Employer file: IQVIA

First in an occasional series: public-record profiles of the industry's big employers, written for the person deciding whether to work there rather than the person deciding whether to invest.

The public shape

IQVIA is the largest CRO in the world by revenue, formed in 2016 when Quintiles, the biggest CRO of its era, merged with IMS Health, the dominant healthcare-data company. The combination is the company's whole thesis: trials plus data. It employs roughly 88,000 people across more than 100 countries and reported around $15.4 billion in revenue for 2024.

For a worker, the scale cuts both ways, and honestly.

What scale gives you

• Every therapeutic area, every phase, every geography. If you want to redirect your career into oncology or rare disease, the work exists somewhere in the building.
• Internal mobility. Moving teams without changing employers is a real option at this size, and it is one answer to the industry's reassignment churn.
• A brand that travels. Years at the biggest CRO read clearly on a resume anywhere in the industry.

What scale costs you

• You are one of tens of thousands. Process is standardized because it must be; the machine is optimized for the machine.
• Metrics culture. Utilization and turnaround discipline are how a company this size stays profitable. Ask any monitor what that feels like in a heavy month.
• Distance from decisions. The contract your study depends on was won, priced, and staffed levels above you, and reassignment follows the contract.

Questions worth asking in the interview

1. For this exact role: what is the expected travel percentage in practice, not in the posting?
2. How is the team currently staffed against its contracted scope, and what happens to the team if the scope changes?
3. What did the last two people in this seat move on to, and how long did they stay?

That third question is the quiet one. In a high-turnover industry, how a company answers it tells you whether they track it, and whether they care.

Help us go beyond the public record

Everything above is public. What the public record cannot tell you is what any of it pays at your level, or whether the people inside would recommend it. That is what the anonymous survey exists to answer, one employer at a time, once enough responses name the employer to clear our 15-datapoint threshold. If you work at a large CRO, your datapoint moves that needle directly.