One in five biopharma professionals has now been laid off more than once

Being laid off used to be something that happened to you once in a career, if at all. In biopharma it is now close to routine. A BioSpace LinkedIn poll, reported on 5 November, found 64% of respondents had been let go in the past five years, and 22% had lost a job at least twice.

BioSpace did not publish the number of respondents, so treat the figures as a temperature check rather than a census. Even so, they fit what the BioSpace layoff tracker has recorded week after week.

How it plays out at the hiring stage

BioSpace spoke to Bryan Blair, vice president of biotech and pharma recruiting at GQR Global Markets. His view is blunt. When two candidates are equally qualified, his clients almost always pick the one who has never been let go, and he called layoffs "probably one of the most common reasons candidates are rejected."

The reasoning is understandable. A hiring manager is accountable for how a new hire performs, and a clean, linear CV is easier to defend. But it means people are being screened out for decisions they did not make.

Blair also said some candidates now leave "present" as the end date on a role that ended in a layoff, and estimated that this has become probably five times more common over five years. He said the tactic usually works, and questioned whether the way candidates are judged is fair.

What candidates say

Respondents to a separate BioSpace survey described the cost. One said a senior career had stalled into part-time consulting. Another said repeated restructurings had broken the continuity of their career. A third said being let go twice pushed them into starting two small businesses.

"Many recruiters and hiring managers don't want to bother with someone frequently let go." A BioSpace survey respondent

The advice, flipped for hiring teams

Blair's advice to candidates is to be ready to discuss a layoff without raising it first, to point to the scale of any public cut so it is clear performance was not the cause, and to explain specifically what happened where there is no public record.

Hiring teams can meet them halfway. Most large cuts this year are tied to pipeline decisions, site closures or commercial pivots, and are on the public record. A two-minute check of the tracker or a press release tells you whether a gap was about the person or about the programme.

In a market where one in five people has been through this twice, filtering them out shrinks the pool for no good reason.