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Pharmaceutical Sales Jobs
I will be doing a consulting project for one of the big pharma companies this month and it’s actually a repeat client since I did a similar one for them last year working for their drug representatives for a few days. In addition to being a business speaker, I also do these consulting projects on the side. I know that they went through a layoff earlier this year but as I scan the names of the drug representatives I’ll be working with this month, I notice a lot of new names.
Although there were many of the same names from last year, there were a lot of new ones, including a familiar name of a rep I use to work with at one of my former pharma companies. So it appears that after the layoffs, the lost pharmaceutical sales jobs were brought back with new rehires.
Pharma Companies Rehiring
This is not something entirely new as I’ve seen this type of thing quite a few times before. Pharma companies would layoff a part of their pharmaceutical sales force only to rehire to fill back most of the vacant sales territories later on. The funny thing is that when they do rehire, they never call back the former drug representatives they let go.
Maybe they rehire to fill the vacant territories with new blood at lower salary ranges or just to get a new crew to hopefully have better organizational fit. In any case, what this tells me is something that I’ve always said when asked about my opinion on pharmaceutical sales reps getting laid off.
Pharma companies go in cycles. They lay drug representatives off when things are bad and they rehire when things get better or when they realize that they need more people to work the vacant territories that never really vanished in the first place. Sometimes these layoffs are an excuse to clean house of drug representatives who were perhaps trouble makers.
In any case, pharmaceutical sales jobs always seem to come back. So I recommend those who want to enter the industry to always prepare and keep in touch with industry contacts. You never know when they will be rehiring again and when they do, you want to be prepared and ideally, the first to know.
To help you get prepared better than anybody else when pharma companies do rehire to fill vacant territories, see my free pharmaceutical sales jobs webinar.
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