Bryan Blair

Finding His Place

SciPro gave Blair his start in life sciences recruiting in 2020, in a market where almost nobody was hiring anyone. He moved to GQR not long after and has built his career there since.

The team is in the office 3 days a week, and he looks forward to all 3. Recruiting alongside people who become friends outside of work, he says, is most of what makes the job hold up over 6 years. You end up at their weddings. There are no Sunday scaries.

The Work

Blair is Vice President at GQR, where he runs executive and contract search across clinical functions for biotech and pharma. His desk covers drug safety and pharmacovigilance, clinical operations, clinical development and medical directors, biostatistics, statistical programming, and clinical data management.

Since 2020 he has extended 262 offers and had 217 accepted, an acceptance rate of 83%.

An AI Engineer Who Recruits

Blair spends more on AI tooling than most recruiters spend on job boards. His Claude bill for July was $811, and he considers it money well spent.

He asked it once to describe how he actually works. "You're really an AI engineer who recruits, not a recruiter who uses AI," it told him. He has not argued with the assessment.

The habit shows up publicly. He writes 2 newsletters, RecruitRx on the biotech hiring market and recruit.ai on the practical use of AI in knowledge work, for a LinkedIn audience of more than 22,000.

The People Who Made the Difference

Blair names 4 people, and what each of them taught him.

Liz Kennedy, his first boss, taught him work ethic. Cheryl Chason, his second, taught him how to deliver excellence.

Nicole Leinders, Division Head of Life Sciences at GQR, taught him what executive presence actually looks like. How to be a real leader in a room, and how to build a team that wants to work hard together every day and expects to still be doing it side by side years from now. She creates a culture you cannot help but buy into, he says. The feeling is contagious. She has earned his admiration as a professional.

And Joseph Rispoli, his best friend, the one whose New York apartment he took over in 2020. They are still best friends. Rispoli left recruiting and is the COO of a law firm at 29. He was also the person who helped Blair through addiction earlier in his life, and stayed with him through the worst of it. Blair is 6 years sober. During that stretch, he says, Rispoli was the only one there.

Advice for Anyone Graduating Now

Asked what he would pass along to a college senior, Blair gives 1 piece of advice: move to the biggest metropolitan area you can reach. New York. San Francisco. Austin. Wherever the jobs are dense.

He is describing what he did. He arrived in New York in 2020 with no job, into an apartment a friend had left behind, and was working within 5 days.

The argument is not only volume. Working in New York means competing every day against people who came from all over the world to do the same thing you do, and that sharpens you fast. Blair thinks a market like that solidifies both a career and a person as a professional in a way a smaller one cannot. "If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere."

The second argument is stability. When the economy turns, density is a cushion. There is so much hiring across the New York metro that the floor sits higher there than almost anywhere else, and Blair says that is worth real comfort even against what it costs to live there.