A few weeks ago at the CalBio Meeting in San Diego, a major threat to the biotechnology industry was discussed at length.  It is the increasing difficulty in finding properly trained employees.  The biotech industry has recently been increasing its use of H1b visas to help alleviate this problem, especially for Ph.D. scientists and engineers, but because of the political restrictions in the number of these visas allowed per year, this is not a long term (or even short term) labor strategy for the industry.  This problem is primarily due to the fact that fewer and fewer recent college ...

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All indications are positive for the U.S. biotech industry including a significant increase in capital funding, drug approvals, and patent applications over the past three years.  This certainly bodes well for continued strong hiring trends in our industry.

However, there is one force so powerful that it can almost single-handedly bring all of this good news from one of the United States? great industries to a screeching halt.  That force?the politician.

Although we are all for improving our current health care system in terms of making quality health care more accessible for all, we can only hope that ...

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I?ve been reading more lately about the misuse of public information posted by job candidates on the major online job sites such as Monster.com, HotJobs.com, and CareerBuilder.com.

A few years ago, most of the reports of misuse centered around the unauthorized use of resumes and candidates receiving calls trying to sell them services instead of legitimate career opportunities.  However, it looks like the recent trend has taken this misuse from being a nuisance to being criminal.

The Better Business Bureau and the FTC have seen a major rise in complaints about the misuse of personal information ...

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First off, let me say that I believe that objective, professional talent assessments can have a very important place within the recruitment process.  However, they must be used wisely with the candidate being comfortable with the process and with the company only using these assessments as one piece of information in the overall evaluation of prospective employees.

A recent article on ERE by Todd Rogers does a very good job of describing some of the pitfalls of using these assessments from the candidate?s perspective.  More companies have begun the practice of sending out questionnaires which can take up to ...

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Much has been made of the expected qualified personnel shortages in the biotech industry over the next decade, but there are some functional areas which already are experiencing these shortages.  They include:

Biostatisticians

Nurses for Clinical Research and Science Liaison roles.

Medical Affairs Management

Certified Project Managers

Biostatisticians seem to be in particularly high demand at this time and I believe that this demand will only increase in the coming years. 

A few months ago, we were ready to begin work on a Senior Marketing Manager position where the HM initially insisted that he required a candidate that had their MBA from one of the top five business schools and had worked at one of the top three companies in our industry.  Rather than just going off and searching for this proverbial ?needle in a haystack?, we decided to have a detailed discussion with this HM regarding his actual position requirements and also gave him our frank assessment that his schooling and company requirements would severely limit his candidate pool and ...

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Yes, that?s right, it is all about the ?O?!

Opportunity, that is.  (Probably not what made you click on this link)

As a recruiter, it is extremely important to cease upon opportunity when it presents itself.  These include:

Doing a great job in qualifying the open positions you have in front of you.  Which hiring managers are eager to hire, are providing you with prompt feedback, and are being constructive in moving the search forward.  Working with these hiring managers creates an Opportunity!

Doing a great job in qualifying the sourced candidates for your open positions.  Which candidates are ...

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One of the more underappreciated skills that a good recruiter brings to the hiring process is their ability to sell their candidates to the hiring managers.  There have been many times when a candidate that I felt very positive about was initially rejected by the hiring manager.  Many times this is due to the fact that the hiring manager is busy and sometimes not entirely focused on resume review. 

The key to getting that candidate re-reviewed and hopefully interviewed is to present this candidate back to the hiring manager with a concise list of reasons why this candidate should be ...

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Recently we received a job specification which included the following statements:

Position requires analytical skills to characterize complex proteins using SDS-Page, IEF, and HPLC.  In addition, candidates should have strong working knowledge of M-ALS, MALDI-TOF MS, ESI/MS and LC/MS.  Capability to operate multiple MS platforms such as OqTOF, TOF/TOF, and ion trap-FT is highly desired.

While it is extremely important for a recruiter to know the meanings of these acronyms, it is just as important to know what each of these techniques are, what they are meant to achieve and how they would fit together in the ...

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There was a very interesting discussion on ERE a couple of months back about whether executive recruiters really recruit anymore, which raises a question as to the future of the recruiting business.  Large shifts in how an industry conducts business tend to take place at a glacial pace and are not always readily apparent while in the midst of such a shift.  Are we in such a place right now?

To be successful, contingency recruiters must gravitate toward the easiest to fill positions with the easiest to find candidates.  Why?  No Placement, No Pay.. That?s Why. 

However, these easier ...

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Okay, your boss has just handed you the task of recruiting multiple CRA (Clinical Research Associate) positions at your company.  After wondering what you did to them to get them upset at you, now what do you do??

The real question is, ? what should your organization have been doing all along??

CRA positions are notoriously difficult positions to fill because of the very specific experience, travel, and often relocation requirements.  One key to recruiting these difficult positions at your company is to decrease the need for finding external candidates to fill these positions in the first place.  This can be ...

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One of my favorite business reads is Jamming by John Kao.  In this book, Mr. Kao compares the creative process in the business world to a musical jam session where a session may start with a bunch of incongruous and disparate sounds, but end up as incredibly harmonious new music.  His point is that the same thing can happen in the business world if there is a strong interchange of ideas from the widest variety of sources and this creative process is managed effectively.

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