Frequently Asked Questions

For most pharmaceutical and biotech roles we present a screened shortlist within days, not weeks. Industry surveys put average time-to-hire at mid-size pharma companies at 45-60 days; a specialized firm compresses that because the candidate pool is already mapped, by therapeutic area, by GxP discipline, and by availability. The practical difference: by week three of a slow internal process, the strongest regulatory or quality candidates have usually accepted another offer.

Match the engagement to the length of the work. Tech-transfer support, submission pushes, batch-record remediation and inspection readiness are project-shaped: contract staffing fits them without adding permanent headcount. Contract-to-hire suits roles you expect to keep but want to de-risk first. Direct hire is right for leadership and for capabilities you are building permanently. Many of our clients run all three in parallel across one program.

Resumes in regulated manufacturing are easy to inflate and expensive to get wrong. Our screening goes beyond keyword matching: recruiters probe the specific systems and documents the candidate owned, deviations they authored, CAPAs they closed, audits they faced, and we validate scope with references who supervised the work. A candidate who has only observed a process reads very differently from one who has run it, and that distinction is exactly what our screening is built to surface.

Ask any staffing firm this question before you sign: the answer reveals how much risk they actually absorb. Our engagements include a replacement provision: if a contractor is not performing, we replace the resource; if a direct-hire placement leaves within the guarantee window, we re-run the search. You should never be paying twice for the same seat.

Quality assurance and quality control, regulatory affairs, manufacturing and process roles, validation, clinical operations support, supply chain, and the scientific bench, from individual contributors through director level. Because we focus on life sciences rather than staffing 'any role in any industry,' our recruiters speak the vocabulary of the people they screen.

You pay an hourly bill rate for contractors; the bill rate covers the consultant's pay, statutory employer costs, insurance, and the firm's margin. Direct-hire searches are priced as a percentage of first-year salary. We are transparent about structure because opaque pricing is one of the most common frustrations companies report with staffing vendors: if you cannot tell what you are paying for, you cannot compare providers.

For W2 contract placements, the consultant is our employee: we run payroll, withhold taxes, and carry workers' compensation and liability coverage, so your team gets the capability without the employment administration. If you have already identified a person and simply need a compliant employer of record, we offer payrolling as a separate, lower-cost service.

The best pharmaceutical professionals are usually working, not searching. Single-channel recruiting, posting and waiting, misses them entirely. Our pipeline is built from referrals inside quality and regulatory communities, alumni networks from major manufacturing sites, and a curated database built over years of placements. That is the practical reason to use a specialist: access, not job-board speed.

Both, and the service differs deliberately. Early-stage companies typically need one experienced person who can build a function; large manufacturers need reliable surge capacity that passes vendor qualification. We calibrate seniority, cost, and engagement model to the company's stage rather than pushing one template.

Typically one to two weeks, driven mostly by your site requirements: background verification, drug screening, medical clearances where required, and any site-specific GxP onboarding or training documentation. We run these steps in parallel and keep you informed, because a placement is not done when the offer is signed; it is done when the person badges in.

Yes. Replacing an incumbent, building a team ahead of an unannounced program, or hiring around a sensitive project all call for a search that never carries your company name until the final stage. Specialized firms are structurally better at this: we can describe the role credibly to candidates without naming you, because we know the domain well enough to be specific.

Ask what industries they specialize in (beware 'all of them'), how they screen beyond the resume, their actual fill and retention statistics, how replacements are handled, and what their bill-rate structure includes. A specialist will answer all five in specifics; a generalist will answer in adjectives. We publish this list because informed clients choose specialists.