Scaling a Biotech Team from 10 to 100 Without Breaking Your Hiring Process

By Christine P. Tsouros, Vice President of RPO & Project Management at PLR Talent Solutions (formerly PharmaLogics Recruiting) 

Growing from 10 employees to 100 is a major milestone for any biotech company. It can also expose weaknesses in a hiring process that worked well when the organization was smaller.

At 10 employees, hiring may be founder-led, relationship-driven, and highly customized. By 100, those same habits can create delays, inconsistent candidate experiences, unclear decision-making, and recruiting bottlenecks.

The companies that handle this transition well treat recruiting as part of business planning, evolving hiring strategy, pipelines, and infrastructure alongside the business. They anticipate talent needs, build repeatable processes, and adjust recruiting resources as demand changes.

The Hiring Strategy That Worked for a 10-Person Biotech Team Won't Work at 100 

Early-stage hiring often works because leaders can stay close to every decision. Founders know candidates personally, executives conduct most interviews, and decisions happen through informal conversations. That level of customization becomes difficult to maintain as headcount grows.

At 100 employees, companies need repeatable processes without losing the scientific and cultural rigor that made early hiring successful. The goal is to scale the process, not simply the number of recruiters. A growing biotech should ask:

• Who owns each stage of the hiring process?

• Which interviewers evaluate which competencies?

• Who makes the final hiring decision?

• How quickly does feedback need to be submitted?

• Are job descriptions consistent across similar roles?

• Does the recruiting team have visibility into pipeline health?

• Can the process handle 10, 20, or 30 open positions at the same time?

These questions become critical when hiring is connected to clinical, regulatory, manufacturing, or commercial milestones. 

Build the Hiring Forecast Before You Write the Job Description 

A requisition is often where recruiting activity becomes visible. It should not be where workforce planning begins.

Before opening a role, determine how many people the business will need, when they need to be onboarded, and why each position matters. For a biotech, that means mapping hiring needs to:

• Clinical trial starts and expansions

• Regulatory submissions

• Manufacturing buildouts

• Quality requirements

• Commercial launches

• New funding or growth initiatives

• Expansion into new therapeutic or technical areas

The forecast should also identify which positions will take longer to fill. Specialized roles may require proactive sourcing because qualified talent can be difficult to find on short notice.

Instead of asking, "Who can we find for the role we opened yesterday?" ask, "What talent will we need six months from now?" That shift gives recruiting teams time to build relationships with passive candidates, understand the market, and determine where internal capacity ends and external support becomes useful.

Scale Your Biotech Team in Phases 

The path from 10 to 100 employees does not need to happen through one massive recruiting transformation. A phased approach allows the hiring infrastructure to develop with the company.

10 → 25: Build the foundation 

At this stage, establish the basics that will support future growth:

• Employer brand and employee value proposition

• Consistent job descriptions

• Interview structure

• Evaluation criteria

• Decision ownership

• Hiring-manager expectations

• Initial talent pipelines

• Candidate communication standards

The objective is to create enough consistency that hiring does not depend on one founder, executive, or recruiter's personal process.

25 → 50: Add infrastructure 

As hiring volume increases, recruiting needs greater visibility and structure.

This is a good point to introduce:

• Pipeline tracking

• Recruiting metrics

• Defined hiring-manager accountability

• Proactive sourcing strategies

• Talent pools for difficult-to-fill positions

• More structured interview workflows

• Clearer recruiting capacity planning

This is also the time to find where the process slows down, whether in sourcing, scheduling, feedback, or offer approvals. Finding the bottleneck matters more than simply adding recruiting capacity.

50 → 100+: Build for concurrent hiring 

With numerous searches running across functions at once, recruiting infrastructure must absorb that volume while keeping the candidate experience consistent. That may require additional recruiter, sourcing, coordinator, or project support, along with workflows for prioritizing openings and allocating resources. The key is to build capacity around the company's actual hiring curve. 

Don't Let Hiring Volume Destroy Candidate Quality 

Rapid growth creates pressure to move faster, which can lead teams to lower standards, shorten evaluation, or decide based on urgency. None of that is necessary when the process is designed well.

Speed and quality can coexist when candidates move through a consistent decision-making process. For specialized life sciences roles, that means evaluating the full candidate profile. Technical expertise may be essential, but motivation, adaptability, communication, and cultural fit also matter. A candidate moving from large pharma to a smaller biotech, for example, may face very different expectations around autonomy, pace, and scope.

A strong process helps hiring teams distinguish between qualifications that truly cannot move and preferences that may be flexible. The result is speed without sacrificing quality.

Flex the Recruiting Model Around the Growth Curve 

A biotech entering a high-growth period does not need to build a large permanent talent acquisition organization overnight. The recruiting model should reflect the company's stage, hiring volume, existing infrastructure, and expected demand. Options include:

• Internal recruiters

• Contract recruiters

• Sourcing support

• Recruiting coordinators

• Project-based recruiting

• Embedded recruiting teams

• Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO)

• Specialized external recruiting partners

An early-stage company with fluctuating needs may benefit from time-based or fractional support. A company with an established TA team facing a sudden surge may need embedded recruiters or sourcing capacity. Sustained clinical, manufacturing, or commercial growth may justify a broader RPO structure, while hybrid models can add specialized sourcing for difficult searches.

The point is to match recruiting resources to the business rather than forcing the business into a fixed recruiting structure.

