Sucampo Looks to Add to "Scientific Core" As Global Reach Grows, Says HR
April 13, 2015
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
Sucampo Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is a public, American biopharmaceutical company focused on medical applications of a class of ion channel modulators called prostones. A global company, Sucampo is headquartered in Bethesda, Md., and has operations in Japan, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Sucampo has one marketed product, Amitiza, which Takeda distributes globally except for in Japan and China.
1. Where are you focusing on adding staff (i.e. C level, R&D etc.)?
Last year our CEO took over the reins from our founder. Since then, we have filled the C-suite with new senior executives, including a chief medical officer, a chief scientific officer and a chief financial officer, and we have built out our management team with the addition of a senior vice president of regulatory, an executive vice president (EVP) of business development and licensing, and myself, an EVP of HR, IT and strategy.
We are now looking at the next level of the organization with the aim of reinvigorating the scientific core of our business in 2015. We have already brought in a senior director level formulation expert, and we are continuing to very strategically bring in scientists with clinical capabilities to bolster our scientific heritage.
2. What does your company look for most in a job candidate, that's specific to your corporate culture?
We make decisions in a very focused way and we expect to execute. We also recognize that we need to move through things quickly and strike while we have this fantastic opportunity with the business, and we are looking for people who are motivated to make things happen today. A cultural fit is enormously important, and I think most would agree that if you don’t have a good cultural fit, you’ve failed in the selection process. We are very transparent with all of our candidates about what they’re getting into when they walk in the door, and ideally they either run towards the light or run away from it. I think we’ve been very successful so far.
3. What hiring trends are you seeing right now in your sector, and how have those been affected by such a boom year for biotech stocks?
Biotechnology has clearly matured as an industry, and the larger biotech companies are doing an excellent job of investing in and developing talent, as well as creating stable hubs of that talent geographically. As a result, we now have a workforce with a sophisticated skillset that is ready to come into smaller organizations and help to drive success faster. In addition, significant M&A activity in the sector has made an already mobile workforce even more mobile. There’s still a very strong entrepreneurial spirit in biotech, and we are now seeing a lot of exciting start-up companies attracting and leveraging really capable talent that they’ve been able to pull together from those two different patterns.
4. How many candidates would you say you see in an average year? Was that different in 2014?
At Sucampo, we are on a growth trajectory and are seeing an overall quantum increase. We are still a small company, but we will probably see around 200 candidates throughout the year, which is between five to seven candidates per job that we are looking to fill. Sucampo is a fast moving biopharmaceutical company that has been reinvigorated with our new CEO, Peter Greenleaf, and a new leadership team, as well as a strategy reset to drive success through investment in our scientific core.
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