Trading Places: 2025 Intensified CDMOs Recruiting Sponsor Talent

By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma

The CDMOs have valid reasons for it.

Throughout this year I’ve spoken with manufacturing outsourcing professionals on both sides of the aisle who say external development and manufacturing organizations want to be viewed in a better light by sponsors, and recruiting experienced sponsor-side professionals is one step to accomplishing that goal.

Unless, of course, some of those sponsors are unhappy about losing talent.

“Relentless,” is how one oligonucleotides development specialist describes his experience of being recruited away from his current role at a biotech.

Another sponsor-side professional said she went into CDMO interviews with specific ideas on how they could improve.

They listened. She joined one of them.

Of course this influx of sponsor talent into the stables of CDMOs is not new, but it intensified in 2025.

Those who have already made the trade to service provider say their new company reaps the benefits of a better customer-relationship experience.

That is a main driver of this activity.

On the sponsor side, you readily acknowledge drug programs advance at a sustainable pace because of the skilled professionals at CDMOs.

For biotechs it’s a self-induced reliance, built on the now ubiquitious virtual or lean make-up of these companies. Outsourcing is the affordable business-enabling and science-implementing model.

But here’s the rub. Apparently appreciative sponsors still describe CDMO relationships as transactions born of necessity. It’s an activity performed without a sense of enthusiasm.

In fact the outsourcing experience, they say, is taxing. Too often a struggle.

“Why is this?” CDMOs asked themselves throughout 2025. They think they’ve landed on an answer.

Yours And Our Professionals

Professionals at sponsors – those actively looking for new positions or those who are not – describe a muscular effort by CDMOs to recruit them.

More and more are accepting offers.

The logic has always been there; bring in people who have experienced the pain points of working with CDMOs firsthand – e.g., communication failures, opaque timelines, cost overruns, data acquisition challenges – and who can help redesign processes with a customer’s perspective in mind.

Providers are looking for an appreciable elevation of customer service. I recently wrote about this topic specifically.

Customer service – partly defined as a CDMO’s passion for the work it does for you – has risen on sponsors’ lists of CDMO-selection criteria.

“How will this CDMO treat us through the duration of our relationship?” is as pertinent today as “How functional is their pilot facility?” or other questions of capabilities and capacities.

A manufacturing leader I spoke with described working at a CDMO today as “the underdog life.”

That’s a recognition that providers have an uphill battle to earn high marks for demonstrating development and manufacturing excellence, but also delivering a less stressful way of accomplishing objectives together.

So expect more such hirings. In 2026, these may be questions you will ask of perspective CDMOs:

• How many former biotech or pharma professionals are at your company?
• What organizations have they come from?
• Are any of our former employees here? Will they be working on my project?

2026’s Transformational Agenda

With ex-sponsor professionals in the organization, what will the CDMO’s reorientation to the customer look like in practice?

Outsourcing professionals converge on a few key areas to prioritize.

Service Innovation

Innovation starts, perhaps counterintuitively, with clearer pricing discussions driving more flexible contracting terms. The courtship and onboarding process includes access to project teams at the CDMO, and to the extent possible, co-development of scheduling and planning.

As the outsourcing market continues to mature, the CDMO making headway in 2026 will design collaborative governance structures, and more flexible ways to work together from management to bench.

Rethink the Team Extension Concept

This one is my personal interjection.

After experience working at a CDMO, and now covering the industry for over a decade, I’ve grown less sanguine regarding a sponsor’s ideal that a CDMO should “feel like an extension of our own team.”

This may cut across the grain of all the above. However, the reality is CDMOs are businesses outside your enterprise with their own operational and business needs. A clear expectation by the sponsor of this can only help set the most realistic expectations, and will benefit a relationship.

Otherwise, dissapointment occurs when the ideal cannot be reached. CDMOs will always have independent needs and objectives. What they are striving for is to serve customers better; an important part of that includes honest communication of the possible and the not attainable.

Yes, absolutely, CDMOs should feel like extraordinary resources to help move your company forward. Personal working relationships are essential.

But if you need real extensions of your team, hire more team members into your organization.

Having so pontificated, there is this: Increasingly, sponsors may appreciate that former employees are working at a CDMO, and believe these human resources will help get both sides closer to the “extension of our company” ideal.

Always here, though, is the caveat of not being so happy when CDMOs lure your employees away. That's a thorn in the side of any relationship.  

All in all, I should end by enunciating that after a year of advocating for improved customer service – even more “passion” at CDMOs – both biotech and pharma outsourcing professionals do more often than not sing the praises of their current external partners.

CDMOs reliably deliver services and materials that fill needs from a quality, regulatory and safety perspective.  

But once you receive good service – you strive for even better experiences. 

CDMOs know that. And thus they are trying to get closer to that ideal by “borrowing” some of your professionals.