Hiring in a Pandemic COVID-19

Connexis Search Group places a wide range of candidates in the molecular diagnostics and life science industries.   

We place sales reps, sales managers, marketing positions, field application scientists, field service engineers, medical science liaisons, pathologists, CLIA lab directors, medical technologists, clinical lab scientists, software developers, bioinformatics, and many others.In this article, I will discuss the positions in demand and the types of companies that continued to hire during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our firm has seen a spike in hiring. July placements are higher than in previous years.

Sales

Sales reps working for companies that offer critical products or services have more opportunities to advance their products or services since they still have access to the decision-makers. For instance, some of our clients who sell oncology testing are still hiring since their customers (oncologists) continue to treat patients and need these services. One of our clients in the oncology space is currently hiring over fifty people.

Another client who offers respiratory therapy products has recently hired over ten sales reps and clinical specialists to meet the clients' demands in treating COVID-19 patients.

In contrast to the above examples (oncology and respiratory sales), some companies that sell services or products that are more preventative (wellness-oriented) are not hiring during this time. Since many people are postponing preventive doctors’ visits, these types of companies are typically not hiring.

Technical

We see a significant spike in hiring technical candidates such as medical science liaisons, field application scientists, medical directors, lab directors, clinical laboratory scientists, and medical technologists.

We work with two types of technical candidates: Life science companies and CLIA Laboratories.

Our CLIA laboratory clients are hiring candidates to help them perform COVID-19 testing. As everyone is aware, there is a significant push to increase COVID-19 testing. As a result, most CLIA laboratories are ramping up to offer these tests. In the last three months, we have worked with six companies that are hiring medical technologists to perform COVID-19 testing. Each one of these companies is hiring five to six people at a time. One of our new clients has secured a significant contract and is hiring twenty medical technologists and three or four managers to handle the test volume from this contract. Based on the increased hiring demand that we recently experienced, we do not see any end to this trend anytime soon.  

Our life science clients are also experiencing rapid growth and many of them are hiring technical candidates as well. Some of our clients in this space offer product that are used to help researchers find COVID-19 treatments.   So, even though these clients are not doing COVID-19 testing, they provide researchers with information to develop new COVID-19 therapies.  

What types of companies are hiring?

Most of the companies that are actively hiring are backed by private equity or venture capital and have a desire to rapidly advance their product offerings. Larger, established companies tend to operate in wait-and-see mode.