It has been a vintage year for Paramount Recruitment, with a change in the agency’s focus, some major client wins and the launch of a refreshed brand image to reflect the company’s new vision. Here, Director Eugene McDaid shares his thoughts on 2016 and the challenges that lay ahead in 2017.

A giant leap for recruitment-kind

At the end of last year, Paramount Recruitment made a bold decision to move away from the traditional contingency-based model of recruitment and focus on what we do best – building long term relationships with companies and partnering with them to find the right people to grow their business.

Contingency recruitment demands high volumes of candidates, quickly and at the lowest price, and this approach rarely delivers any real quality or value to a client particularly when dealing with specialised and senior roles.

So we began 2016 with a vision to specialise in our areas of greatest expertise. To do this we boosted our medical communications, genomics and bioinformatics teams and we are pleased to say that this strategy is already paying off. Our bespoke and specialised service is attracting like-minded clients, such as Genomics England, proving there is definitely space in the recruitment market for agencies prioritising sector knowledge and experience over simply generating CVs.

Its good to talk

To reflect the new direction for the business, we have refreshed our branding, our website and what we are trying to say to prospective candidates and clients about who we are and what we do.

As part of the process, we have considered how we could contribute more to the communities we serve, to give something back. This is being achieved in part through a renewed dedication to providing lively and informative articles and opinion pieces to share our insights into the life sciences and recruitment industries.

What’s next for Paramount Recruitment?

The shifting political landscape makes it quite difficult to predict what lies ahead for the recruitment and life sciences sectors – and therefore Paramount – in 2017.

In terms of recruitment, there may be some challenging times as the finer details of Brexit and the free movement of labour across our borders are hammered out in Westminster and Brussels. Depending on the outcome of negotiations, this could result in tighter restrictions for economic migration and potential skills shortages in the pharma and research industries. With talks of a possible EU referendum in France, Europe may hold more upsets for 2017.

Despite the unsettling economic conditions on our doorstep, across the pond the changes in the US could actually benefit the UK in many ways. Should the UK secure a better trade deal with the US, this could attract more investment into the country’s pharma industry which will quicken the pace of discoveries and breakthroughs. Paramount is already considering a strategy to expand its ties with the US market in 2017 and secure high calibre candidates from American life science companies.

In addition, the US has its own pioneering genomics research programme and this is certainly of interest to the UK. Genomics medicine is definitely one to watch over the coming years and Paramount will continue to work closely with clients in this sector to get the right talent into the industry, to make the discoveries that could transform modern medicine.