Recruitment firm: Life-sciences industry is hot

Israel’s life-sciences industry is booming, leading recruitment firm Jobinfo said Sunday, citing the annualized 22 percent rise in demand for quality-assurance and regulatory-compliance personnel in the first half of this year.

According to Jobinfo, which specializes in hi-tech, finance and biomed, the data show that more life-sciences companies are being established than before, and more existing companies are moving to the production stage. It said medical-devices companies, the largest component of the life-sciences field, are particularly beholden to international pricing standards and therefore require quality-assurance and regulatory staff right from the beginning.

“The challenge for life-sciences companies was and still is the search for candidates with specific experience in the fields they are developing,” Jobinfo CEO Ilana Achimeir said. There are only a very small number of candidates qualified to work in the life sciences, she said, which differentiates it from other disciplines such as programming and hardware.

Life sciences attracted 27% of all investments from venture-capital funds in the first quarter of 2012, according to IVC Research Center. More than half of that, or about 14% of total venture-capital funding, was directed to medical-devices firms. Life sciences attracted similar attention in the first quarter of 2011, but it ended the year with a market share of just 16% of venture-capital funding.

Jobinfo recently launched an Internet advising campaign under the slogan “Between 0 and 1,” in an attempt to meet the growing demand by attracting graduates from IDF technological units such as 8200 and 9100. The advertisement, which appears on Facebook, YouTube and other social media, asks whether there are more real numbers between zero and one, or between one and infinity. Users who click on the advertisement are led to the Jobinfo website, where an explanation is provided as to why there are more real numbers between zero and one.