Pharmaceutical Recruiters for the Quality, QC and Manufacturing Seats You Fill Once
Direct hire and retained search for drug makers and CDMOs, run by recruiters who know the quality system.
- Program area
- Drugs
- FY2025 Form 483s
- 713
- Most-cited area
- 21 CFR 211.22
KORE1’s pharmaceutical recruiters run direct hire and retained searches for quality, QC, validation and manufacturing seats at drug makers and CDMOs. Permanent hires, backed by a 92% twelve-month retention rate across KORE1 placements.
Last updated: September 21, 2026
A contract analyst covers a peak. The seats on this page are the other kind.
Head of quality. QC supervisor. The investigator whose name sits on a closed deviation three years from now, long after the consultant has gone home. What those seats pay, from QA supervisor to site quality head, is in our pharma quality manager salary data.
Our scientific desk started life as the KORE1 Scientific Division in 2018. Dave Manchester built it. He left, then came back as a consultant on these searches. Sixteen years into scientific recruiting with pharma as his core lane, he calls the job the Synergistic Salesperson, meaning a recruiter who actually likes the science and is straight with people about the role because of it.
Where this page sits. GMP cover on contract and contract-to-hire runs through the pharmaceutical staffing agency desk.
Life sciences staffing is the hub across biotech, pharma, device and diagnostics, and biotech recruiters handle therapeutic-area search on the biologics side. Validated systems work, so LIMS, MES and Part 11, belongs to pharmaceutical IT staffing. This page is the permanent seat.
Every Observation Has an Owner. We Hire the Owner.
FDA issued 713 Form 483s in the drugs program area for inspections ending between October 2024 and September 2025, and wrote 2,837 separate observations on them. Ten areas carry 63%. Counts below come straight from the inspection observation workbook FDA publishes each year, and the seat beside each one is the job that answers for it when an investigator asks.
- 01 21 CFR 211.22 Quality unit duties not written down, or written and not followed 309 10.9% Seat that owns it Head of quality, QA manager
- 02 21 CFR 211.192 Production record review, and investigations that stopped short 236 8.3% Seat that owns it QA investigator, CAPA lead
- 03 21 CFR 211.67 Equipment cleaning, sanitizing and maintenance 204 7.2% Seat that owns it Cleaning validation engineer
- 04 21 CFR 211.100 Written production and process control procedures 201 7.1% Seat that owns it Process engineer, document control lead
- 05 21 CFR 211.160 Laboratory controls, specifications and sampling plans 176 6.2% Seat that owns it QC laboratory supervisor
- 06 21 CFR 211.84 Component testing and supplier certificates taken on trust 161 5.7% Seat that owns it QC raw materials analyst
- 07 21 CFR 211.68 Controls over computerized systems and the records they hold 153 5.4% Seat that owns it Validation and data integrity
- 08 21 CFR 211.113 Procedures against microbiological contamination 129 4.5% Seat that owns it Aseptic lead, QC microbiologist
- 09 21 CFR 211.166 The stability program and the methods behind it 120 4.2% Seat that owns it Stability coordinator
- 10 21 CFR 211.42 Aseptic area design, environmental monitoring and cleaning 105 3.7% Seat that owns it Facilities QA, EM specialist
Notice the top two. 21 CFR 211.22 is the quality unit written down, and 211.192 is the production record review that same unit signs before a batch ships, so close to one observation in five last year came back to one department. Want the rules themselves? FDA keeps a plain-language summary of what CGMP actually requires.
None of that is a hiring problem by itself. Not on paper. It turns into one the day the seat beside the line is empty, or filled by an acting manager who is already doing another job, or filled by somebody who has never once sat in the room while an investigator worked through a batch record. That last gap is the expensive one, and it is invisible on a resume.
What We Pin Down Before You See a Resume
Pharma job titles travel badly. Two sites can both advertise a QA Manager and mean jobs that share almost nothing, so the title tells a recruiter very little and a keyword search on it tells them less. So we screen on four things instead, in writing, before anyone is submitted. Every time.
- Dosage form
- Sterile injectable, oral solid, topical, API. A tablet QA manager moving into aseptic fill is a training plan. Not a hire. Worth knowing which of the two you are signing up for.
- Quality system
- Paper, hybrid or fully electronic. Somebody who has only ever reviewed batch records on paper will be slow in an electronic batch record site. Months, not weeks.
- What they personally owned
- Not what the department did. Names, not teams. Which investigations they wrote, which ones they closed, and which ones came back from QA a second time.
- Inspection exposure
- Front room, back room, neither. It is the single best predictor of how a new hire behaves in the week after a finding lands.
That fourth one gets skipped constantly. Ask it anyway. It is the same discipline behind how we vet candidates on every other desk.
Direct Hire, Retained Search, or a Replacement Nobody Hears About
Three shapes. The right one is usually obvious once you say out loud how big the pool actually is.
- Direct hire, contingent
- You pay when someone starts. It fits a QC analyst, a supervisor, a validation engineer, any seat with a real pool of people who would move for the right offer.
- Retained or engaged search
- A commitment up front, exclusivity, and a weekly slate whether the news is good or not. That last part matters. Site quality heads and directors, where the qualified pool is small and most of it is not looking.
- Confidential replacement
- The incumbent does not know. Nothing gets posted, nothing goes to a job board, and the shortlist comes to one inbox.
If the honest answer is that the work only lasts through a validation campaign or a backlog, that is contract staffing, and the pharma contract desk covers it. Different page, different math. Our direct hire terms, guarantee period included, are the same ones we use everywhere else at KORE1.
