Advice You - Business

According to a July 2002 survey conducted during the Pew Internet and American Life Joint Project, over 52 million people have looked for job information online and more than 4 million continue to do so every

According to USFDA, a combination product is one composed of any combination of a drug and device; biological product and device; drug and biological product

day.

Furthermore, the study showed, some 47% of all the adult Internet users in the United States have gone online looking for positions or job information. Doubtless, those figures are even higher today, <

; or drug, device, and biological product and fixed dose combination would include two or more combinations of drug.

Examples of combination products may in

b>so one might readily assume that the Internet offers the exposure to job leads that the great majority of job seekers want. The truth, however, is less reassuring.

Here’s why:

At first glance, the Intern

lude drug-coated devices, drugs packaged with delivery devices in medical kits, and drugs and devices packaged separately but intended to be used together.

et would seem to be a long-awaited boon to the weary job seeker. There are literally thousands of job sites plus sophisticated search engines to help you sort through them. There are services that will email yo

here is enormous increase in the number of combination products entering the market in the recent years. Combination products have proven advantages but fixe

fresh openings per your parameters on a regular basis. You can answer help wanted ads online, email your r?sum? to hundreds of recruiters, explore different career fields, access company profiles, get professio

d dose combinations are still in the process of convincing regulatory authority on their advantages over the single ingredient formulations.

Combination pro

nal career help – oh, the list of goodies goes on and on!

And, to be fair, most of the job-hunting helps on the Net are useful to some extent. Yet studies show that, at best, of all the jobs posted on the In

ucts have become life saving products for the pharmaceutical companies who doesn’t have many innovative molecules in their product pipeline and have been inc

ternet only 5% are filled that way, leaving a myriad of hopeful job seekers disappointed and angry.

Why such a low percentage of hits? Here are some of the reasons:

Low exposure to job openings.

easingly used in the product life cycle management. Even the companies having product patents are trying to extend their product life cycle through the combi

Most job openings are not posted on the Internet. Part of the reason why is that over 80% of U.S. companies have fewer than 100 employees. Thus, the likelihood that these smaller companies use the Internet

nation products and maximize the revenues. But the companies involved in this practice are overlooking that they are burdening the patients both economically

to post job openings or to seek employees is correspondingly small.

A glut of submittals for each job.
For example, a recent report noted that monster.com, which has at least 15 million r?sum?s<

and physically. They need to rightly judge the benefits of the combination products and they have to even look at the risks involved when combining the produ

/b> posted on it at any one time, receives over 4 million new r?sum?s a day. Thus, the likelihood that your r?sum? will be pulled up by a potential employer—who may be deluged with hundreds of r?sum?s in

ts. Some of the combination products were well accepted by physicians while others suffered. Companies involved in development of combination products are fi

nswer to a single posting—is slim at best.

An over-fed Monster.
Monster.com, the "Big Daddy" of all search engines, pulls a disproportionate number of job seekers who use only it. Thus, once again,

ding difficulty in defining their combination products and facing various challenges from selecting a combination to marketing it.

Following aspects would a

too many submittals to too few jobs.

Ambiguous job titles.
What you call a "CFO," another company may term a "Senior Financial Executive." If you don’t enter appropriate search parameters,

dd to the challenges in developing combination products:

Which markets to tap where the combination products can do fairly well?
Which combination prod

you may never know of openings that match your background in all other respects.

User ignorance.
Among those jobseekers with access to the vast and complicated Internet, few know how to u

cts are meaningful and rational?
Which therapeutic categories to select?
Which Combinations can address unmet needs of the patients?
Do combin

se it to its full advantage to seek jobs. Even for the initiated, applying to online jobs can be a time-consuming, frustrating experience. A 2005 white paper about the quality of Fortune 500 company career

tions increase the patient compliance?
What would be the developing cost?
How to tackle the risks encountered during combination product developmen

ages, published by Internet recruiter gurus Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, notes that although 41% of online job applications on those pages take 5 minutes or less to complete, over 43% of them soak up 10 – 30 mi

t?

As combination products don't fit into the traditional categories of drugs, medical devices, or biological products, the USFDA is in the process of devel

nutes, and 13% had nothing to which to apply. Furthermore, the bottom 20% of those Fortune 500 companies, they feel, "target no one, engage no one, inform no one, and respect no one."

So what are we to do?

Cle

ping new procedures for reviewing their safety, efficacy and quality.

Professional from academic institutions, pharmaceutical industries, health care indust

arly, the savvy job hunter — if he is to get maximum exposure to job openings on the Internet — must research and understand just what is involved, weigh the value of this or that marketing avenue, and pro

y and representatives from various regulatory agencies are working out to design the regulatory requirements for manufacture and sale of combination products

eed accordingly. He must identify those Internet aspects that clearly offer a viable return for the investment of his time, eliminating all others.

And, while it would be foolish to ignore the Internet — people

.

As there is an increasing trend of the combination products companies manufacturing such products should be able to tackle the problems involved in the de

do find jobs through it, after all — the astute job hunter will actively pursue all the other marketing channels knowledgeable seekers use: networking, informational interviewing, telephone contacts, spot

elopment. They need to be wiser in analyzing the market trends and the regulatory requirements.

Companies that provide selfless information through particip

opportunities, etc. He will craft a balanced, realistic marketing action plan, one that fully capitalizes on all the job hunting techniques, not just a few.

"All that glitters," after all, "is not gold."

tion in industry events and feedback to regulatory authorities would be able to face the challenges and will be successful in developing combination products

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Advice You - The Job Seeker's Internet: Just a Pile of Fool's Gold?

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