27. März 2018
It’s a bit of a stretch but indeed you need some skills in human relationships to understand how to fit candidates to positions. There is nothing worse for a headhunter than to have high-quality searches and no fitting candidates or, the other way around, having great talent and nowhere to place it. So, the secret lies in the middle. Making the match.

When is a fit a fit?

Every search starts out with some sort of idea of a need and so does every candidate. Both sides seem to know what they are looking for. But often, it indeed just seems as if they do. Many times even I have been surprised by which candidates ended up being perfect for the job and what companies where really looking for. This is the essential superpower headhunters need, to fill the space between the job search of the client and the needs of a candidate. Everything short from a personal fit is not enough. Much like in love: the lid needs to fit the pot.

By Stephan Breitfeld, Partner Life Sciences – ingeniam

stephan.breitfeld@ingeniam.de
Tel.:+49 (0) 69 / 959091989
Mobil: +49 (0) 172 / 6685350

20. Februar 2018
A lot of times in a lot of different contexts I have mentioned in my articles, that in executive search it can be quite a tricky question whether expert or general knowledge is more important. In an industry like the life sciences especially this question pops up quite frequently. There are people who say that once you reach a certain career level, expert knowledge becomes less and less important while others say that in our times today, general knowledge is more of a hobby and actually quite obsolete. I find this discussion rather interesting and that’s why I decided to take a closer look.

Complex knowledge about single topics

With the general growing speed of innovation and developments in technology, in the life sciences in particular with the “fusion” of entire industries (e.g. health IT), the knowledge you need in your field generally becomes more complex. You need to know more things and adapt to change much faster than you needed to, let’s say, 10 years ago. But you could also put it this way: you know more and more about less and less things.

It’s inevitable that you develop more specialized skills since you only have that much space in your brain and need to keep up with your job’s demands. So it’s easy to skip knowing about world politics when there is another update in the software you have to deal with.

By Stephan Breitfeld, Partner Life Sciences – ingeniam

stephan.breitfeld@ingeniam.de
Tel.:+49 (0) 69 / 959091989
Mobil: +49 (0) 172 /