The race to contain Ebola is it challenging the talent pool Viewpoint careers advice blog

The race to contain Ebola is it challenging the talent pool The Ebola outbreak in West Africa first hit the headlines in March last year and since then more lives have been lost to the disease than in the entire period since its discovery in 1976. This has led to rapid investment into the search for a vaccine and treatments. The impact on candidate hiring has been mixed, with the focus of recruitment within smaller, agile research organisations rather than the large pharmaceutical giants that are fronting the research. The race to identify treatments and a vaccine has begun The World Health Organization (WHO) figures up to 2 February 2015 put the total number of Ebola deaths at 8,984. However, this is likely to be an underestimate, given the difficulty of collecting data. In August 2014, the United Nations health agency declared an ‘international public health emergency’, saying that a coordinated response was essential to arrest the spread of the virus. Governments around the world and regions such as the European Union subsequently pledged funding on an unprecedented scale, setting up facilities in affected countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Countries such as the UK and USA have also been sending medical and logistics personnel and funding the development of vaccines. Vaccines Europe and the Ebola+ programme One such enterprise is the Ebola+ programme, an Innovative Medicines Initiative launched by Vaccines Europe in November 2014. This is a €280m push to fund projects by pharmaceutical and vaccine companies to boost the development, manufacture, transport and storage of Ebola vaccines. Such large injections of cash have fuelled the development race. With margins in the vaccine business notoriously low, this will have come as a significant incentive to pharmaceutical companies. Progress is now being made with at least three vaccines in development by Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK), Johnson Johnson (JJ) and Merck. The hiring picture is not entirely clear So, how has this flurry of much needed activity impacted on jobs and recruitment to the pharmaceutical industry? Logic would suggest the sector might be brimming over with new appointments and contracts, particularly in clinical trial management and drug safety, as vaccine candidates are fast-tracked to meet the demands of the health crisis. However, Chloe Westley, Associate Life Sciences Recruitment Consultant at Hays in London acknowledges that while we might expect to see demand increasing, in the real world of recruitment, the pharmaceutical industry’s unique business model means it is not so straightforward. She explains: “While there is potential for a surge in demand for drug safety, pharmacovigilance and regulatory affairs professionals, companies like GSK, who have been working in response to the Ebola crisis with the Wellcome Trust US National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Centre, may be choosing to do the work with their existing personnel.” She goes on to say that the picture is further clouded, at least in the case of GSK, by recent staff layoffs in its US vaccines department. This would suggest that the hiring trend is moving in the opposite direction. The role of Contract Research Organisations (CROs) and biotech companies A senior spokesperson from a CRO has firsthand experience of almost winning a contract to an Ebola vaccine research trial by one of the big pharmaceutical companies involved. He describes how the pharmaceutical business model is now well set up to accommodate sudden and urgent projects such as the Ebola crisis: “We bid to do the Ebola vaccine development work, but lost out to a competitor. The way the pharmaceutical business model works now, ‘big pharma’ does not recruit new staff when projects like these come along, but rather, approaches trusted research organisations like ours, or small biotechs that are already set up to hit the ground running. They may recruit one or two people to project-manage the CRO, but they don’t run trials in-house like they used to.” In summary The Ebola crisis has mobilised a global effort to develop one or more vaccines to stem the spread of the epidemic. It is clear that the benefits will now far outweigh the costs, human and financial, for these devastated African economies. The work is being done, whether in-house by big pharma or outsourced to smaller organisations. It would appear that existing staffing infrastructure has been sufficient to accommodate the upsurge in development and trial work or where new roles have been generated it has been in smaller, more agile CROs. This is the picture in the commercial sector. In the public sector, however, there continues to be a direct impact on recruitment for positions in the front line, such as doctors and nurses, in West Africa. Are you working in the war on Ebola? If so, we’d welcome your experience and insights. To view our current vacancies, please visit our life sciences jobs index. Stay up to date with latest news from across the globe by joining our LinkedIn group, Life Sciences Industry Insights with Hays and follow us on Twitter @HaysLifeScience