Helping to Breathe New Life into Recruitment at Boston Scientific

Challenges in filling important IT positions led medical device giant to turn to Veritude to more quickly find the right candidates. A recruiter sits within the company’s IT group rather than in HR.

by Kay Dougherty

With $6.3 billion in annual sales and more than 28,000 employees around the globe, Boston Scientific is the world’s No. 1 developer and manufacturer of medical devices for the practice of less-invasive medicine. As a market leader, it has experienced significant growth in recent years—to the point where top management recognizes it needs to take a more strategic approach to recruitment, including the hiring of IT specialists such as programmers, analysts, and technical project managers.

Recently the need to address talent management became even more pressing when the company last April acquired the Guidant Corporation, one of the largest cardiovascular medical device manufacturers in the world.

For Boston Scientific, it was initially a difficult task to find technical specialists in a timely fashion—without incurring the costs of using executive recruiters. Under intense competition for top-quality talent and facing a short supply of on-staff recruiters, HR could not produce enough qualified candidates for hiring managers to choose from within its targeted time frame. Hiring cycles exceeded industry norms, increasing management pressure on HR.

“At Boston Scientific, our core competency is making medical devices—not recruiting technical staff. We needed a partner with real specialization and deep roots in the technical recruiting area,” explained Scott Duhamel, director of staffing for Boston Scientific.

To address this deficiency, the Natick, MA-based medical device maker turned to outsourcing for solutions. It engaged Veritude to develop a customized recruiting plan and deliverables proposal for its CIO.

The provider first sent a senior recruiter on site to gather pertinent information on the company’s culture, operations, and requirements. This included individual interviews with hiring managers. To meet Boston Scientific’s aggressive recruiting goals, the senior recruiter has remained on-site and sits within Boston
Scientific’s IT group rather than residing in HR. With firsthand knowledge of IT’s specific challenges, the recruiter is in constant contact with Veritude’s central recruitment team, which literally works around the clock to provide talent sourcing. The team disseminates a continuous flow of candidate data that helps ensure the right person will be hired for the right position at the right time.

For Boston Scientific, the results were immediate. A robust IT candidate pipeline was instantly established. Qualified professionals can now be hired within weeks instead of months. And the strength of the company’s IT department has been improved by an influx of new talent—leading to better technical support for R&D, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and every other area that contributes to Boston Scientific’s bottom line.

One reason for these improvements is outsourced recruiters anticipate client needs ahead of time, which accelerates the hiring process. They leverage Veritude’s extensive reach within the marketplace to attract top talent. By combining these capabilities with innovative differentiators such as overnight offshore sourcing in India, Veritude is able to provide Boston Scientific with a formula that meets and exceeds ambitious expectations.

“We look at Veritude as a partner, not a vendor,” says Duhamel. “When you look at the value we’ve received from them, it’s tremendous. Now that we’re getting qualified candidates in the door and hired much faster, we’ve been able to meet our very aggressive goals.”