — Profile. Job descriptions, leadership capabilities, the companies to cover and the client's list of people it already knew, agreed before the first call.
- Step 2 — Long list. About twenty profiles per role from across the market, with current position, experience, English and what would make them move; around two months.
- Step 3 — Short list. The client picks the profiles to look at closely; we interview five to ten in our office and report in writing.
- Step 4 — Follow-up. Short lists kept current for when each role opens, while open searches for medical, sales-force-effectiveness, compliance and finance roles run alongside.
A good map outlasts the vacancy that started it: the client was still working from the same lists two years later.
In the client's words
“It is important for us to contact the short-list candidates more often, to reduce the risk of losing them.”
The client's HR specialist, when the mapping process was agreed (translated).
How we work
We do not show you another company’s name
The client, its people and the candidates are not named here, and they will not be named in a meeting either. We are glad to talk this project through in detail. What we will not do is discuss the last client that way with you, or you with the next one.
Next step
A leadership role you cannot advertise?
Tell us which roles you will need in the next year and which companies you would hire from. We will tell you honestly how deep that market is, how long a map takes and what it costs.