What do you think a staffing service like ours sees more of: A) clients who want market research freelancers with general experience? Or B) those who want freelancers with vertical industry specific experience?
We find that many Market Research & Insights teams need temp researchers with “horizontal” skills (such as moderation, report writing, stats/SPSS, etc.) more than vertical industry expertise. But that priority flips for teams that do research in pharmaceutical and medical categories. Why? Sheer complexity and size!
The complexity is in the ecosystem connecting physicians, pharmacists, patients, caregivers, insurance companies, and manufacturers trying to meet essential medical needs. Things get further complicated by attitudes towards medical systems, understanding side effects and adverse events reporting, and many economic and cultural issues.
The size, well, is ENORMOUS: Research and Markets forecasts that the pharma industry alone will reach $1.7 trillion in annual sales in 2025, up from $1.2 trillion in 2020.
With all of this, it’s no surprise that pharma and medical projects often benefit from a researcher with deep industry experience, who understands the known research risk factors specific to these categories and maybe who even knows how to do research in regulated industries (pharma).
Finding market research experts with pharma and/or medical expertise is challenging. Trust us, we know! If you are trying to hire a market researcher in this space, you likely already know how hard it is. Here are a couple of tips we can share from our experience recruiting these experts into our staffing service:
- Tip 1: Be realistic about breadth of topic experience. It is very difficult to find truly qualified market researchers who are experienced with “both sides”: the “B2B” side of provider and payor related research, and the “consumer” side of clients and patients. If you are hiring, you will realistically have a much deeper pool of candidates if you take the POV that you can hire an experienced researcher with one side or the other, and then develop them from there.
- Tip 2: Be open to researchers from academic backgrounds. We often find that our best source of market research methodology experts who have rich, hands-on medical-related research experience come from academia. There are lots of universities that do patient/consumer studies on various healthcare topics. As graduate students finish these programs, they sometimes decide to explore a pivot into commercial market research. The great thing is that these researchers really know their research methods, and many have solid statistics/data analysis skills. The one catch: some of their standard processes around project management and report writing are different—but those issues are easily addressed through an onboarding process.
Would a temporary market researcher with healthcare related expertise help your team? We have several fully vetted US-based consultants in our Rent-A-Researcher service with extensive experience in healthcare services, medical devices, and pharma. Whether you need a quantitative researcher for a survey about over-the-counter medicine or a qualitative researcher for medical executive IDIs, our rockstars have you covered. Click here to request a bio sheet of qualified candidates.
Interested in another vertical industry? Check out our RAR Skills Sheet to see all the categories and skills represented in our candidate pool.
