Negligent hiring of field force can pose some major risks to Big Pharma, as it involves a great deal of investment in time and resources. So, doesn’t it make sense to do your due diligence before bringing the new hire on board? Apart from the obvious responsibility of selecting the best candidate on paper from a pool of résumés, you need to ensure that a person is exactly what they claim to be.
But what if there’s more to this story than what meets the eye? What if their qualifications are forged? What if they have a criminal history?
Your hiring controls need to be water-tight as medical sales representatives are the ones who ultimately carry your brand around in the market – a bad hire can bring down your brand image like a Jenga tower. And once trust in this business is lost, it’s a long road to recovery.
Negligent hiring of field force results in 3 major risks
False credentials
You need to be able to trust your employees completely for doing their job. This also means trusting them to be qualified. Remember former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, who made headlines for allegedly misrepresenting his college degrees?
A medical sales rep with a false degree or with no life sciences degree at all is a potential threat to the company. Selling drugs to doctors, pharmacies, and hospitals without certified knowledge of formulations and medical products is plainly illegal.
Employment history
Medical reps don’t just sell drugs, they also bond and foster relationships with their target market. If they were involved in any malpractice previously, they carry it to the next organization too. If you hire such a candidate, your company is at risk of losing its well-earned reputation and goodwill in the market.
Litigation exposure
Employers are directly liable for the actions of their employees and the pharmaceutical field force is no exception.
For example, medical sales reps travel quite a bit to make sales calls. This requires them to have a valid driver’s license. What if a rep continues to drive on a suspended license or worse, on an invalid license and causes an accident?
This leads to direct litigation exposure for the company that hired them because they were on official duty at the time.
Such shortcomings in hiring your field force can lead to potential problems that range from minor to rather severe. A toxic hire in pharmaceutical sales wastes more than just time and money – they threaten the overall productivity of your company.
But there is good news – a way to help your company avoid this fate is by running a thorough Background Verification.
Background Verifications simply make good business sense.
The field force is a direct reflection of your company overall. And Background verifications are the best way to maintain a reputation for the safest way to do business in a trust-based industry such as pharmaceuticals.
Here are 5 ways that Human Resources can leverage to build a genuine pharmaceutical field force:
Education checks – Fake universities and false qualifications will no longer be a deterrent while hiring – a tech-enabled process scans the candidate profile for such anomalies.
Employment checks – Your new hire’s past is linked to your present. A system-driven process checks the candidate’s profile for any malicious activity and collects accurate feedback from HR officials who have hired the candidate previously.
Address checks – Permanent and current addresses of your new hire are geotagged and physically verified.
Criminal records checks – As the face of a pharmaceutical company, medical field reps have to be examined thoroughly for convictions or wrongdoings in the interest of creating a safe working environment. Fool-proof systems run the candidate’s profile through court records and obtain police clearance certificates to ensure there are no red flags.
Real-time ID checks – In the age of photoshop and morphed pictures, Real-time ID checks is a solution that matches your potential hire’s face with that of the ID to eliminate any possibility of identity theft and false information record.
This process may reveal any red flags that could potentially affect trust, safety, and your company’s bottom line. In this way, Human Resources makes a well-informed decision on hiring the right candidate in reality, and not just on paper.
Are you a pharmaceutical recruiter wanting to build a next-gen field force that’s authentic and genuine? Click here to connect with us and know more about our offerings for you!
To know more about it, please write to shivani@idfy.com
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