"We need technically competent people, who desire to innovate"

Dr Gautham Nadig, co-founder and director, Metahelix Life Sciences, Bangalore

Talent identification and management are critical issues for start-up and early stage discovery based companies. A bigger challenge is in growing scientific talent into managers and to organize a group of people with diverse skills and motivating factors to run a biotechnology business.

HR requirements

Enterprises require people at various levels beginning from the undergraduate level–BSc in science, MSc in biology/chemistry and PhDs in certain specialized areas. The quantity of people available at entry levels has never been in doubt and usually companies are flooded with resumes. Yet it is not very easy to pick a person who has the right skills for the role in the company. Once we climb up the ladder in bringing in more specialized talent, it is not a question of number of people that is important, but the real issue is on the kind of specialized skills that an organization needs and these are people with PhDs and post-doctoral experience in specialized areas of biology or chemistry. There are various instances when companies do not find the people in India and these are usually recruited from overseas.

Hiring criteria and success factors

For a successful science-based business at an early stage, there are two critical issues-To get the right people in place quickly and that the technical quality of these people should be acceptable and above a certain level.

• The person who is hired must be able to work with others of varying competence and diverse skills. Sometimes there are compromises made and these lead to people-related issues on an on-going basis. In addition, the business must also build the team with a variety of constraints and there are certain critical success factors that could either make or break these efforts.

• Cost of building a team should be low.

• Ability to build teams quickly and on demand.

• Ensure that the right person is selected for the job and therefore reduce the training period required for new hires.

• Ability to identify the leaders in the group and provide them formal management training.

In building result-oriented teams, Metahelix as well as other organizations have begun to evince interest in the human resource availability situation, specifically in and around Bangalore, because we have a vested interest in it. There are a few critical observations on the quality of human resources and what needs to change if talent and human resources start driving the growth of the biotechnology business. The overall picture is not very encouraging with the MSc level of hiring that companies require. It has been the experience of ours and other organizations as well that one needs to spend enormous amount of time in selection and thereafter in training these resources. With the PhD levels, there are different organizational issues that relate to building competencies in leadership, finance and management training and a commercial bent of mind in these scientists.

So how can a business make a difference to this situation is often a question that crosses our minds. It has come to a point where we need to radically change the way science education is delivered today. If one visited science colleges, undergraduate and post-graduate, you would find excellent institutions. Unfortunately great infrastructure does not necessarily generate great talent. Significant intervention is needed in the quality of teaching–content, methodology, combination of courses, selection criteria of students and teachers. The need of the hour is an army of people who are technically competent, can work in teams, who have the urge to innovate and a desire to win the game.

Motivating people

We have been trying to understand what makes people tick. Understandably, it is the quality of work and the workplace. It could be challenging science when you begin your career, and then it would to be a role of managing projects and thereafter, it could just be a people manager. The motivating factors could again be intellectual, for some. It would be a feeling of responsibility. For others, it would be networking with peers within and outside the organization. Of course, there is the lure of money and to a smarter few, they would like to own a piece of the company they are building.

Every business considers high quality human resources as strategic to its growth and sustainability and it is therefore extremely important to ensure that the human resource needs of the biotechnology industry are properly addressed. This would demand a much stronger engagement between academic institutions and the nascent biotechnology industry today.

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