Your science is hard. The hire who translates it into a business is harder.
Pharma, biotech, medical device, and diagnostics. Commercial leadership, R&D leadership, regulatory, and clinical operations.
Life sciences hiring sits at the collision of scientific depth, regulatory complexity, and commercial discipline. Most candidates have one of the three. The right hire has all three - or a clear path to the missing one.
The cost of the wrong hire isn’t just turnover. It’s a delayed launch, a missed regulatory window, a clinical trial that doesn’t enroll. Time isn’t recoverable.
We install the screen for what actually matters: judgment under regulatory pressure, scientific credibility with internal teams, commercial discipline with external markets.
“A delayed launch doesn’t show up as a hiring metric. It started as one.”
THE KIND OF QUESTION THE INTERVIEW ASKS
“Take me through a launch that slipped. What did you see first, who did you have to move, and what did the revised timeline prove?”
You have seen brilliant science stall behind the wrong commercial leader.
In executive search since 1999
85% retention on placed candidates at 24 months, firm-wide
Retained and project engagement models
Aledria Howard
Practice Leader
Aledria Howard leads the practice after more than a decade inside life sciences recruiting teams - pharma, medical device, and clinical organizations. She runs the searches where quality, regulatory, and clinical execution decide outcomes, and designs the screens that test for it.
Talk to AledriaBetween discovery and commercialization sits a handful of hires who translate the science. The engine defines the translation outcome, screens for operators who’ve carried products across that gap, and disqualifies on the red flags that surface at month nine - after the launch window closed.
Your in-house recruiters can be certified on the same discipline through REI, the education arm of Guide, Don’t Drive™.
- 01
Run the Diagnostic
The 23-question hiring-discipline diagnostic surfaces your exact gap in about ten minutes.
- 02
Strategy Call with a Practice Leader
A Practice Leader maps the gap to a solution - retained search, RPO, or Staffing - on your live requisitions.
- 03
The Install on Live Searches
The 6-Step Performance Engine™ runs on the open seats that matter most. Standards hold. Hires produce.
The market map is built by hand, one qualified name at a time.
THE STAKES
The translation hire that fails at month nine fails after the launch window - the delay never shows up as a hiring metric, but it started as one.
INSTALLED HERE
The handful of hires who carry science to market, screened for evidence they have crossed that gap before.
- VP / SVP Commercial
- VP / Head of R&D
- Chief Medical / Scientific Officer
- VP Regulatory Affairs
- VP Clinical Operations
- VP Quality Assurance
- VP Manufacturing / CMC
- Therapeutic Area Leadership
- Medical Affairs Leadership
- Health Economics & Outcomes Research
How do you screen for judgment at the translation gap between science and commercial?
We build the screen around what the role actually demands: has this person carried a product across the science-to-market gap before, under regulatory pressure, with internal scientific credibility intact? The behavioral prompt names the gap specifically - and disqualifies on the red flags that surface at month nine, after the launch window closed.
Can you run searches for commercial leadership, not just scientific roles?
Yes - VP of Commercial, Chief Revenue Officer, Business Development Director, and Market Access leads are high-frequency searches. The screen asks the same question in a different register: how does this person translate between scientific certainty and commercial speed when neither side fully trusts the other?
Do you work across therapeutic areas?
Oncology, rare disease, medical device, diagnostics, and CRO environments are the most common. The screen is always calibrated to the actual operating environment - the demands of an oncology launch are not the same as a diagnostics scale-up, and the behavioral standard reflects that.
Stop hoping. Install the discipline that makes the next life sciences hire produce.
23 questions. About ten minutes. A scored read of where your hiring breaks.
