"GxP" is three different things
Job adverts routinely ask for "GxP experience" as though it were a single qualification. It is not — it is shorthand for a family of good-practice standards covering different activities, and experience in one does not confer competence in another. A candidate who has spent five years in manufacturing quality is not thereby able to monitor a clinical trial, and asking for the family rather than the member tells applicants that whoever wrote the advert is not close to the work.
Good Manufacturing Practice
Manufacturing and quality: production, batch records, deviations, release. Where most biotech quality and bioprocess roles sit.
Good Laboratory Practice
Non-clinical safety studies. Narrower than most adverts imply, and frequently confused with "working in a laboratory properly".
Good Clinical Practice
The conduct of clinical trials. The standard clinical research and trial-delivery roles are held against.
GLP is the one most often requested in error. A discovery scientist running experiments to a high standard is not working to GLP, and asking for it screens out excellent bench scientists who correctly decline to claim it.
Most research roles are not regulated at all
Discovery and early research generally sit outside these frameworks entirely. Work becomes regulated when it is intended to support a regulatory submission, when it is manufacturing material for administration to people, or when it is part of a clinical trial. Target identification, assay development, exploratory work and much of computational biology do not meet any of those tests.
The requirement nonetheless appears in adverts for those roles, usually for one of two reasons: it was copied from a previous vacancy elsewhere in the organisation, or it is there as a proxy for rigour. Neither survives contact with the consequences, because the line does not attract more careful scientists — it simply removes everyone whose career has been in discovery, which is most of the people who would be good at the job.
What the requirement actually costs you
Regulated experience is a genuine specialism that people build over years in a particular environment. Requiring it is not a filter that thins the field slightly; it changes which field you are recruiting from. For a discovery role in a competitive cluster that can be the difference between a shortlist and an empty inbox, and the effect is invisible to you — candidates who read the requirement and move on do not tell you why.
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1
Ask what part of the job the regulator would inspect
If the honest answer is none of it, the requirement is decoration and should come out of the advert entirely.
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2
If some of it is regulated, say which part
A role that is eighty per cent discovery with a regulated component is attractive to more people than one described flatly as a GMP role. Describe the split.
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3
Decide whether you would train it
Working to a standard is largely learned in post, under supervision. If you would accept a strong scientist and train the compliance, say so — that sentence alone widens the pool substantially.
If you genuinely need it, ask precisely
Where regulated experience is a real requirement, precision helps you as much as the candidate. Naming the standard, the setting and the depth lets the right people recognise themselves and stops the wrong ones applying — which is the entire purpose of a requirements list, and something "GxP experience essential" achieves for nobody.
How to write the requirement
Where the regulated question sits alongside the other decisions — which market you are actually recruiting in, and the geography that follows from it — is covered in how to hire biotech scientists.
Check it against the market
How comparable roles in the same cluster phrase their requirements is the quickest correction to an advert that has drifted.