Build the Talent Pipeline Before the Requisition Opens 

Waiting for final requisition approval before starting talent research can put a growing biotech behind schedule. Specialized recruiting requires relationships, market knowledge, and proactive outreach, and strong pipelines take time to develop. 

Start by mapping anticipated needs against business milestones. If clinical operations will expand in six months, start identifying that talent now. If a manufacturing buildout is planned, understand the talent market before positions become urgent.

Your applicant tracking system can also be a valuable source of talent. Previous applicants, finalists, former contractors, and referrals may already know the company. A well-managed ATS can function as a living talent database rather than simply a place to store resumes, giving a growing team a head start.

Measure What Actually Matters 

More recruiting metrics do not automatically create better recruiting. Measurement should show where the process is working and where it is breaking down. Useful measures include:

• Time to qualified candidate

• Time to interview and offer

• Offer acceptance rate

• Source of hire

• Interview-to-offer ratio

• Pipeline quality and coverage

• Candidate experience

• Hiring-manager satisfaction

Rising time to qualified candidate may point to sourcing or talent availability. Candidates reaching interviews but not offers may signal a calibration problem. Declined offers may call for a closer look at compensation, communication, or the hiring experience.

The goal is visibility, not a bigger dashboard.

Don't Let Hiring Managers Become the Bottleneck 

As headcount grows, founders and executives cannot personally drive every interview, which makes decision ownership essential to scalable recruiting. Each interviewer should know:

• Which competencies they are evaluating

• Which questions they own

• What has already been covered

• How their feedback will influence the decision

• When feedback is due

Hiring managers need the same clarity: who makes the final decision, how disagreements are handled, and how quickly candidates should receive an update.

Recruiters can build a strong pipeline, but they cannot compensate for a decision-making process that repeatedly stalls. A candidate who waits weeks between interviews may have already moved on.

Protect the Candidate Experience as Your Biotech Team Grows 

As a process that once involved three people grows to six, scheduling gets complicated, panels become inconsistent, and communication fragments. That matters when recruiting specialized life sciences professionals who may be weighing multiple opportunities. Protect the experience with a few basic disciplines:

• Communicate consistently. Let candidates know what happens next and when to expect an update.

• Keep the process efficient. Every interview should have a purpose.

• Align interviewers. Candidates should not have to repeat themselves.

• Be transparent. Communicate responsibilities, expectations, timelines, and organizational realities honestly.

• Sell the opportunity. Hiring managers should be prepared to explain why they value the company, the team, and the work. Candidates are evaluating you, too.

The result is a hiring process that can move quickly without making candidates feel like they are moving through a machine.

What the Right Recruiting Infrastructure Looks Like at 100 

By 100 employees, recruiting should have evolved from an informal activity into an operating system for growth. That does not mean building the largest possible TA department. It means having the right infrastructure for the work ahead:

• A hiring forecast connected to business milestones

• Repeatable interview and decision-making processes

• Proactive talent pipelines

• Clear hiring-manager accountability

• Recruiting metrics that identify bottlenecks

• Candidate communication standards

• Recruiting resources that can expand or contract with demand

• A clear understanding of when internal recruiting and external support each make sense

This is also where the recruiting model deserves a closer look.

PLR Talent Solutions (formerly PharmaLogics Recruiting) takes a consultative approach to RPO, embedded talent, and time-based recruiting, with engagement models designed around a client's stage, goals, and existing infrastructure. Teams can work as an extension of the organization and adjust support as hiring requirements change. 

That flexibility matters for growth-stage biotechs because hiring demand rarely stays constant. A company may need targeted support for a few specialized searches, additional capacity after a funding event, or a broader team to support sustained growth. With more than 20 years focused exclusively on life sciences, PLR brings the market knowledge, flexibility, and process insight a recruiting partner should offer, rather than simply sending candidates against open requisitions.

Build for the Next 90 Hires, Not the Last 10 

Hiring 90 additional people requires companies to rethink how talent decisions are made, how pipelines are built, how recruiting resources are allocated, and how candidates move through the process.

The companies that navigate that transition effectively start planning before the requisition opens. They connect hiring to clinical, regulatory, manufacturing, and commercial milestones. They build talent pipelines ahead of demand. They give hiring managers clear ownership. They measure where the process breaks down. And they adjust recruiting support as business needs change.

The goal is not to build the biggest recruiting team. It is to build the right recruiting infrastructure for the growth ahead.

Ready to build your hiring infrastructure for the next stage of growth? Contact PLR Talent Solutions (formerly PharmaLogics Recruiting) to assess your current recruiting infrastructure, identify capacity gaps, and develop a flexible recruiting model aligned with your hiring priorities.

About the Author 

Christine Tsouros is an accomplished Vice President of RPO Project Management, bringing over 13 years of experience in the life sciences industry. Throughout her career, Christine has been instrumental in managing a wide range of recruitment projects—both small and large—in diverse global markets. Her deep understanding of the complexities within the life sciences sector has enabled her to lead teams with strategic foresight and precision, ensuring successful talent acquisition solutions across multiple regions.  

Known for her passion for building lasting relationships with top industry professionals, Christine excels at identifying and securing high-caliber talent for her clients. She is deeply committed to exceeding expectations, consistently delivering exceptional service, and ensuring her clients’ needs are met with the highest level of professionalism and efficiency. Her expertise spans various facets of recruitment, from team leadership to stakeholder management, making her a trusted partner for organizations seeking innovative recruitment strategies.