Recruitment Support: What It Means When You Don’t Have a TA Team

Last updated: October 12, 2026

By Dave Manchester, Scientific Recruiting, KORE1

You run a QC lab, nobody in the building recruits for a living, and you just typed “recruitment support” into a search bar. What are you actually asking for? Recruitment support is outside help that takes over some or all of the hiring work a talent acquisition team would normally do, from finding and screening candidates to running a full search, sized to the seats you have open.

That’s the definition. It’s also a little unsatisfying, because “some or all” covers a lot of ground, and the gap between some and all is where most of the money and most of the frustration lives.

“Recruitment Support” is what people call it when they reach me. Hardly anyone opens with “contingency search” or “contract-to-hire conversion.” They open with the problem. A seat is empty, the person who would normally fill it doesn’t exist, and the manager has a batch release, an audit, or a tech transfer to run in the meantime. Search the phrase yourself and you’ll find a couple of council jobs schemes in England, a few listings for recruiting coordinators, a handful of vendor pages that never quite say what they sell, and not a lot else. Very helpful.

I recruit for pharma, biotech, contract development and manufacturing (CDMO), and lab teams through KORE1’s life sciences staffing group. Consider this the translation guide I wish more managers had before the first call.

Recruitment Support, Defined From the Buyer’s Side

Here’s the version I’d want quoted.

Recruitment support is any outside arrangement that does part of a company’s hiring work for it, such as sourcing, screening, scheduling, or a full search, when the company has no talent acquisition team or more open seats than that team can carry. It describes a need. It isn’t the name of a product.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Vendors sell products and you’re describing a need, so the first job on any recruitment support call is translation, and if the person on the other end skips it and starts emailing resumes, you’ve already learned something about them. Translation first.

A TA team is different. It’s a function. It owns the requisitions, the employer brand, the applicant tracking system, the interview loop, and the relationship with every candidate who ever applied. Recruitment support usually owns a slice of that. Which slice is the whole question.

Most Science Companies Never Had a TA Team

If you’re reading this because there’s no recruiter on your payroll, you’re in the majority. By a lot.

The Census Bureau’s Statistics of U.S. Businesses for 2022 counted 2,305 pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing firms in the United States, and 1,364 of them, about 59 percent, had fewer than 20 employees. Biotech research and development skews smaller still, with 3,970 of 4,937 firms under 20 people, roughly 80 percent. Meanwhile the 212 pharma manufacturers with 500 or more employees held 235,060 of the industry’s 314,242 jobs. Three jobs in four. Those 212 companies are where the talent acquisition departments live. Everybody else improvises.

Improvising is fine, by the way. It’s how most of this industry hires.

The regulators don’t grade on headcount, though. Under 21 CFR 211.25, a drug manufacturer needs “an adequate number of qualified personnel” to perform and supervise manufacturing, processing, packing, and holding, and each of those people needs the education, training, and experience, or some combination of them, to do the assigned job. Twelve employees or twelve hundred, same sentence. An empty analyst seat at a small CDMO isn’t an HR inconvenience. It’s a staffing gap with a compliance shadow, and it’s one of the most common reasons people call our quality control staffing desk.

Five Things People Mean When They Ask for Recruitment Support

After enough of these calls, the requests sort themselves into about five shapes. Here they are with the industry name attached, so you know what to ask for and how you’ll be billed.

Only one of those rows puts somebody on your payroll on day one. Worth noticing.

Contract staffing is the one small science companies underuse, and I suspect it’s because “contractor” sounds temporary in a way people quietly associate with lower quality. It shouldn’t. A scientist placed through contract staffing is the agency’s W-2 employee, so the agency withholds federal income tax, pays the employer half of Social Security and Medicare, covers federal and state unemployment, and carries the workers’ compensation policy. You get a trained analyst running Empower on your Waters HPLC without opening a permanent headcount line you’ll have to defend at the next board meeting. For a four-month method transfer, that’s exactly the right shape. Same for a backlog of FDA Form 483 commitments.

