Oncology Monitors recruits the industry using other CRAs. No, we're not talking about referrals - we do the recruiting. So how does monitor involvement impact the client side of staffing CRAs? It's a fair question and one you should be asking on your end. We realize that this is an unconventional approach. It also takes some getting used to if you are a new client, but the advantages are intuitive if you look at it from a CRA's perspective - your target audience if you need monitors.
We readily acknowledge that personnel at other recruiting agencies are professionals - at staffing. Traditional staffing, in our experience, is salesmanship. That's why their pitch to potential clients is based on marketing, mission statements, and platitudes about matchmaking and wonderful people: they are trying to sell you something, after all.
The reality in our industry is that all of the staffing agencies have access to about the same pool of candidates, and as you may be aware, it's not a lot of people to begin with and the good CRAs are an even smaller subset. The differentiation will be in how fast they can flood you with resumes or how much they can charge you for carefully vetted candidates if they are your exclusive vendor.
No matter who you do business with, what all of these companies have in common is their interface with the candidate pool. That's where we come in, it's why we exist, and it's how we're different.
One of the open secrets in the industry is not often shared with clients: CRAs generally don't like recruiters or the recruiting process. We view them at best as a necessary evil, and a tool to use to our advantage occasionally to get a better-paying position. They rarely return our phone calls or e-mails unless they can make a buck, and we have all experienced the feast-or-famine of dealing with an agency. When you are first starting out and have little experience, recruiters literally have no use for you. Get a couple of years under your belt and they gather like flies. Activate your resume on a job site, and you may have 50 e-mails the next day. The same company that wouldn't talk to you now wants to be your best friend.
The courtship is often awkward; it's surprising how unprofessional much of the industry remains. You will no doubt deal with a professional executive with many years of industry experience when you are solicited for your staffing business, but once they get your jobs, the recruiters take over to do most of the leg work.
Working on commission, most spend long days making cold calls and sending blaster e-mails, ‘sourcing’ the best they can. Recruiters often read from scripts and may not be able to even pronounce some of the therapeutic areas they are staffing. Unable to understand our resumes, they instead look for previous experience and then ask us how many of each type of visit we have done, and if we have specific experience in exactly the kind of study they are recruiting for. Semantics matter: we've all lost a chance at a job because a recruiter has a buzzword or two in their requisition, and if you say no to the buzzword early in the phone screen, you won’t be able to talk your way back in since they don’t really understand what it is we do. Very often, recruiters e-mail us extensive experience questionnaires to complete ourselves, which means they can then simply forward the information on to you without having to actually understand it.
Usually the only information a recruiter has access to - or that they will reveal to a potential candidate - is a job description. The descriptions tend to be generic and useless to CRAs. The recruiter can't answer any of your other questions. The client is great, no promises can be made about the amount of travel, and the goal is to get your resume.
Whether you get the job or not, once they have your name in a database, you are never off the mailing list, and your contact information survives their turnover: someone will be contacting you whenever they have a position to fill. CRAs become accustomed to so many cold calls to assist in 'sourcing' that you learn not give out your personal cell if you can help it, and try to let as many calls as you can go to voicemail.
Naturally, this impacts the CRA candidate pool in a negative way, and helps to create an atmosphere that encourages a savvy but cynical, fickle and sometimes greedy workforce. The good CRAs who are committed professionals tend to take refuge in working exclusively with recruiters that they can trust.
At Oncology Monitors we fulfill this role and it's our Raison d'être. We believe there's a better way to attract and keep talent for your clinical research monitoring needs. It's not rocket science, but it requires the experience to understand what you need and expect, the knowledge of what makes a good CRA, and the professionalism and ethics to make it all work. Our goal is to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase satisfaction – we believe win-win relationships are the only ones worth having.
