Supporting Kinapse’s growth strategy with key hires

With no formal HR function in place at Kinapse, Talentmark’s project team provided a complete service.

Kinapse is a leading pharmaceutical consulting business with teams based in Europe, India and the US. It provides advisory, build and operational services across the full R&D, clinical, medical, regulatory and commercialisation life-cycle, working with 19 of the top 25 leading global Life Sciences firms as well as many fast-growth and early-stage ventures.

Challenge

Our role was to recruit specialist managers in a number of specific functional areas to support the company’s ambitious growth plans. These included roles in labelling, regulatory affairs, pharmacovigilance, medical writing, consulting and project management. Our work with Kinapse stretched over a five-year period from 2012 to 2017.

The initial challenge was that Kinapse had no formal HR function or talent acquisition process in place. Instead, recruitment and resourcing decisions were taken by line managers, which was distracting them from their core business activities. Nor did they have the capacity for volume hires.

As a starting point, we were able to act as a flexible specialist recruitment partner and to relieve pressure on the internal team. Kinapse could come to us with the hiring plan they wanted to present to their client, and it would be up to us to source individuals with the right skills and talent for these roles to complete their shortlists.

Results

Over the course of the project, we helped Kinapse to fill 87 leadership, management and project roles , averaging a total of 40-60 hires per annum. We did this by providing an off-site managed service with a dedicated project team who were able to provide account management, delivery and administration. This was important as the project required regular management reporting and the provision of often detailed candidate and interview information that Kinapse could pass on to their own clients.

The nature of Kinapse’s business model meant that Talentmark was often asked to research and pull together a quality pipeline at short notice. Typically, we might have only two or three weeks’ notice to identify a pool of up to 30 potential candidates (both permanent and interim) across a range of functional areas at senior management and operational level.

As Kinapse was in turn pitching to their own clients, there were occasionally scenarios where they did not win the business. In cases like this it was up to us to inform candidate and at the same time ensure that this was closed down in a positive way for everyone involved.

Kinapse asked us to help to put in place their own internal talent acquisition infrastructure.

Outcome

We delivered to the brief and within the timeframe. Our deep functional and sector expertise means that we were ideally placed to meet their needs, where a large generalist Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) provider would have been unlikely to provide the same level of strategic consultancy, in-depth sector and functional experience or flexibility when it comes to both permanent and interim roles.

And, whilst we are not of the scale of a big recruitment house, we can still offer different price points at different levels and offer solutions that do not require a typical search-led approach.

At the end of the project, Kinapse asked us to help to put in place their own internal talent acquisition infrastructure, so that they could resource recruitment requirements themselves in future.