Life Sciences stories: a powerful tool for recruitment

Storytelling sounds about as far away from science and reason as you can get. After all, people join companies for meaningful work and bountiful salaries, not a few fancy words! But people have been telling stories since the dawn of time, and with good reason…

Stories are a fantastic way to catch attention, hold engagement and be remembered. Three things that go hand-in-hand with attracting candidates to your roles! And once you start looking, you’ll find stories really are everywhere. 

Let’s start by looking at some of the research that shows that storytelling is more like science than magic.

• Emotional memory is a specific type of memory relating the way events make us feel. If you can trigger an emotional response - for example, with a story - you increase your chances of being remembered.
• Story-based advertising has a positive impact on brand image and identity (especially when paired with video) over the use of features-based advertising. 
• Stories can be 22 times more memorable than facts alone.

How and where to tell stories about your company

Your business is brimming with tales that will catch and hold the attention of your candidates! You can share them on your website, social media, in job ads and even in interviews. Data can be a key component, but it’s not the most powerful focal point. Instead, focus on people and feelings. Such as:

Your origin story

You could tell candidates when you were founded and how quickly you have grown. You could. But wouldn’t it be more interesting to try something different? Try answering the following questions:

• Who had the initial idea for therapy your business is based on?
• Why did your Founder choose to start the company?
• What got your leaders interested in science?
• What is your vision? This, in itself, should be a story. The story of the world you are trying to create and the people you are creating it for. 

For example, you can turn this:

Founded in 2018, we set out to create effective and affordable therapies for orphan diseases. Using cutting-edge technology, we found a way to mass produce medicines while reducing the cost and impact on the environment. By 2020, 100% of patients with X disease were able to access treatments that reduced the burden of disease regardless of their financial situation.

Into this:

In 2018, our Founder finally had the investment required to set up a small lab at a local science hub. From there, she aimed to find a way to produce medicines for people suffering from lifelong illnesses that have been ignored by medicine for too long. Applying completely new technologies, her and her team reduced the cost of production enough that within a few years, families affected by these illnesses had access to life-changing medicine for a cost that didn’t reduce them to poverty.

The information is largely the same, but in the second story you feature people and emotive language instead of data and timelines. Families are human; ‘patients’ just sound like participants in a study. 

Your employees’ stories

Your employees are a vital source of stories. After all, you’re trying to attract people to work alongside them! When describing your company culture, it’s easy to sound like you are bragging or making hollow promises. Stories by, or about, your existing employees offer social proof. 

Crucially, to attract the diverse talent that businesses need in order to perform at their best, you’ll need to tell diverse stories. Try telling stories about some of the following:

• Unorthodox career pathways through your business.
• People who have returned from parental or sickness leave and flourished.
• How people arrived at your business as new starters; where have they come from?
• Your favourite answers to interview questions.
• People who have been with your business for more than ten years.
• People who have recently been promoted or won awards.
• Why people love working for you.
• The moment that people finally felt like they had settled into their new role.
• The career aspirations of your employees and how they plan to achieve them.
• A ‘day in the life of…’ for each major role you hire for.

You could set it all out as “We expect X% of new starters in this role to be promoted within 18 months”... but why not accompany that with a story about someone who did just that (or who managed to do it even quicker)?

The stories of the people you work so hard to help

And of course, the people who benefit from your company’s work. This is another huge source of stories that can help you sell your roles. New generations of workers are particularly focussed on having purpose in their lives and their work.

One place to start is how you represent your mission and/or vision. Sure, you’re using amazing science to create high-tech solutions to medical problems. But at the end of that process is a person whose life will be changed. Many of the big names in Life Sciences use ‘person first’ language for their vision or mission statements:

• Glaxo SmithKline: Our mission is to help people do more, feel better, live longer.
• Pfizer: Innovate to bring therapies to patients that significantly improve their lives.
• Johnson & Johnson: We strive to improve access and affordability, create healthier communities, and put a healthy mind, body and environment within reach of everyone, everywhere.
• Merck: We aspire to improve the health and wellness of people and animals worldwide, and to expand access to our medicines and vaccines.

Of course, many of them still use technical and science-first language and you could argue that it’s not done them any harm! But through a recruitment lens, a little story could go a really long way. 

Even if you can’t change your vision and mission statements, you can add a narrative that gives them more power. And on your recruitment materials, you can link through to case studies about the impact of the treatments you produce. 

Statistics can also be a powerful part of the story. Survival rates before and after receiving your treatment, for example. But take it one step further: “Before X medicine was available, patients like XXX would have to manage their symptoms by themselves, knowing that there was no medicine that could reduce this burden. Now, her and her children can live normal lives.”

These stories are not just there to pull on the heart strings; they are why your business exists, and a huge draw. If you’re not using them to snag the best candidates, you’re missing a trick!

What are the downsides of storytelling?

Storytelling is a skill. Like any science, it takes practise and understanding. It takes longer to produce great stories than it does to churn out a few facts. And if you get it wrong you might encounter the following issues:

• If your stories aren’t clear and concise, they can lead to confusion and disengagement.
• People bias towards ‘stereotype consistent’ information when repeating stories, so it’s important to be careful not to feed into stereotypical narratives in your materials.
• If you tell a story and it evokes emotions, ideally they should be positive ones! Our brains are good at directing our attention away from things that make us feel bad. In Life Sciences, share messaging about the people you aim to help (patients, for example) carefully - maintain an element of positivity and hope in the way you frame those stories.
• Information that you learn can be easily forgotten if not used immediately, so include a call to action after every story to allow people to act on how they feel ‘right now’.

But with effective planning and review processes in place, you’ll find it starts to come more naturally. It might even start to spread to other areas of your work (presentations benefit hugely from storytelling!). And you’ll be surprised to see the impact it has on your ability to capture the hearts and minds of candidates, especially during the current talent shortage.