5 Clinical Research Recruitment Trends for 2024

The global clinical trials market size was valued at USD 80.7 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 6.49% from 2024 to 2030. Despite this anticipated growth, the clinical research industry has faced huge challenges over the past year, largely driven by political and economic turbulence.

Whilst 2023 saw mass layoffs across the industry and an overall slowdown in operations, clinical research activity is predicted to pick up again in 2024, and as a recruitment professional, now is the time to ensure your workforce is ready to pick up the pace.

In this article, we’ve outlined 5 trends we expect to see continue in clinical research recruitment in 2024, highlighting what you can do to ensure you’re ready to engage and attract top talent in a challenging job market.

Increasing Adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

How could we write a 2024 predictions article without mentioning AI?

As a recruitment professional, you cannot afford to ignore AI in 2024. AI has already proven its potential to revolutionise the recruitment process by streamlining operations, improving efficiency, and enhancing decision-making.

82% of recruiters and HR decision-makers are using AI-powered tools either frequently or very frequently, with the top use cases reported as:

• Chatbots and intelligent candidate messaging (45%)
• Job recommendations on career sites (41%)
• Email and recruitment marketing content (39%)
• Screening candidates via automated messages (39%)
• Intelligent sourcing (38%)

More and more AI-powered recruitment tools are emerging every week, and it would be impossible to keep up with – and indeed implement – every single one. As a recruitment professional, you should instead be focusing on your pain points and looking at which tools and platforms will help you enhance your hiring success. For example, do you have a poor candidate response rate? Is your recruitment marketing content lacking?

As well as researching tools and platforms to implement into your processes, you also need to be aware of the tools and platforms jobseekers are using. Just as new AI-powered tools are emerging every week for recruiters, so are they emerging for candidates. Whilst there are many genuine use cases for AI in a jobseekers’ search, there are also tools out there that are helping candidates to fabricate their job applications and cheat their way into the recruitment process.

Whilst AI-generated content on applications, CVs and cover letters isn’t always easy to detect, you must be aware of its existence, and ensure you’re evaluating candidates in ways that don’t allow them to hide behind technology.

Importance of Early Careers Hiring

In 2024, Gen Z is poised to overtake Baby Boomers and make up a rapidly growing share of the workforce. It’s no secret that the clinical research industry has tackled a skills shortage in recent years, and as noted by the CCRA, if we’re to overcome this shortage, we need to increase investment into early years talent. Investing in this talent will allow you to develop and cultivate the skills you need to propel innovation, and by starting a candidate’s career path early, you’ll be able to mould your employees into future business leaders.

Investing in early career talent today means investing in a future workforce that is diverse, resilient, and adaptable. Early talent programs often prioritise access, opening up new pathways for students and recent graduates to enter the workforce, increasing diversity and ensuring that the sector benefits from new ideas and perspectives. As an industry, we must also work together to promote clinical research as an exciting and accessible space to kickstart a career, strengthening our future talent pipeline.

Transition to Skills-Based Hiring

Continuing with the topic of the clinical research skills shortage, another trend we can expect to see in the industry is a move towards more skills-based hiring. This approach focuses on evaluating a candidate’s specific skills and competencies rather than traditional qualifications or criteria.

Skills-based hiring creates a more diverse and inclusive talent pool by removing bias based on educational backgrounds or experience. This approach levels the playing field for candidates from different backgrounds and provides opportunities for individuals who may have acquired valuable skills through non-traditional routes. As a recruitment professional, this also allows you to tap into potential top talent that may have been overlooked in traditional hiring processes. By focusing on skills rather than credentials, you can identify candidates who possess the necessary abilities to excel in the job, even if they lack certain qualifications or experience.

With the increasing adoption of AI in the job application process, skills-based hiring can also help to protect your organisation from candidates who have fabricated CVs or cover letters to include details of qualifications they may not hold and experiences they may not have had. It can increase the likelihood of you finding the most qualified person for the job and may allow you to attract exceptional talent that may be being overlooked by your competitors.

Change in Mood

The life science industry has faced a huge deal of uncertainty over the past year, largely driven by economic turbulence. Between Jan – Apr 2022 and Jan – Apr 2023, there was a reported 448% YoY increase in layoff activity in the pharmaceutical industry, with this downward market trend continuing throughout 2023. The market has transitioned from being largely candidate-driven during the post-pandemic boom, to employer-driven, with fewer job openings and more competition among jobseekers.

This has undoubtedly created a shift in mood amongst the clinical research workforce. Employee mobility is reportedly falling, with employees less concerned about chasing new opportunities and career development, and more concerned with job security. Paired with a turbulent economy and the threat of a recession in countries like the UK, the increase in layoff activity has shown employees that at least for now, the grass is rarely greener elsewhere.

Prioritisation of Diversity and Inclusion

It goes without saying that prioritising diversity and inclusion within your hiring process is an absolute must in 2024. Not only is it quite simply the right thing to do, but evidence has proven that a diverse workforce has a positive influence on innovation and creativity, allowing you to bring together a wealth of unique experiences and ideas. An inclusive corporate culture is connected with a 59% boost in innovation, and employees who feel very included are nearly 3x more likely than their peers to feel committed to their organisations.

But what does diversity and inclusion really mean?

When it comes to creating a truly inclusive hiring process, you need to do more than steer clear of gendered language in your job adverts. Diversity and inclusion are becoming more nuanced, and as a recruitment professional, you should be looking at ways of ensuring you’re providing equal opportunities, removing barriers, and fostering a sense of belonging for everyone, irrespective of their differences. Not only do ethnicity and sex play a key part in creating an inclusive hiring process, but other factors such as age, sexual orientation, gender identification, socioeconomic status, and neurodiversity must be acknowledged.

As a recruitment professional, one of the best things to do to ensure you’re cultivating a diverse and inclusive workforce is to lean on partnerships with organisations aimed at raising the bar on inclusion, such as the Proud Science Alliance (PSA). The PSA is a collective of healthcare and life sciences sector LGBTQ+ networks working to raise the bar on LGBTQ+ inclusion within their organisations and the sector as a whole. Don’t assume what your candidates/employees need, and instead, work alongside such organisations to understand what you can do to make a real difference.

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