Launch of pharmaceuticals MR site

MrWeb today launches www.marketpharma.com, a site dedicated to pharmaceuticals and healthcare researchers. Relevant news and jobs will appear on both MrWeb and marketpharma, and additional feature articles will appear in the latter exclusively for MR professionals in this market.

The decision to provide a separate way to access jobs in these distinct sub-sectors of MR was based on several factors. MrWeb Director Nick Thomas explains that the two principle reasons came from opposite sides of the job market: 'Firstly, we get a lot of feedback from candidates about the functioning of the vacancy section on the site, with occasional suggestions for extra features, and one recurring request is for a sector menu so people can choose which sectors they want to work in within research. There are several practical reasons not to do this - it would clutter the search page, make coding up of vacancies more difficult and lead to people missing relevant jobs - but we did notice that nearly all these requests came from people in pharmaceuticals and healthcare, and we took a mental note.

'Secondly, it's apparent that the sector is seen as more distinct by recruitment specialists. There are three or four companies specialising in pharmaceuticals MR, without having broader MR remits, and we wanted to cater for them. There are also a number of quite successful pharmaceuticals job sites, some of which have MR jobs but none of which give them much priority as they are a tiny portion of the whole market - in fact none that we could find had as many pharma and healthcare MR jobs as MrWeb, and most of our advertisers don't use them so marketpharma represents an easy way for jobseekers to find most of the relevant jobs in one place - in fact, exactly the reasons we started MrWeb's jobs section more than four years ago.'

The response from advertisers has been enthusiastic - all ten of the MrWeb regulars have pharma and healthcare vacancies and they are in general agreement about the perceived separateness of the sub-sector. The number of jobs on the site will be low relative to the main site, of course, but there are fifty there at present, of which half are new for 2003. To the jobs content will be added feature articles, both on careers / jobhunting and on researching the sector more generally - the first article looks at the current situation for jobseekers and is published today, concurrent [almost] with the publication of the late January MRWho in which it also features.

The site also provides a quick way to access medical omnibuses and agencies in the MrWeb directory with specialist knowledge of the sub-sector, plus desk research links and selected news items from DRNO. Clients and agencies interested in contributing to the site should contact nick@mrweb.com - we also welcome your comments and suggestions.

www.marketpharma.com

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.