Fast growing recruiters thrive on clinical focus
pharmafile | March 23, 2006 | News story | Business Services |
Recruitment company Levy Associates have become one of the UK's fastest growing companies thanks to their success in matching talented clinical staff with pharma employers.
The St Albans-based company was ranked in the recent Sunday Times Virgin Atlantic Fast Track 100, an annual list of the UK's fastest growing companies, just six years after being launched by managing director Lawrence Levy.
Levy says his most important strategic decision was to concentrate on select areas within the industry and maintain a strict client focus.
"The key to our success is that we focus on core competencies and core clients and we put a huge amount of effort into understanding their business and their needs," he said.
Levy Associates places most of its candidates in clinical development – phases I to IV, regulatory affairs, medical units and pharmacovigilance/drug safety.
It has an established permanent recruitment division and also supplies contract or consultant personnel to the clinical sector – an area the company said has experienced strong growth over the last five years.
Pharmaceutical companies are employing increasing numbers of clinical contractors, and the growth has helped recruiters Levy Associates become one of the UK's best performing companies.
Managing director and founder Lawrence Levy said: "There is an increasing trend for pharma companies and CROs to use contract personnel alongside permanent employees, and the number of consultants we have on our books, from CRAs to project managers, is growing all the time."
The company has a strong focus on Europe – it opened an Amsterdam office in 2003 and plans further expansion on the continent.
It will also shortly finish compiling a Europe-wide candidate database, which has been two years in the making and will help the company meet the current and future needs of its clients.
The migration of European clinical personnel to the UK is a growing trend that Levy Associates has been quick to take advantage of.
Pierre Joly, a senior consultant at Levy Associates, said: "The sheer number of opportunities within pharma, biotech and CROs, together with the perceptions of the standard of living and the relative ease for EU nationals to make the transition has provided us with a rich source of skilled international applicants for both our domestic and European based clients."
Levy Associates was one of just three recruitment firms on the Fast Track list and the only one with a presence in pharma.
Compiled by Oxford-based research company Fast Track, the 2005 list ranks companies according to their annual sales growth rate between 2001 and 2004.
Between 2000 and 2004 Levy Associates grew to a 7.5 million pounds business with an average annual growth rate of 62%, with a current turnover of 10.5 million pounds per annum.
As well as being one of the fastest growing pharmaceutical recruiters within the industry, the company is a supplier to the likes of Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Schering-Plough and AstraZeneca. Its client base also includes two of the top five European CROs.
