Recruitment Tasks and Skill Requirements across Healthcare Supply-Chain Stages in China

Abstract How do recruitment tasks and skill requirements evolve across healthcare supply chains? We examine online job advertisements from China's pharmaceutical and medical-device manufacturing and distribution sectors in 2015--2022. A common text-classification framework distinguishes advertised tasks, skills and formal requirements, enabling annual comparisons across four supply-chain segments. A descriptive decomposition separates changes within segments from changes in their representation in the observed advertisements. Recruitment profiles differ across stages, and these differences evolve over time. In the later period, pharmaceutical manufacturers advertised sales and market-development tasks more often than distributors, while distributors more often requested scientific and medical knowledge and advertised quality, regulatory, clinical and technical-service work. Medical-device recruitment followed different trajectories, showing that stage differences depend on product category and year. The pooled increase in scientific-and-medical-knowledge requirements arose from changes within the four segments, with changes in segment composition slightly offsetting that increase. The study provides a consistent framework for comparing recruitment content across healthcare industries and identifies supply-chain position as an additional dimension of heterogeneity in advertised labour demand. These findings show how industry averages can conceal distinct recruitment trajectories across manufacturing and distribution.