Contract-to-hire gets the most questions. With contract-to-hire staffing, the scientist works your actual SOPs on your actual instruments, inside your LabWare or STARLIMS build, before anybody signs an offer, and three months of that tells you more than a third-round interview ever will. It tells the scientist something too. They get to find out whether your LIMS is as painless as you said it was.

For permanent seats, direct hire recruiting is the default, and it probably should be. If the person will own a USP <711> dissolution method, train the next analyst, and answer an FDA investigator’s questions three years from now, hire them permanently and pay for a search done properly. Retained search is rarer at small companies, which is also correct. Save it for the seats where a wrong hire costs you an inspection, like a first director of quality, or for a replacement nobody’s been told about yet.

The last row is the one founders reach for first and need last. An embedded recruiter on contract pays off once the same seats keep reopening, often right after a Series A or B arrives with a hiring plan attached, and I wrote a separate piece on when a growing science company should hire its own recruiter. Short version? If you have two open seats, you don’t need a recruiting function. You need two good searches.

The One Question I Ask Before Anything Else

What happens if this seat is still empty in 60 days?

That’s it. That’s the question.

The answer tells me which row of the table you’re in. “Nothing much, we’d just be slower” means a permanent search with room to be picky. “Our release backlog doubles” means a contract analyst now and a permanent hire on a separate, calmer track. “We miss the pre-approval inspection” means you should stop reading blog posts and call somebody this afternoon.

Sixty days isn’t a random number. In SHRM’s 2026 recruiting benchmarking research, drawn from more than 4,600 organizations, the median time to fill a nonexecutive position was 39 calendar days, and those are organizations with recruiting leaders doing the work. Without one, the person running your search is also running your lab, signing off on deviations, and covering the bench whenever somebody calls in sick, so the search gets whatever hours are left at the end of the week. Add the candidate’s two weeks of notice and 60 days starts looking generous. Optimistic, even.

Good scientists don’t wait around, either. A strong QC chemist on the market is like a professional athlete in free agency. If they’re good, more than one team is calling, and the team that takes three weeks to schedule a second interview loses to the team that doesn’t.

What Recruitment Support Should Take Off Your Desk

Whatever shape you buy, some of the work should leave your desk. Some of it shouldn’t. Here’s how I’d split it.

• Sourcing. All of it. Your job is not scrolling LinkedIn at 10 p.m. for someone with Empower 3 and dissolution experience.
• The first screen, including the dull questions about commute, salary range, and whether they’ll really work second shift in a gowned cleanroom.
• Scheduling, which might be the most underrated thing a recruiter does for a manager who is also a scientist.
• References and the offer conversation. That includes the awkward part, where the candidate mentions a counteroffer on a Friday afternoon.
• Telling the candidates who didn’t get it. Somebody should. Usually nobody does.

Some of it can’t leave. The technical interview, mostly. Could I screen for system suitability? Sort of. I minored in chemistry, which gets me far enough to hear when an answer sounds wrong and nowhere near far enough to know why, so the real version of that conversation belongs to you. Here’s one I like. Ask what they’d do when the tailing factor fails on injection five of six, and listen for whether they go to the column or the mobile phase first. There’s no single right answer. There is a wrong one, and it starts with re-injecting until the result passes.

The decision’s yours too, obviously. So is the first week, when a new hire works out whether your SOP binder and your training matrix look anything like what you described in the interview. I can’t fix that from outside the building. Nobody can.

Something stays on my desk as well. I call scientists the way I’d call a friend who wanted career advice, and before you roll your eyes, it’s practical. Friends get the real answer. The method is what I call the Blind Recruit (not blind hiring, not anonymized resumes, just an unfortunate overlap in names). On that first call a QC chemist in Carlsbad or Durham doesn’t know which company I’m recruiting for, or which role, so what they say they want can’t be bent toward your opening. Maybe it’s fewer weekends. Maybe it’s getting off the HPLC and into method development, which matters a great deal if your opening is 80 percent routine release testing and you were hoping not to mention that.

