Vik Patel explains what wins or loses candidates in each major Life Sciences market.
Vik Patel is Head of Life Sciences at ARM. Over the course of his career he has recruited across more than twenty markets and built up over 75 LinkedIn recommendations from candidates and clients spanning Europe, North America and South America. We sat down with him to get his take on what makes each major Life Sciences market distinctive, and what can go wrong when recruiters don’t possess that local knowledge.
Vik, you’ve recruited across a lot of markets. What’s the one thing people consistently underestimate about international Life Sciences recruitment?
The detail. People assume that if you understand the skillset, you understand the market. You don’t. The technical requirements for a regulatory affairs specialist are broadly similar whether you’re hiring in Amsterdam or Atlanta, but what’s completely different is everything around it: how candidates think about compensation, what motivates them to move, how much they trust recruiters, what the legal and structural process looks like. That’s where placements succeed or fall apart, and it’s where most generalist recruiters come unstuck.
Start us off with Benelux. What makes Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg so distinctive?
They’re small countries with a disproportionately large Life Sciences presence. A significant number of global pharmaceutical and biotech headquarters are based there, which means the talent pool is concentrated and competition for experienced people is fierce.
The thing that trips up clients and inexperienced recruiters most consistently is the compensation structure. In the UK, we talk about annual salary. In Benelux, experienced candidates don’t think that way. They think in monthly terms and multiply by 13.92, not 12. That’s the real annual figure they’re working to.
So when a client says “we’re offering €70,000” and a candidate is mentally calculating their monthly figure times 13.92, the gap between what the client thinks they’ve offered and what the candidate thinks they’re being offered can derail the process.
Does that come up regularly?
More than people would expect. And the problem is, candidates won’t flag it themselves. They assume you know. If you don’t ask some very specific probing questions early in the conversation, you won’t find out until it’s too late and the candidate has already mentally moved on.
Beyond salary, the package expectations are often more sophisticated than in the UK. Daily lunch vouchers are standard. Environmental credentials matter; Belgium and the Netherlands are probably five to ten years ahead of the UK in terms of how much candidates factor sustainability into their assessment of an employer. Bonus structures are detailed and important. Employment legislation around benefits is constantly changing, and we stay close to those developments because candidates notice when you don’t.
How does the market itself move?
Differently from the UK. We don’t get high volumes of roles from this region. What we typically get is a role that an internal TA team has been working on for eight weeks, has run out of road with, and needs solving quickly. In that situation we can usually produce three credible profiles within a week, move to interview and make a placement.
The pitch is simple: if you’ve already tried the obvious routes, we can compress the timeline significantly and take a lot of the stress out of getting to the advanced stages.
Let’s move to DACH: Germany, Austria and Switzerland. What are the key factors to think about there?
Germany in particular has some specific characteristics that catch recruiters out if they haven’t spent real time in the market. The first thing to understand is that many of the best candidates will not respond to a direct approach from an internal TA team. It’s a cultural preference: there’s a strong culture of wanting to be represented by a specialist headhunter. Candidates feel more confident that a headhunter will represent their interests properly, guide them through the process and be genuinely independent. If you want to reach passive candidates in Germany–and most of the best ones are passive–you need that credibility.
And then there’s the Works Council–this is the one that causes real problems for recruiters who don’t know about it.
Can you explain?
Germany’s Works Council is broadly equivalent to a trade union, but it operates at company level and has formal authority over certain employment decisions. When a candidate reaches offer stage, accepts the role and is ready to move, that offer is still subject to Works Council approval. There’s a nine-day approval window. The placement isn’t finalised when the candidate says yes. It’s finalised when the Works Council signs off.
Many recruiters never mention this. Candidates find out at the last moment, it creates anxiety and sometimes processes fall apart unnecessarily. We talk about it early, explain exactly how it works and set expectations. That alone puts us in a different category from most people operating in this market.
What else distinguishes the DACH region?
