Help wanted

When Jennifer Buell went hunting for a biotech job, the Tufts University PhD student expected the search to take awhile.

Boy, was she wrong.

In a matter of weeks, Buell, 32, of Jamaica Plain, had eight interviews and six offers, including a six-month contract position with Antigenics Inc., a Lexington biotech company developing drugs that target cancer and infectious diseases.

If it were a tight job market, she might have opted for the job security and accepted a permanent position. But with so many options, Buell said, she felt free to take what she actually wanted — the six-month job — knowing that the worst that could happen was that she’d be sending out resumes again soon.

Buell is not the only one feeling confident. Biotech companies tend to cluster and grow together. Innovation feeds innovation; talent tends to attract yet more talent. And by all accounts, the Boston-area cluster is growing.

‘‘There seemed to be a significant number of opportunities,’’ she said. And Buell seized one of them — in January she won a permanent position at Antigenics as a clinical project manager.

With big players such as Merck & Co. and Novartis AG opening labs over the past few years and start-up companies growing, the biotech job market in Massachusetts is strong and getting stronger, according to recruiters, human resources directors, and the candidates themselves.

‘‘The job market has always been very good,’’ said Burt Baptiste, who works in the Woburn office of Aerotek, a national recruiting company. ‘‘However, over the last 18 to 24 months — and obviously until the present — it’s just a lot more competitive with these big companies coming in and not just attracting the best people, but requiring the best people.’’

That has created a candidates’ market. Companies in Greater Boston are seeking everything from bench scientists who’ll make, say, $35,000 per year to medicinal chemists who’ll make well into six figures. Indeed, there is often a shortage of qualified candidates, especially for high-level positions, said Kevin Carroll, a Hingham-based recruiter at Phillips DiPisa.

‘‘The demand for these folks is tremendous,’’ he said. ‘‘The world just doesn’t create enough of them, and I think that’s only going to continue.’’

Consequently, candidates can sometimes be selective as companies jockey for their attention. And that makes it tough to recruit, particularly for smaller companies.

‘‘Sometimes I’m not going to be able to compete. That’s fine. I know that,’’ said Pattie Manning, director of human resources at Surface Logix Inc., a 49-person drug-development company in Brighton.

But Manning said she still manages to find the people she needs. With so much biotech talent in the market — in Boston and Cambridge, the suburbs, and beyond — companies lose one candidate only to find another.

‘‘We’re very excited to be here,’’ said John Cerio, vice president of human resources at Antigenics. ‘‘The talent in the Boston marketplace is fantastic. We think it has a very high energy level and it is an area that is attractive to people to recruit from outside the region. It is a magnet.’’

Massachusetts has had a biotech industry for decades. ‘‘But it didn’t always translate into big job growth,’’ said Elliot Winer, chief economist for the state Department of Workforce Development. ‘‘That’s starting to change right now.’’

According to state figures, about 41,000 people are employed in scientific research and development, with roughly half of them working specifically in biotech. Across the sector, growth has been steady in recent years: up 13 percent since 2003. Still, compared with the healthcare and social assistance industry, which employs 453,800 statewide, or the manufacturing industry, which employs 297,400, the biotech industry isn’t large. In fact, Winer said, only about 1 percent of all workers in Massachusetts are employed in biotech.

But it’s a growing market. According to state projections, the number of scientific R&D jobs in Massachusetts will grow 26 percent between 2004 and 2014 — three times the projected rate for all jobs.

Meantime, the number of biotech companies is growing fast. The Massachusetts Biotechnology Council reports 41 percent growth in the last three years as its membership has increased to 538, from 380 in 2004. This growth is at least one reason why major pharmaceutical companies have begun moving here. The thinking is, where businesses cluster, there is opportunity.

‘‘The reason why we moved here is because we knew it was a good talent market, and it has definitely paid off,’’ said Ginger Gregory, vice president and global head of human resources for Novartis in Cambridge. ‘‘We have been very successful in attracting talent and have a considerable number of applications for the openings we have.’’

Lex Van der Ploeg, site head for Merck’s research laboratories in Boston, agreed. Since opening Merck’s Boston lab in August 2004, Van der Ploeg said the pharmaceutical giant has benefited from being so close to both scientific collaborators and potential job candidates.

But in this competitive job market, companies may have to make a sweet offer to lure a top scientist. Kent Wrobleski, a recruiter for Kforce Professional Staffing in Burlington, recalled one recent ‘‘tug of war,’’ in which a PhD-level scientist got a job offer of $80,000. A second company, vying for the candidate’s interest, offered $5,000 more, said Wrobleski, and the wrangling continued until the man finally got an offer he could not refuse: A six-figure salary.