6 Steps to Hiring a Clinical Research Associate (CRA)

Bringing top talent to your Clinical Research Organisation (CRO) can be a challenge, regardless of how long you’ve been working in recruitment. In a job market that’s remained highly competitive, standing out as an employer of choice and finding new ways to locate and engage your target audience of talent is becoming harder than ever.

In this article, we’ve outlined 6 key steps to take when searching for CRAs to help you refine your recruitment strategy…

Determine Your Needs

Firstly, be clear on who your ideal candidate is. Make a list of the absolute essentials this person must have, as well as a list of desirables. The level of skill and experience they need may depend on factors such as the size and complexity of your trials, the patient population, and the treatments being investigated.

As well as qualifications, hard skills, and experiences, think about the traits and soft skills you want your ideal candidate to have. For a CRA role, these may include problem-solving, attention to detail, organisation, and communication skills. Once you’ve got your ideal candidate defined, you’ll be able to make your recruitment advertising more targeted.

Create an Engaging Job Advert

Don’t just copy and paste your job description into a job advert. A job description is a detailed summary of the key responsibilities and requirements of the job and is used to clearly communicate company expectations and add more context to a role. On the other hand, a job advert should act as a marketing tool, created with the aim of engaging potential candidates by presenting your company as a desirable place to work, and your role as an opportunity not to be missed.

Where a job description is detailed and informative, a job advert should be clear, concise, and enticing. More tips on improving your CRA job adverts can be found here.

Expand Your Reach

Once you’ve posted your role on your website or on social media, think about how you can increase traffic to your adverts and bring more qualified talent to your organisation. One way of doing this is by sharing your roles on a niche job board such as PharmiWeb.Jobs, which has more than 440,000 registered jobseekers actively seeking a job in the life science industry.

On our job board, you can push your roles in front of an ever-growing audience, proactively search more than 83,000 CVs to match candidates to your roles, and send your jobs directly to your ideal audience through targeted email campaigns.

Find out more about how we can help to grow your talent pool here.

Strengthen Your Employer Brand

There are hundreds of CROs currently hiring for CRAs. So how do you make your roles stand out?

You need to make sure you have a strong Employee Value Proposition (EVP) that clearly communicates the unique benefits an employee would gain through a career with you. Even if you offer a candidate the same salary as another CRO, the working environment, company culture, and other opportunities you offer will be unique to you, so it’s important to use these to bring top talent to your organisation.

Once defined, your EVP should be at the forefront of all your recruitment advertising activities. One way to effectively communicate your EVP to candidates is by setting up a PharmiWeb.Jobs Employer Branded Careers Hub. These are branded mini-sites containing all the information a jobseeker needs to know about a career with you, strengthening your employer brand and employer of choice positioning on our job board.

Take a look at examples of our branded careers hubs here.

Keep Candidates Engaged

Even after a jobseeker applies for one of your roles, you need to work hard to keep them engaged throughout the entire recruitment process – the hard part isn’t over!

With competition for CRAs still fierce, reducing candidate drop-off from the process is key to securing the best talent in 2023. Focus on making the process as seamless as possible; keeping candidates informed at every stage, being responsive to any questions they may have, not making the process any longer than it has to be, and providing them with as much detail about timelines etc. as you can.

Track Your Efforts

Especially if you’re hiring in bulk, it’s crucial to track the results of your recruitment efforts. By gathering vital data such as your average cost per hire and sourcing channel effectiveness, you’ll build up a picture of what is and isn’t working for you, ensuring you’re investing your resources into the right channels and getting the best ROI for your organisation. Here are 21 recruitment metrics to measure in 2023.