That’s also why I’d rather count who’s still there in a year than how fast a seat closed. KORE1’s 12-month retention rate on placements is 92 percent. Ask any recruitment support partner for their number. Us included.

Good Recruitment Support vs. Resume Forwarding

Shopping for this is harder than it should be, because almost everyone describes themselves the same way. A few tests cut through it.

• Ask what they need from you before the search starts. A good answer includes the instruments, the methods, the dosage form, and the quality system. “Just send the job description” is a bad answer.
• Did resumes land within an hour of the first call? That’s speed, sure. It also means nobody asked you a single question.
• GMP vs. GLP, one sentence. You’ll know.
• Ask how big the candidate pool really is for your seat, and where it sits. Someone who works that niche should be able to describe it without looking anything up.
• What happens if the hire leaves in the first 90 days? Every reputable firm has an answer. Get it in writing.

The myth I hear most often is that recruitment agencies are too expensive. Sometimes. For the wrong seat, they are. I’m not going to re-run the math here, because a colleague already did it carefully. Our piece on whether a recruitment agency is worth the fee prices one open seat end to end, and the comparison of a staffing agency against an in-house recruiter covers the break-even.

What I will add is that the models bill in completely different ways, and that’s what people miss when they line up quotes. A contingency fee is a single invoice that shows up only after someone starts. A contract bill rate already includes the employer’s payroll taxes and the agency’s margin, so it looks expensive next to a salary and isn’t, quite. An embedded recruiter costs the same every month whether anyone gets hired or not. Compare those three on a single number and the one that looks cheapest tends to win for the wrong reason.

Recruitment Support Questions From Teams Without a Recruiter

Is recruitment support the same thing as RPO?

Not usually, though RPO is one version of it. Recruitment process outsourcing means a provider runs your hiring process under a longer contract, often with its recruiters working inside your systems across dozens of hires. A ten-person biotech with two open seats rarely needs that. It needs two searches run well.

We already use a PEO. Doesn’t that cover hiring?

A PEO handles payroll, benefits, and HR compliance, but it usually won’t find you a scientist. Some sell a recruiting add-on, so read what it actually includes before you count on it. If the add-on is job board postings and an applicant tracking login, that’s software. Somebody still has to find the chemist.

What does recruitment support cost for one seat?

$0 up front on a contingency direct hire search, and nothing at all unless someone you hire through it starts. Contract and contract-to-hire seats bill hourly instead, and an embedded recruiter bills for their time. I won’t put a percentage in a blog post, because the number depends on the seat and the model, and a fee with no seat attached tells you nothing. The worked example in our agency-cost piece gets you much closer.

Realistically, how fast can someone start?

Faster on contract than on permanent, nearly every time. Contract scientists are often between assignments, while a permanent hire usually has to give notice somewhere first. For a GMP seat, budget time for gowning qualification and SOP training either way. The badge is quick. Being allowed to touch release testing is not.

Should we put more than one agency on the same search?

Three agencies on one contingency search sounds like triple the odds, but in a small scientific market it mostly triples the calls. The same few chemists hear about your job from three different recruiters, with three slightly different descriptions of it. They notice. They also talk to each other. Pick one partner per seat and hold them to a timeline.

Ask for the Seat, Not the Support

So here’s my advice for the next call, with me or with anyone. Don’t ask for recruitment support. Describe the seat. The method, the instrument, the shift, the date it has to be filled by, and what happens if it isn’t. A recruiter worth paying will turn that into the right model in about ten minutes, and if they can’t, keep looking.

If you want that translation done for a seat you’re staring at right now, Let’s Connect. Tell me the role, the site, and your answer to the 60-day question. You can also find me on LinkedIn.