Career Moves Empower

Can you share an example of successfully leading a diverse team and achieving project goals?

I lead the team responsible for attracting talent to our Global Manufacturing & Supply and Global Quality business functions.

Together, we are responsible for developing and executing recruitment, attraction and employer branding strategies.

Our purpose is to attract top-tier talent from across the globe and a wide range of backgrounds while simultaneously strengthening Takeda's employer brand.

To achieve our project goals, we place a strong emphasis on creating an inclusive work culture that fosters innovation and collaboration.

Each team member is united in our purpose and brings their unique and complementary viewpoints to the work we do so that we can be successful. 

Describe a strategic decision you made that influenced a project's direction.

For me, it’s less about decisions and more about an approach. We all have opinions on what we believe is the ‘best path forward,’ but those opinions are often bespoke and not reflective of a situation or a particular working environment.

By leading with qualitative and quantitative data, the ‘best path' often reveals itself, and it’s not always what I would have pursued had I been asked to make a decision independent of information.

When we take the time to examine the data, the root cause of the issue is realized so we can spend our effort fixing the true issue, knowing our time is being spent in the right way.

For example, one challenge we took on recently involved a high volume of candidates in ratio to our open jobs, and the manual time required to review them. We knew it was critical to P-T-R-B that we fill those jobs as quickly as possible, so this was a challenge worth solving.

We looked to technology and AI to help us overcome this challenge. There was initial resistance from our business, team members and others, but by showing the data and the ultimate impact on the patient, we generated the support we needed and implemented the new tool with success.

What I love about this initiative especially is that we were able to solve a problem while also upskilling our team on some of the latest techniques in our industry.

Share a complex project you led and your impact on its execution and outcomes.

During my tenure with the Global Manufacturing & Supply and Global Quality teams, I spearheaded a multifaceted project focused on delving into our business functions’ distinctive Employment Value Proposition (EVP) so that we could unite under a vision that would articulate what made us stand apart and how that connected to the expectations from talent in the market.

To achieve this, we conducted in-depth interviews with employees and leaders worldwide, as well as talented individuals external to our organization.

The culmination of these efforts allowed us to encapsulate the unique facets that set our business functions apart, both within and beyond the pharmaceutical industry.

This initiative has significantly enhanced our ability to attract top-tier talent, leading to a notable improvement in employer perception and substantial positive outcomes in our talent acquisition endeavors.