|
 For Email Marketing you can trust
|
|
|
|
|
The Beaker Buzz
June 2010
|
|
|
|
Welcome
to summertime at Beaker!
For
the life sciences industry, it means a welcome respite from conferences &
conventions (at least until September) and a time to reflect on how far the
industry has come in the last six months.
Flash
back to January 1st, 2010. CEO's were
holding worse-case contingency meetings with their Boards. The recruiting market was frozen with no
companies adding headcount and the best candidates not willing to consider
opportunities beyond their current role. And, employees were hunkered down fearful of losing whatever job
security remained in their current role.
For
sure, the tide has shifted & the industry is thriving again. And, while a full recovery is not complete,
the trajectory and mindset of the industry gives enough optimism to welcome the
summer and look forward the second half of the year.
Jeffrey D. Clark
Chief Executive Officer, Beaker
jclark@beaker.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Life
Technologies is a global biotechnology tools company dedicated to improving the
human condition. Our systems,
consumables and services enable researchers to accelerate scientific exploration,
driving to discoveries and developments that make life even better. Life
Technologies customers do their work across the biological spectrum, working to
advance personalized medicine, regenerative science, molecular diagnostics,
agricultural and environmental research, and 21st century forensics.
|
Valeant, Biovail Agree to $3.2 Billion Reverse Merger
06/21/2010 Sten Stovall, Dow Jones Newswires
Valeant
Pharmaceuticals International and Canada's Biovail Corp. Monday said
they plan to merge to create a specialty pharmaceuticals group focusing
on neurological products, dermatology and generic medicines in Canada
and emerging markets. (Read more)
|
Gen-Probe invests $50M in Pacific Biosciences
06/18/2010 BusinessWeeks
Diagnostic
test maker Gen-Probe Inc. said Thursday it invested $50 million in
sequencing company Pacific Biosciences, and will work on products that
combine technologies developed by each company. (Read more)
|
OncoMed gets $40M in stem cell deal with Bayer Schering
06/18/2010 Steve E.F. Brown, San Francisco Business Times
OncoMed Pharmaceuticals Inc. will work with Germany's Bayer Schering Pharma AG on stem cell drugs to fight cancer. (Read more)
|
Bayer and OncoMed Pharmaceuticals Enter $400 Million Strategic Alliance
06/17/2010 PRNewswire
Bayer
Schering Pharma AG and OncoMed Pharmaceuticals, Inc., today announced a
global strategic alliance to discover, develop and commercialize novel
anti-cancer stem cell therapeutics targeting the Wnt signaling
pathway. Cancer stem cells are a subset of tumor cells believed to
play a significant role in the establishment, metastasis and recurrence
of cancer and agents targeting the Wnt pathway have the potential to be
developed as pan-tumor drugs. (Read more)
|
|
Career and Industry Impressions
|
|
Recruiting...Redefined
The economy has forced upon all of us a sea change and the
opportunity to reexamine the world around us. Nowhere is this change and
opportunity more evident than in the recruiting sector, where a quiet but
dramatic shift is underway.
From an HR perspective, internal staffing teams are smaller than
they were a year ago. Budgets have shrunk and will continue to be
challenging. Job board spending is down significantly. Agency
& search firm usage is at an all-time low for most employers, many of whom
would prefer to keep it that way.
A Closer Look
From all accounts, everyone is managing their headcount and
discretionary spending with a heightened level of discretion. Many have
had their resources clipped by corporate financial constraints. Overall,
HR budgets now look very different compared to years past, smaller and more
thoughtful. Nowhere has that been more evident than in the size and
makeup of internal staffing teams. One of the top 5 employers in the life
sciences industry pared their internal recruiting team from 200 to less than 40
recruiters.
Leading job boards have been displaced from their prominent perch
atop the HR budget, as a result of buyer's remorse driven by diminishing value
and slipping ROI. On top of falling demand, job boards overall are
declining in popularity and promise, as employers and candidates realize that
only 3% of online job postings result in the placement of an external
candidate.
Recruiting tools, subscriptions, and investment in Web 2.0 are
also being much more closely scrutinized for their tangible ROI and
contribution to hiring. For most companies, these nice-to-have luxuries
have fallen to the wayside.
Agencies have become a 'pariah' of sorts in this budgetary
environment. Contingency & retainer-based agency volume has all but
evaporated. As a result, search firms & recruiters are competing for
a smaller pool of projects across the industry. The RPO sector is growing
and popular, but mostly only viable for larger employers looking to free their
TA team from volume-based recruiting at lower levels.
More than the Economy
Over the past 15 years, technology has provided us with a powerful
new medium to connect with candidates. However, many of the most
popularized platforms have yet to prove their worth. Instead, they
are the predictable headlining act at an endless parade of 'next generation'
recruiting conferences, seminars and training sessions.
And
many argue the science of recruiting has suffered. Compromised by easy
access are the traditional skills required to identify,
develop and recruit the strongest of candidates. With technology comes
responsibility for us to develop along with it. But, are staffing
teams
living up to their end of the bargain?
So with all this change, there remains one constant. Nothing
has replaced the need for a talented recruiter to pick up the phone and engage
a strong candidate about a compelling career opportunity. But with
corporate career sites swamped with applicants, HR is doing more filtering than
recruiting these days. As a result, many are wondering how well their
staffing team will adjust when candidates again come in high demand.
A Perfect Storm...or an
Opportunity?
For
the first time since the earliest signs of a downturn in
September 2008, signs of optimism have returned to the
industry. Financing is flowing; deals are getting done. And as a
result, headcount
is beginning to increase. For smaller companies, it means a
reawakening
of recruiting. For larger employers, it means acceleration in the pace
of
hiring around the world.
Beyond the population of job seekers, passive candidates are again
considering options beyond their current role. Relocation, where once
impossible, now appears only difficult. This activity will lead to
turnover which in turn will again begin to create a new necessity for
recruiting.
But what will we do differently this time? Gone is the option of
simply ramping back up old habits of spending and inefficiency. So, HR
leaders are faced with finding a smarter way to meet new hiring demands with a
more critical eye toward scalability & cost-efficiency. And,
employers must again begin to look beyond speed & cost to the quality of
placements within their organization.
In this new world, companies must be smarter in how they manage
the process of recruitment. In the simplest form, what employers need is
access to qualified, motivated candidates. From that point, internal HR
teams can manage the remainder of the hiring process. This requires a new
thinking in the tools and services of recruiting.
Internally, passive recruiting skills must be relearned by
internal recruiters now accustomed to a bounty of applicants for each open
project. In service providers, new offerings, like BeakerSource™, will
emerge to challenge the traditional model of most recruiting firms, which were
largely conceived long before the technology now available. Value will be
driven by results, not retainer, as the entire market searches for faster,
cheaper yet more effective means of complementing their own internal staffing
teams.
Without exception, every category of the employment industry has
been dramatically affected and will be forced to adapt to a new landscape of
recruiting, molded by the lessons of the past 16 months. The pricing
model of search firms will be challenged. Job boards will need to
legitimize their value proposition. Web 2.0 will need to begin to realize
its potential. And, as staffing accelerates, companies will need to
more carefully scale their investment in internal recruiting teams and the
tools they enable them with, with a focus on flexibility and
efficiency.
For certain, 2010 and beyond will be a year of change for the
recruiting industry unlike any in the past few decades, this time spawned not
by technology but by an insistence that we all find a better way. |
|
|