Notice periods. Three months is standard, which means from the moment an offer is accepted we’re often managing that candidate relationship for three to three and a half months before they start. That requires consistent communication throughout, sometimes substantive updates, sometimes just a check-in, but the relationship has to stay warm.
One thing that’s often underestimated is flexible working as a selling point. Some German employers are reluctant to expect full-time hours from everyone, particularly after parental leave. We work with clients who embrace flexibility, and being able to say that clearly opens doors with candidates who might otherwise not be in the market at all.
What about France?
Structurally, four-month notice periods are standard on the permanent side, and sometimes longer. Think about what that means in practice. From the moment a candidate accepts an offer, we’re in regular contact with them, on behalf of the client, for the next four months. We’re representing that client’s brand, communicating their culture and protecting their proposition throughout. We’re effectively the main point of contact between the candidate and their future employer for a very long period.
It’s also a market to approach carefully, because the relationship dynamic is different, and if you don’t understand that going in, you’ll find the market frustrating. You have to win trust with French candidates, and until it’s established you won’t get the depth of information you need to represent someone properly. The conversations improve significantly once that foundation is there, but you have to earn it.
So in France, it’s not a transaction, it’s an extended brand ambassadorship, and clients who genuinely understand that tend to work with us in a very different and more productive way.
Does that investment pay off?
With several of our French clients, the depth of relationship we build with both sides creates consistently better outcomes for them, which is the outcome of doing this properly over time.
The US market is a different conversation, isn’t it?
Completely. Almost everything is different. The pace is faster. Notice periods are often just two weeks, which means a process that might take five or six months from first conversation to start date in France can be completed in weeks. Candidates can move quickly when they want to, and clients expect it.
The other thing that surprises people is the level of respect the recruitment profession carries in the US compared to the UK. There are proportionally far fewer recruiters relative to the size of the market; the UK is oversaturated and as a result many US-based Life Sciences professionals treat headhunters as a legitimate part of their career management.
Some will only engage with recruiters working on retained searches, because it signals to them that a real process is already underway and their time won’t be wasted. We increasingly work on retained assignments in the US for exactly that reason.
But we know there’s also a retention challenge. Can you explain?
There’s a pattern in parts of the US Life Sciences market of candidates moving on after 12 to 18 months. Clients pay a placement fee, the person leaves, they pay again. It becomes an expensive, demoralising cycle.
The way we address it is by spending more time upfront understanding what a candidate actually wants over the next three to five years, not just what they want right now. What motivates them, what would make them stay, why they might leave. When you understand that properly, you make better placements.
The commercial argument is straightforward. If your placement fee is £30,000 and we help you keep that person in post for three years rather than 18 months, you’re not paying that fee again. The value of a well-made placement isn’t the hire itself, it’s everything that doesn’t happen afterwards.
What about the UK?
UK candidates are less focused on the total package than their European counterparts. In Benelux or the Nordic region, the complete offering, pension, sustainability credentials, flexibility, lunch allowances, the works, is a deciding factor. In the UK, it’s almost entirely about base salary and bonus. Neither approach is wrong, but understanding that is important when you’re advising a client on how to position an offer competitively.
Also–and I’ll have to be pretty candid about this, because I think it’s useful–the UK is saturated with recruiters. The sheer volume means candidates are approached constantly, standards vary enormously and it’s hard to cut through. A lot of the noise in this market is unhelpful to candidates and employers. That’s why we are always keen to establish our credibility upfront.
A lot of global markets, a lot of happy candidates and clients across the world. What has worked well, would you say?
Hopefully it shows that our approach works. People remember how they were treated and that we understand the culture they work in.
The markets are different, the cultures are different, the processes and timelines and legal frameworks are all different. But the thing that makes recruitment work in all of them is the same: people want to feel that the person representing them knows what they’re talking about, has their interests in mind, and will be honest with them even when that’s inconvenient.
Vik Patel is Head of Life Sciences at ARM. Find out more about ARM’s Life Sciences recruitment capability across global markets, or connect with Vik directly on LinkedIn.
Vik Patel
Head of Life Sciences
