Michael Pietrack

From the Dugout to the Desk

Pietrack played baseball in college and went into coaching afterward, landing at New Mexico State University, where he was heavily involved in the program's recruiting. When he decided to step away from coaching, he took inventory of what he actually knew how to do. Recruiting was the answer.

In 2007 he joined the Alpine Group in Grand Junction, Colorado, an affiliate of the MRI Network. Like most recruiters, he needed time to find his footing. What followed was a steep climb that ended with the worldwide top ranking in 2013, built entirely inside medical affairs, a population of therapeutic experts who are not compensated the way a commercial sales team would be and who therefore require an entirely different recruiting vocabulary.

That performance drew the attention of a competitor. The Medical Affairs Company, known as TMAC, dominated contract staffing in the same niche where Pietrack dominated direct hire. Rather than fight over the same ground, the two sides built an alliance: in March 2014 they launched a TMAC subsidiary called TMAC Direct, pairing the strongest direct hire and contract capabilities in medical affairs under one roof. Pietrack spent nine years there. The business was eventually acquired by Parexel, a major CRO.

Recognition, and What He Did With It

2014 was a landmark year. Pietrack was elected into the Pinnacle Society, at the time a body representing the top 70 recruiters in North America, on a referral he credits to Rob Bowerman. He was also named one of pharma's 100 most inspiring people, an honor he still describes with a mix of pride and disbelief at the company he was keeping. "There were some really big names in there that I felt like I had no business being in with them," he says.

He turned the platform outward rather than inward, taking on keynote and speaking engagements on recruiting and building a reputation as a teacher of the craft rather than simply a top producer.

The Move to Kaye/Bassman

In 2023, after nine years at TMAC and Parexel, Pietrack moved his business to Kaye/Bassman International Corporation. The reason was one person. In the direct hire recruiting world, Jeff Kaye is, in Pietrack's words, "pretty much like a guru, godfather type of thing," a mentor to generations of search professionals. Kaye had founded the firm's pharma and biotech team more than 30 years earlier before moving into the CEO seat, and he was looking for someone to lead and grow it.

Pietrack joined as practice lead in 2023 and has been building since. In 2024 he launched the Pharmaverse Podcast, a leadership show releasing a new episode every other week featuring interviews with top leaders across the pharmaceutical industry. Behind the scenes, he runs Pharma Club, a private forum where executives convene for closed-door conversations on specific topics. He also writes on leadership for BioSpace, the leading magazine in the pharma and biotech world, contributing an article roughly every other month.

Outside of work, he writes fiction. Two novels, Legacy and Boon, are out, and a third is underway.

Three Mentors, Three Lessons

Ask Pietrack how he got here and he names names. First is Dave Murphy, the owner of the Alpine Group, still his mentor today and someone he spoke with only yesterday. Murphy was, in Pietrack's estimation, "the most fundamentally sound recruiter imaginable." Everything by the book. The same play run the same way every time. The lesson was not technique but temperament: watching Murphy day in and day out through slumps and hot streaks and seeing that nothing changed, that he simply kept going with the process.

Second is Jeff Kaye, from whom Pietrack learned market mastery and the counterintuitive economics of narrowing your focus. The riches are in the niches, Kaye taught him, and the tighter your niche, the closer you get to celebrity status inside it. It sounds limiting. It works.

Third is David Hahn, the CEO of TMAC, and notably not a recruiter at all. From Hahn, Pietrack learned how to run a business, lessons he says he still uses every day. Taken together, the three cover the full stack of what a practice leader needs: discipline, market command, and commercial judgment.

AI, and the Part That Does Not Change

Pietrack has watched the industry transform since 2007, and he is clear-eyed about where AI helps and where it does not. "The main blocking and tackling of recruiting has not changed," he says. "It's still pound the phones, build relationships, listen, and make matches." The core of the job remains human connection, remembering what someone told you, and producing the right person at the moment a client describes a need.

Around that core, though, he is an enthusiastic adopter. AI note takers have genuinely changed his interviews, because a recruiter who is not scribbling can actually listen and then go back to the record. He is effusive about CoRecruit, the platform his team uses, describing it with the kind of affection most people reserve for people rather than software. On the heavy-lift administrative work, resume submittals and candidate write-ups, his rule of thumb is that AI gets you 80 percent of the way there and you edit from there. He expects it to eventually absorb a meaningful share of sourcing as well. What it will not absorb is the relationship.

Advice: Nothing Is Actually Overnight

For newcomers and for those a few years in who suspect they have chosen wrong, Pietrack's counsel is a lesson in patience drawn from business history rather than motivational language. The overnight successes are not overnight. Research any of them and you find a long, unglamorous runway underneath. He points to Under Armour, a company that looked like a sudden phenomenon and had in fact spent roughly a decade just getting on the radar.

It is advice with his own resume behind it: six years from a standing start to the top of a 5,000-recruiter network, and nearly two decades of compounding since. Pietrack's career argues that the fundamentals reward the people willing to run the same play, in the same narrow lane, long enough for the market to notice.