Scientific Sales Recruitment: It is an Employer's Market

As the world waits to learn if the long fall of the recession is leveling off, recruitment in scientific sales industry is showing the benefits the tech markets have traditionally shown. Though job losses during the first quarter of 2009 have been in excess of 84,000 in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, hiring has continued in many places and increased in those industries already gaining a flush of new money from stimulus spending, or which expect new growth as a result of current economic shifts. For those involved in scientific sales recruitment that means opportunity opening up doors in many directions.

The end sense is one of fluid change, rather than catastrophic loss. Many trained scientific workers are available for new work and concerned enough to look farther afield than they might once have. This provides recruiters with a cadre of experienced, educated skilled workers primed and ready to be picked up by companies that in other times might not have been hiring. The hardest hit workers continue to be incoming workers just out of college -- a change from previous recessions.

For recruiters the situation is very promising. With a vast reservoir of trained workers, and a changing environment, there is enormous potential for finding prospective workers with the extreme skill levels to serve as representatives for high tech companies, but without the narrow range of skills needed to transfer directly into the production departments. On the other hand there will be enormous pressure in both new and old companies to expand representative staff.

Older companies who have experienced a loss of revenue during the recession have only two ways to improve their financial standing: they can cut back costs by laying off workers, or they can improve sales, which often means taking on new and highly educated employees who can present compelling reasons for purchase to educated and discriminating clients. Newer companies or companies in tech fields who are experiencing new growth, though, will need to build a scientific sales team for the first time.

The areas to focus on will relate to both geography and field. There are very promising signs that New England, with its extreme diversity of high tech companies, its unusually strong medical and biotech industry, and its stable business environment, will see an upsurge in growth and diversification before the year is out. Seattle is similarly showing the first sprouts of new growth. Traditional computer-intensive technology appears to be recovering a bit more slowly. This is likely to cause a continuing stream of job cuts...but for the recruiter this is a chance to gain workers with a solid background in engineering and device design, and often strong secondary education in bio-science.

It may take as long as six months to evolve a clearer sense of where sales growth is going to occur. Vital aspects related to current governmental stimulus, and governmental regulation remain in flux, pending the outcome of the current Presidential administration's progress in advancing health care initiatives, modifying bio-tech restrictions, and promoting new green technologies. However the speed and effectiveness of the moves to date allow for great optimism from the position of the scientific sales recruiter. The potential need for his or her services will be high, and the basic balance of workers to jobs should allow for maximum employment for recruiters for several years to come.