What Pharma Manufacturing Taught Me About Hiring.

I have sat across the table from both sides of this problem.

On one side: a pharmaceutical manufacturing floor, where a single deviation — an unrecorded temperature excursion or a missed in-process check — can invalidate an entire batch worth crores. Where the question is never "Does this look fine?” It is always "Can you prove it’s fine?”

On the other side: a hiring conversation, where a recruiter glances at a CV for six seconds, asks three identical questions, and makes a decision that will shape someone’s career for years.

The contrast never stopped bothering me.

What QA Actually Is

Quality assurance in pharma is not inspection. That is a common misunderstanding. Inspection is what you do at the end – checking the finished tablet, the filled vial, and the sealed blister pack. QA is something earlier and deeper. It is the discipline of designing processes that make failure visible before it becomes catastrophic.

QA asks one question relentlessly: at every stage, what could go wrong that we are not measuring?

That question — asked honestly, repeatedly, and by someone with fresh eyes — is what separates a pharmaceutical facility that exports to regulated markets from one that does not. Hiring has no equivalent question. It has vibes.

The Three QA Lessons That Changed How I Think About Talent

Lesson 1: Every Failure Has a Root Cause You Have Not Documented Yet

In manufacturing, when a batch fails, you do not discard it and move on. You open a deviation report. You perform a root cause analysis. You ask, 'Was this an equipment issue, a material issue, a method issue, a human issue, or a measurement issue?'

The same batch of talent enters India’s pharma job market every year. B.Pharm graduates from tier-2 and tier-3 colleges — solid practical training, clean academic records, zero backlogs. Many of them do not get hired. We call this a “talent gap". It is not. It is an undocumented deviation in the hiring process that no one has been asked to investigate.

The root cause, almost universally: a measurement issue. Recruiters are measuring the wrong things — college brand, aggregate percentage, and English fluency — and labelling the measurement failure as candidate failure. In pharma manufacturing, that is called an out-of-specification result caused by an unvalidated test method. We do not blame the API. We investigate the method.

Lesson 2: Validation Is Not Bureaucracy. It Is Repeatability.

Before any analytical method is used in a regulated pharma facility, it must be validated. You must prove — with data — that your method measures what it claims to measure, consistently, across different conditions.

No one validates the interview.

The primary instrument used to make career-defining hiring decisions — the unstructured, 20-minute, gut-feel interview — has never been tested for specificity, sensitivity, or repeatability. The same candidate, sent to two different interviewers, produces different results. Not because the candidate changed. Because the instrument is unvalidated. In any GMP-compliant facility, we would have shut down that test method on day one.

Lesson 3: In-Process Checks Exist Because End-Point Testing Catches Failures Too Late

The worst moment in pharmaceutical manufacturing is the final QC failure. You have run the entire batch. Every upstream step is complete. Now – at the end – the product fails the assay. The loss is not just material. It is time, energy, and an irreversible opportunity cost.

Good manufacturing practice prevents this by building in-process checks at critical control points throughout production — not just at the end.

Hiring does the opposite. You invest weeks in a candidate — screening, multiple interview rounds, and reference checks — only to discover at the offer stage that the role was never properly defined, or that the team lead and HR had misaligned expectations, or that the candidate’s practical skills were never actually assessed. End-point failure. Preventable with in-process controls. None were installed.

The GHP Framework: Good Hiring Practice

If I were to design a hiring system the way a QA team designs a manufacturing process, it would have three non-negotiable layers.

Specification Before Screening

You cannot release a drug without a specification. You should not begin hiring without one. Not a job description — a specification. What are the critical quality attributes of this role? What are the acceptable limits? What would constitute an out-of-specification result?

Most job postings are vague to the point of uselessness. “Good communication skills.” “Team player.” “Passionate about the industry.” These are not specifications. They are vibes dressed as requirements.

Validated Assessment at the Right Stage

Every touchpoint in the hiring process must measure something specific and documentable. A structured competency interview. A task-based assignment calibrated to the actual role. A practical evaluation for technical positions. For pharma roles — especially in manufacturing and QC — this means placing candidates in scenarios they would actually face. Show them an SOP deviation. Ask them to walk through a CAPA. See if they understand the difference between OOS and OOT. The skills that matter are demonstrable. Most hiring processes never ask for a demonstration.

Deviation Tracking Across Hires

The most underutilised data asset in any organisation is the history of its hiring failures. Which hires did not work out? What was the signal that was missed? Where in the process did the breakdown occur?

Without this data, every hiring cycle starts from scratch. The same errors repeat. The same biases compound. The same “he seemed like a good fit” thinking produces the same attrition 90 days later. In pharma QA, we call this trend analysis. In hiring, we call it "We will do better next time.” The difference is documentation.

Why This Matters More in India Than Almost Anywhere Else

India produces approximately 40% of the world’s generic medicines and nearly 20% of global pharmaceutical exports. The manufacturing infrastructure is world-class. The regulatory compliance systems — for FDA-inspected facilities — are rigorous to the point of being demanding.

The talent pipeline feeding this infrastructure deserves the same rigour in its intake process. Right now, it does not get it. Tier-2 and tier-3 college graduates with genuine skills are being filtered out by credential proxies. Experienced professionals returning from regional roles are overlooked because their resumes do not use the right language. Practical knowledge — built on manufacturing floors and hospital wards — is discounted in favour of academic polish.

The quality of a drug is not determined by the prestige of the facility that manufactures it. It is determined by the rigour of the process that produced it. The same is true of talent.

The Discipline That Has Been Missing

Quality assurance does not make things perfect. It makes failure visible, traceable, and correctable. That is exactly what India’s hiring ecosystem needs — not perfection, but a system that catches errors before they become losses. A system that can look at a rejected candidate file and ask, 'Was this the right decision, and can we prove it?'

I have sat across the table from genuinely talented people who never got the opportunity to demonstrate that talent – because the process that evaluated them was not fit for purpose. That is not a talent problem. That is a quality problem.

And quality problems, I have learned, always have solutions. They just require someone willing to look at the same process again, with fresh eyes, until they see what everyone else has stopped seeing.