Odgers Berndtson’s Chris Hamilton and Mike Drew explain how health tech companies can hold on to their best people and attract new talent in the age of the great resignation.
The great resignation is affecting all companies, of all sizes, across all sectors and industries. For health tech – which is now in a position for unprecedented growth – talent is a particularly acute issue if companies in the space don’t want to fall behind their competitors.
Underlying the cause of this talent crisis are three factors. The existential threat created by the pandemic has prompted many people to look for roles and companies that align more closely with their values and beliefs.
Working from home has afforded people with more time to contemplate and question the career they want. And how companies have treated their workforces during COVID-19 has given employees a clear view of the types of behaviours espoused by those they work for.
It’s important to understand these driving forces as they are key to mitigating the great resignation. Below are five areas health tech companies should focus on if they want to attract and retain the best people in this new war for talent.
Double down on your mission statement
Health tech has an advantage over many other sectors. The majority of organisations in the space are mission-driven and their products or services have a clear social and human benefit.
Most would come under the banner of ‘tech for good’ and are launched with the aim of advancing medical science and addressing unmet medical needs.
Ensuring this remains front and centre across all aspects of the organisation will be the cornerstone of attracting and retaining talent. Strategy should be aligned to the organisation’s purpose and employees should be able to see this in how the company presents itself to the market, right through to how the leadership team communicates business goals to the organisation.
It’s worth noting that the inverse of this can also have detrimental effects. Organisations that are only mission driven with no commercial drive whatsoever will ultimately fail in a competitive market. The best health tech companies will therefore find the equilibrium between commercial achievements and social purpose.
Live and breathe your values
In an age where talent is able to, and almost always does, interrogate a company’s behaviours when considering a role, all organisations need to live up to the values they present to the market.
That is, they need to be the thing that their marketing and recruitment brochure says they are. Whether it’s providing amputees with prosthetics or building AI-driven drug discovery platforms, employees want to see that the product or service exists for the betterment of society and is not simply for commercial success.
The same is true for diversity, social inclusion, and sustainability. If an organisation makes claims about its focus or investments in these areas, then it genuinely needs to practice what it preaches.
Employees will smell a rat within weeks of walking through the door if the company is simply paying lip service, and then they will walk shortly after that because there are so many other opportunities out there.
Invest in your employee’s careers
Companies that are great at hiring and retaining employees are now examining the employee experience from start to finish.
From the experience of the recruitment process, right through to five and even ten year career development plans, the best companies now see new hires from a ‘lifetime’ perspective. This has become known as a ‘hire to retire’ continuum and enables companies to retain their best people.
At a minimum, this means regularly checking in with workforces, asking them what the company is doing right, what it’s doing wrong, and what needs to go. But the best companies go beyond this to embed their company’s ethos and DNA into the employee experience.
For example, Qualtrics, a billion dollar employee experience company, interviews and hires people based entirely on its core values.
TACOS, standing for Transparent, All-in, Customer-obsessed, One team, and Scrappy, is how the company operates, treats its staff, and the criteria for which it hires new employees.
Critical to the employee experience is career variation. Employees don’t want to feel siloed and most no longer view a career in terms of a single lifetime role.
They want clear progression opportunities with a defined plan, training and development, and opportunities to build different skillsets.
If the company is global, then providing the opportunity to work in different geographic locations will also be a huge advantage when attracting talent.
Build connections with academia
The best companies have strong connections to academia with university leaver and internship programmes that are adept at converting entry level talent into full time employees.
While this is primarily for entry level positions, it does mean that companies can mould new skillsets in a way that is most effective for them.
What’s more, it is often a cost-effective way of attracting new talent, who are themselves actively looking for roles.
This should be combined with an investment in reskilling of existing skillsets, either through in-house programmes or external training.
Health tech, and technology in general, are rapidly evolving sectors and skillsets are in regular need of being updated as technology moves on. Employers that provide this opportunity are far more likely to hold on to their best people.
Embrace digital transformation
Health tech’s other advantage is its inherent relationship with digital technology. Most health tech companies have, by design, embraced digital technology.
But those companies on the verge of the health tech spectrum, or those large pharmaceutical players still firmly in the purely healthcare space, face talent challenges if they’re playing catch-up with technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, or IoT.
In general, healthcare more broadly needs to embrace the digital transformation curve; those that aren’t are losing talent to those that have strong digital platforms or are implementing digital transformation programmes.
Importantly, candidates are becoming more discerning about the company they’re joining and can differentiate between those companies with genuine investments in digital technologies and those that are only ‘playing at AI’, for example.
In particular, big pharma is facing some of the most significant challenges around talent and digital adoption.
Often too large to realign and transform, they’re forced to acquire and merge smaller technology businesses into their company.
This can take a long time and so a lot of people are leaving large corporations for smaller tech-oriented healthcare business.
For those health tech companies at the bleeding edge of digital technology, this provides a very real opportunity.
