Seems Jeff Burkel, chief operating officer for MicroMass Communications, a health care advertising firm, has an image problem with Wichita.
Medical Marketing & Media, a health care marketing business publication, recently published a story on its Career & Salary Survey 2008, in which it is discovered that salaries across the health care marketing industry (read: pharmaceutical reps) have decreased by 3.7 percent — from $133,700 in 2007 to $128,800 this year — causing a shift in hiring and recruitment strategies.
In that story, Burkel is commenting that location can play a key factor in the hiring process for some candidates. Then he’s quoted:
“With our Raleigh location, we get [applicants] that are done with the Northeast scene, and are looking to escape,” he says. That isn’t always the case, however. Some locations are less appealing than others. “If you want to move people to Wichita, KS, forget about it,” says Burkel.
Has Burkel even been to Wichita and seen its unique, extremely prolific and robust health care sector?
His company’s headquarters are in Cary, N.C., and the firm has an office in Morristown, N.J.
Ahem.
I’ll stick with Wichita.
2 Comments
Wichita can tend to be a metaphor as a place in the center of the country, away from the coasts.
So I think he was referring to that, more than Wichita itself.
But we all know that Wichita is a diamond in the rough, but we can always use a little polishing.
The best salespeople for Wichita are those us us who came from elsewhere. I have lived in BOTH of the regions represented by Burkel’s Medical Marketing & Media (as wlll as other regions); I choose to live in Wichita.