Biotech giant CSL has been forced to increase the pay of some employees at its plasma collection centres and embarked on a recruitment spree as staff shortages hamper the bounce back in its core business after the COVID-induced slump.

CSL chief financial officer Joy Linton told the Macquarie Australia Conference on Tuesday that the business had increased the salaries of lower paid staff since February in an attempt to address worker shortages.

“Availability of staff is probably our limiting factor, rather than donors,” she said.

CSL chief executive Paul Perreault first flagged worker shortages in February, when companies across the plasma products industry were competing with sectors such as retail to retain talent.

On Tuesday, Linton said: “We have put through a pay increase, a high single digit pay increase, to our lower wage people that does appear to have stopped attrition.”

CSL is also on a hiring spree for staff across the US, including reception managers and phlebotomists (clinicians responsible for collecting biological samples from patients), but Linton noted it would be months before these staff were on the ground.

“It does take three months between when we employ somebody and when, as a phlebotomist, we allow them to extract plasma from a donor. They need to undertake quite a lot of training. We’re in that three-month period at the moment,” she said.

On the donor side, CSL and its competitors have been forced to increase the payment it makes for each plasma donation. Pre-pandemic this was around $US50 ($70) and has now jumped to $US70 in some locations.

Linton said the company expected a stabilisation in these payments, but not an immediate decline. “In the current environment, we are not predicting a significant reduction in donor fees,” she told the conference.