EnDevor Logo
January 2010
EnDevor Recruiting, Inc. Issue No.9
Greetings!

Happy New Year from EnDevor Recruiting!  I'm sure for many out there it feels better to say these words after 2009 than after any year in recent memory.  The team here at EnDevor would like to give you an overall review of the industry as we see it, a quick recap of the last quarter of 09', and an outlook onto 2010.  As usual, we are also providing links to articles we've collected over this previous quarter that may be of interest.

Our best wishes and luck to all our clients and colleagues in 2010.  We are always here to be of assistance in finding and filling new positions.
 
Sincerely,
John Breese & Martin Caney, EnDevor Management
www.endevorrecruiting.com  office: 617-327-3808
2009 Year in Review
 
As witnesses of recent history, the last two years of the 2000's represented an historic, near-catastrophic change in the financial markets, severely tightened credit and labor markets, and at the time of this writing, our nation at the threshold of sweeping and unprecedented healthcare reform.  While these changes have had negative impacts on our industry (and some structural changes yet unforeseen), the BioPharmaceutical sector continues to be an incredibly viable and increasingly important sector to the economy and of our national security (see: H1N1).   2009 saw 26 new drugs approved by the FDA, more than any of the previous four years, and with more Biotechnology drugs approved (7) than 2008 (4) or 2007 (2).  The Obama administration has also signaled increased funding for the FDA -- which leads many to anticipate somewhat shorter approval cycles for new products.  
 

As was the case in Q3 of this past year, the M&A activity among large pharmaceutical companies goes on as 2010, 2011, and 2012 are critical years for Big Pharma companies facing cliff expirations and whom seek to sustain their cash flows and/or diversify their product portfolios by acquiring smaller yet promising biotechnology concerns.  In parallel, many in Big Pharma are re-evaluating once out of favor but cash-flow rich areas such as vaccines, generics and OTC products. 

Obviously, in mergers and corporate takeovers such as those seen in 2009  there is inevitably a culling of a certain percentage of the workforce of the new, combined entity, as certain overlaps of responsibility and redundancies emerge.  This has happened numerous times in the previous year and could very well continue into 2010.  EnDevor is here to help all those affected by this market force.

 

EnDevor Q4 Recap

If you might remember, we had written in Q3 of 2009 that there was a noticeable uptick in the activity we'd seen coming out of the Summer months.  We noticed that this continued into Q4 2009 and believe it may be attributable to a few factors.  First, regardless of the macro-economy, our industry is subject to the FDA and an FDA approval in most cases prompts our clients to hire or fire, and, although there are more people out of work nationally, the audience of this newsletter and the people we work with are highly educated, highly skilled leaders who are generally in demand with skill sets hard to find.  

 

In the beginning of 2009, with the macro-economic news very dour and soaring national unemployment numbers, many companies justifiably took the search process in-house when looking for executive scientists, engineers and regulatory professionals.  While many were successful, what we saw in Q3 and on into Q4 was a realization by those in-house that to find the best and most capable difference-makers in our industry, simply sifting through inbound resumes was not always going to be sufficient to shorten hiring cycles and get important positions filled.  We have an article at right that explains this phenomenon in greater detail. 

 

In Q4 we were more actively encouraged to help our client companies to fill positions that had lingered and for which inbound applicants were proving dissatisfactory, most especially in the management level positions on which we were tasked.    Our methodology has proven time and time again to shorten vital time-to-fill metrics and ensure that our client companies see a full representation of the best possible candidates, both active and passively looking, on the market, and we were successful in helping to fill these roles.

 

2010 Outlook

While the outlook for 2010 might still seem uncertain, and the impact of the impending healthcare legislation still to be seen, we find more  to be optimistic about looking into this next year.   Our industry is still innovating -- there are many resilient and vibrant companies with brilliant and promising drug ideas that have survived this last year and emerge as of this writing.  We believe that if the FDA is able to reduce regulatory delays, hopefully with new structure and better funding, this should bring on new approvals, and with them, new jobs.  Our outlook is for 2010 if the general trends in industry hold:

·          Stronger companies with streamlined organizations and innovative products having weathered a tough 2009 with better approaches to research, development, quality and manufacturing. 

·          As credit loosens and capital becomes more available, entrepreneurship and small owner-operated companies can be established and grown, leading hopefully to more drugs entering the regulatory approval process and creating new jobs. 

·          We've seen and continue to see our client companies adopt a more quality by design-centric approach, and have observed analytical technology become more pervasive in their product lifecycles, which brings more efficiency to the process and ultimately decreasing approval times. People with good experience in QBD, PAT and DoE were required in 2009 and we see more of this in the future.

·          Lastly, we foresee a better-funded FDA streamlining and ultimately approving more products, as regulatory delays lessen, both from improved efficiencies from companies submitting drugs for consideration and a differently structured FDA.   
In This Issue
2009 in Review & 2010 Outlook
Quick Links
Articles of Interest
 
Join Our Mailing List!
About Us
EnDevor is a highly specialized executive search firm serving both the Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology industries. Areas covered include formulations, regulatory, preformulations, process development, process chemistry and analytical development. Based in Boston, MA, our core competency is the recruitment and placement of highly talented, highly sought after leaders in the BioPharm/Pharmaceutical development and manufacturing sectors throughout the United States. We are a full service recruiting firm focusing on both retained and contingency searches. EnDevor helps our clients establish a first-mover advantage by quickly and carefully extracting the best talent available in the marketplace, from bench-level individual contributors to c-level executives. Our unique methodology helps to streamline the search, interview and hiring processes by employing key qualification strategies and search criteria.