Barrington James’ Dan Barrington on Acquiring S3
The CEO discusses how his firm uses AI and his plans for future growth
When Barrington James, a global life sciences recruitment firm, acquired S3 Science Recruitment in July, Dan Barrington, CEO of Barrington James, saw S3 as the perfect complement to his firm’s human capital offerings. He shares his plans for continued geographic growth, how artificial intelligence saves time for his team, and the trends and challenges he’s seeing in the life sciences recruitment world.
Middle Market Executive: What were you looking for in an acquisition, and what initially attracted Barrington James to S3 Science Recruitment?
Dan Barrington: It was quite a long list to be honest with you, because we’re looking to grow our human capital offering both across life sciences and globally—anything from executive search to contingent recruitment or contracting staffing. S3 worked predominantly in Europe in preclinical recruitment, something we don’t do, and although they’re small, it’s a very motivated team with good potential. We saw that S3 wasn’t getting much leadership development, and they were desperate to grow. It was the people at the end of the day that made us really excited about the company and the opportunity to increase our service offerings across life sciences.
MME: Can you talk about your plans to incorporate S3 into your operations?
DB: S3 is keeping the name because they’ve got a great name in their industry, but it’ll be branded as a Barrington James company. Because it’s a smaller firm, all the systems have been integrated and we’ve spoken to all the clients we share. We’ve got a very comprehensive learning and development program at Barrington James, so members of the S3 team were all very keen to do that. We’ve also onboarded them into our benefits and rewards package, which is significantly better than they had previously.
MME: What types of growth are you looking at going forward: organic, geographic, more acquisitions?
DB: All of the above. In terms of geography, we’re targeting predominantly the U.S. and Europe, but we’re also looking at Australia. We’re always open to anything within the life sciences space; that’s the key thing for us. It’s the life sciences, human capital space—anything within that, inorganically and organically. We believe that in the areas we’re in, there’s room to double, triple and quadruple the number of staff members we have, so we’ll continue to do that over the next four or five years.
MME: Per the press release announcing the S3 acquisition, it seems like you’re very interested in enhancing Barrington James’ technological capabilities. Are there any specific functions or applications you’re working on or hoping to add?
DB: We’re always keen on looking at new technology, and it can really help us in the job we do. We’re looking at a new CRM now to help onboard and maintain candidate records according to the different rules and regulations in different countries, because there’s quite a few of them. All our tech is there to save time for our people rather than do the jobs of our people. What we’re trying to do is give our consultants back time in their day, so they can speak to our candidates and clients. Our unique sales proposition as a recruiter, as opposed to just being a mover of CVs, is to give our people time to build personal relationships. Any tech that can save our recruiters time is something we’re massively looking at. Obviously, artificial intelligence is a big part of that now. We’re using AI in a lot of ways, from updating records from CVs that come into our current CRM system to helping write emails to doing salary surveys.
MME: In the recruitment space more broadly, what challenges are you facing and what strategies are you using to overcome those?
DB: It’s been a slower 18 months in every sector of recruitment since the post-COVID boom. The challenges we face are keeping our consultants motivated and keeping them hungry when times are hard and the market’s a bit tough and they have to work harder. That’s just about old-school managing and motivating people. We make sure we hire right, we have good career paths, great development paths and good incentives. We continue to communicate to our staff, and we help them as much as possible with the tech that can make their day easier. One of our biggest challenges is getting people who want to do the job and work the hours and be the face of recruitment.
MME: What trends are you seeing in life sciences recruitment?
DB: The life science world was turned upside down, like everything else, with COVID, but post-COVID we saw a massive uptick in companies recruiting staff, probably too quickly. The trend we’re seeing now is the opposite: People are recruiting staff too slowly. They want a perfect 10 for a job, whereas a couple of years ago they’d have taken a 4 out of 10. The truth is that a middle ground is probably their best option.
It’s also tough getting people to move jobs now, because people often want to bet on the devil they know. You can go to a company and then in two weeks be laid off—a “last in, first out” sort of thing.
I’d say one trend we’re seeing is a bit of an uptick in hiring for senior roles recently, which usually means that somewhere in the next six to nine months there will be an uptick in the slightly more junior roles. There’s been a lot of C-suite movement in our industry in the last year, so we think that’s going to come down the chain in early 2025.
Hilary Collins is ACG’s Associate Editor.
Middle Market Growth is produced by the Association for Corporate Growth. To learn more about the organization and how to become a member, visit www.acg.org.