Pharmaceutical Roles We Place Into Permanent Seats
Four groups. Grouped the way a site is actually organized, not the way a job board sorts them.
The people who sign
Site quality ownership, which is where observation 01 lands every single year. Usually an engaged search.
- Director of Quality
- Quality Assurance Manager
- QA Supervisor
- Head of Quality, small site
Release and stability
Bench chemists and micro staff who put a result behind a lot number. Pay bands sit in the QC analyst salary guide.
- QC Analyst II and III
- QC Chemist, HPLC and GC
- QC Microbiologist
- Stability Coordinator
The follow-through
Investigations, CAPA and the validation work that keeps the finding from repeating. Device programs run through medical device staffing.
- QA Investigator
- CAPA Specialist
- Validation Engineer
- Cleaning Validation Lead
On the floor
Supervisors and process engineers who run the line the batch record describes. Wider plant hiring goes to manufacturing staffing.
- Production Supervisor
- MSAT or Process Engineer
- Aseptic Operations Lead
- Packaging Supervisor
Clusters our pharma searches keep landing in
Drug manufacturing is not spread evenly across the country. Neither is the talent. These are the corridors where our searches concentrate, and because a QC chemist in one of them will happily look at a role two hundred miles away for the right title, we recruit nationally into all of them.
- Greater Philadelphia and the I-95 corridor
- Central and North Jersey
- Research Triangle, North Carolina
- Indianapolis
- Greater Boston
- North Chicago and Lake County
- San Diego
- Orange County and Irvine
Adjacent desks take the rest. Medical device recruiters take design history file work, biotech staffing covers the cell and gene side, and the wider scientific staffing agency practice covers chemical, food and testing labs. Technician and analyst seats on those benches are filled from our laboratory staffing desk. Southern California programs go to SoCal biotech staffing.
How a Pharmaceutical Search Runs Here
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1
Scope the seat, not the title
Half an hour, usually. The questions are about dosage form, the quality system and who this person reports to when something goes wrong. The req comes second.
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2
Build the pool from quality systems, not keywords
Not on job boards. We map the sites within commuting distance that run the same system and the same dosage form, then the CDMOs that serve them. Keyword matching on a title misses most of those people, and it misses the QC and QA distinction that decides which of them fits.
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3
Screen on ownership
Same three questions, every time. What did the person write, what did they close, and what came back a second time. Vague answers are not disqualifying. They just change what we ask next.
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4
Put the inspection question on the table early
Ask it at the front. It always comes up. You will know which candidates have stood in front of an investigator and which have not, before the first interview rather than in week three of a hiring process.
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5
Close before the counteroffer
Good quality people are rarely on the market alone. Their employer knows it too. We agree the number and the start date with the candidate before the offer is drafted, which is the only reliable way to keep a counteroffer from landing in the middle of it.
Common Questions About Pharmaceutical Recruiters
What does a pharmaceutical recruitment agency do that a generalist recruiter cannot?
Read a pharma resume for what the person owned rather than what their department did. Ten areas of regulation carried 63% of every observation FDA wrote at drug establishments in FY2025, and a specialist recruiter knows which job answers for each one. A generalist screens on the job title and the years, which is how a tablet QA manager ends up shortlisted for an aseptic site. That gap is expensive.
Should a QC opening be a direct hire or a contract seat?
It depends how long the work lives. Ask the end date first. Direct hire fits any seat whose decisions outlast the person sitting in it, so think QC supervisor, stability coordinator, or whoever owns your document control system. If the work is a stability cluster, a backlog or a validation campaign with an end date, that is contract cover and our pharmaceutical staffing agency page covers it, with contract-to-hire in between.
What do pharmaceutical recruiting firms charge for a permanent placement?
Somewhere between 15% and 25% of the first year’s base salary, set by how senior and how hard the search is. You pay it once, on a start, with a replacement guarantee agreed before the search opens, and our direct hire terms spell out both. Nothing recurring. Retained and engaged searches split part of that fee up front, and if you are weighing that against building the function internally we have the comparison written up, which buys exclusivity and a weekly slate whether the news that week is a real shortlist or an honest report that the market is thinner than anyone hoped.
How long does a permanent pharma search take?
17 days is KORE1’s published average from first conversation to accepted offer, measured across our IT and life sciences work. It cuts both ways. A QC analyst in a deep market can beat that comfortably, while a site quality director in a thin one takes longer to find and is almost always worth the extra few weeks it costs you.
Can somebody from a CDMO move to a brand manufacturer, or the other way round?
Usually yes, and it is one of the better moves nobody plans for. It works both directions. CDMO people have seen more products, more transfers and more customer audits in the same number of years, which is also why our manufacturing recruiters field the same question. What changes is pace and ownership, because a contract site runs to a client program while a brand site owns the product, so ask the candidate which of those they actually prefer.
Do you recruit GMP quality assurance, and is that the same as a QA engineer?
They share two letters and nothing else. Different work entirely. GMP quality assurance is the pharma function that reviews batch records, owns deviations and releases product, and yes, we recruit it. A QA engineer in software tests code, which is a different KORE1 desk entirely, so say GMP QA or pharma QA in the req and nobody wastes a week.
What if the role is confidential and the person in it does not know?
Nobody gets a job posting. The search runs without your company name until a candidate is serious enough to sign an NDA, approaches go out under a described profile rather than an advertised role, the same way our retained search practice handles a sitting incumbent, and the shortlist goes to one named person on your side. Tell us at kickoff. Not after something has already been published.
Tell Us Which Seat Is Open
No req written yet? That is fine. Send the dosage form, the quality system and what the person has to own. A pharmaceutical recruiter will tell you how deep the pool is and what the search takes.
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