Why CDMO Commercial Hiring Keeps Failing

The CDMO market is on a sustained growth trajectory, projected to expand from $143.8bn to over $386.7bn by 2035. That kind of scale creates enormous commercial pressure, and organisations at every point in the market are responding by hiring. More BD leads, more commercial directors, more people who can own client relationships and build revenue. The problem is that many of those searches are failing before the recruiter has made a single call.

Most of the time, the search fails because the brief was wrong from the start. When a senior commercial hire doesn't work out at twelve months, the instinct is usually to interrogate the process: wrong shortlist, rushed interview, misaligned expectations. Occasionally that's true. More often, the search was built on a spec that described the wrong person, and nobody noticed until it was too late.

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What most CDMO commercial specs actually say

Pull up a cross-section of senior BD or commercial director job specs in the CDMO space and you'll see a familiar pattern. Heavy on sector familiarity, light on everything else. The requirement is usually some version of "proven track record in CDMO business development," plus a list of services knowledge depending on the platform, plus relationships, preferably with named accounts. Compensation expectations and a few lines about culture round it out.

That spec isn't describing commercial capability. It's describing a prior job.

There's a meaningful difference between someone who has held a commercial title in a CDMO and someone who can actually drive business development in your specific context. The former is a credential. The latter is what organisations actually need, and it requires a different set of questions to define.

What stage are you at commercially? Are you building a function, growing an established one, or defending and expanding existing accounts? Is the challenge primarily in opening new logos, or in developing the relationships you already have? Do you need someone who can operate with autonomy, or someone who can work within a structured commercial framework?

The answers should shape everything about the search. In most cases, they're not being asked.

The over-reliance on sector familiarity also has a structural cost. When the brief demands pure CDMO pedigree, the addressable talent pool shrinks considerably, and organisations end up competing for the same relatively small group of people. Timelines extend, offers escalate, and the hire that eventually lands may be the best available rather than the right one.

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The artificial divide between CRO and CDMO commercial talent

There's a persistent assumption in the market that CRO and CDMO commercial talent are essentially different populations. The logic goes: different buyers, different sales cycles, different technical vocabulary. In some respects that's accurate. At the capability level, though, particularly for senior BD and commercial leadership roles, the overlap is substantial and consistently underused.

Strong commercial leaders in the CRO space have spent careers navigating complex, multi-stakeholder sales processes with long lead times, technical buyers, and significant contractual complexity. They understand how pharma and biotech sponsors evaluate outsourcing partners. They know how to build trust with procurement, clinical operations, and scientific leadership simultaneously. The vocabulary shifts when they move into a manufacturing services context, but the underlying commercial capability, which comes down to judgement, relationship development, and deal progression, transfers directly.

CDMO-focused organisations that rule out candidates from CRO backgrounds are limiting their own options without a strong rationale for doing so. A broader search scope, combined with a well-defined capability brief, regularly surfaces candidates who outperform those shortlisted purely on sector match.

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What a better brief actually looks like

Reorienting a commercial search around capability rather than credentials starts before the brief is written. It starts with a clear internal conversation about what commercial success looks like in the role, defined specifically.

Some useful framing questions: What does the pipeline look like in eighteen months if this hire goes well? What relationships need to exist that don't currently? What's the commercial motion, predominantly outbound, inbound, or account-based? How does the commercial function sit relative to technical and operational leadership, and where does that create friction? What's the realistic timeline to full productivity, and what does onboarding actually support?

From those answers, a brief emerges that describes a person rather than a prior job. Requirements become outputs and behaviours rather than credentials. Sector experience gets weighted appropriately alongside strategic thinking, communication style, and the ability to operate at the level the business actually needs.

The other dimension worth addressing explicitly is the cost of getting this wrong, or of getting it right too slowly. A senior BD role that sits vacant for three months or more has a compounding effect on pipeline. Deals that should be progressing aren't. Relationships that need building aren't being built. The revenue impact isn't always immediately visible, but it accumulates, and by the time it shows up in the numbers the vacancy has already done its damage. Scoping the brief properly at the start is the fastest route to a hire that actually holds.

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Getting the search right from the start

The organisations that consistently hire well commercially tend to do a few things differently. They invest time in the brief before they brief anyone externally. They're willing to question their own assumptions about where the right candidates come from. They define what commercial capability means for their specific context rather than defaulting to what it looked like somewhere else.

That approach doesn't guarantee a perfect hire, but it substantially improves the odds and shortens the timeline, because searches built on clarity move faster than those built on assumptions.

If you're approaching a senior commercial search in your CDMO business, the Vector pharma services practice works with hiring leaders at all stages, including brief development, to get the search architecture right before it goes to market.