7 mins read
In short: A MedTech hiring plan ties each hire to a company milestone, states the outcome the hire must produce, separates non-negotiable qualifications from preferences, settles compensation and decision-making authority up front, and designs the interview process before the first candidate is contacted. Startups that do this tend to fill roles faster and lose fewer of the candidates they wanted.
In FloodGate Medical’s experience, many MedTech startup searches stall before outreach begins, because the company has agreed on a title and nothing else. The hiring manager wants a rainmaker, the CEO wants a builder, the board wants a name from a strategic, compensation has not been discussed, and nobody has said who makes the final call. A search can run for months on that ambiguity, the strongest candidates drift away while the company deliberates, and the role can still be open when the launch date arrives.
Josh Heuchan, Founder and CEO of FloodGate Medical, which has recruited exclusively for MedTech companies since 2001, describes the fix in one sentence:
“A successful search begins before the first candidate is contacted. Companies need agreement on the business milestone, the outcomes expected from the hire, the non-negotiable qualifications, and who has final decision-making authority.”
Josh Heuchan, Founder and CEO, FloodGate Medical
What follows is that planning work as a five-step framework, drawn from FloodGate’s experience supporting specialized MedTech searches. It usually takes a leadership team a few hours and can save months. HR and talent acquisition teams supporting a startup can use it as the intake checklist before any search opens.
Step 1: Tie the hire to a company milestone, not to an org chart
In short: Start with the business event the hire has to make possible: a clearance, a launch, a territory expansion, a financing. The milestone sets the timeline, the profile and the urgency.
A startup’s hiring sequence should read like its operating plan. Each role exists because a milestone needs it: a regulatory lead because a 510(k) submission is due in the second quarter; a clinical specialist because the first ten accounts go live in the fall; a first territory manager because the launch region needs coverage ninety days before the sales meeting. Writing the milestone next to the role does three things. It forces a real start date, working backward from when the person must be productive. It tells you what “good” looks like at day ninety. And it makes the cost of delay visible, because the milestone slips with the hire.
In FloodGate’s experience, most strategic objectives eventually depend on a talent objective. The plan is where that dependency gets written down.
Step 2: Define the outcome, then the profile
In short: Describe what the person must accomplish before describing who they are. The outcome produces the profile; the profile written first produces a keyword list.
The seat is not the objective; the business outcome is. “We need a Territory Manager for the Southeast” yields a list of Territory Managers in the Southeast. “We need to take this region from three accounts to fifteen in eighteen months, in a specialty where we are the challenger” yields a different and often larger list: people who have done that, under other titles, in adjacent categories. Write the outcome as two or three measurable statements, agree them across the CEO, the hiring manager and the board where relevant, and derive the profile from them. This is also the moment to decide which role comes first when several are needed at once: the one whose outcome gates the milestone with the least slack.
Step 3: Separate the non-negotiables from the preferences
In short: List every requirement, then label each one non-negotiable or transferable. Regulatory, clinical and technical bars stay. Inherited preferences go.
Some MedTech requirements protect patients and the company and cannot move: a clinical credential for a specialist who will train operating-room staff, direct pathway experience for the person who owns the submission. Many other requirements are habits, inherited from the last search or from the hiring manager’s own path into the industry. “Five years in orthopedics” often means “must know the call points,” which a strong representative from spine may already do. “Existing relationships in the territory” often means “must ramp fast,” which a candidate with a record of building territories from scratch can deliver. Rewriting each requirement as the outcome it is meant to produce keeps the standard and widens the pool.
Step 4: Settle compensation and decision-making authority before outreach
In short: Agree the base, variable and equity range against current market data, and name the single person with final authority. In FloodGate’s experience, searches stall on these two questions as often as on candidate supply.
Compensation decided late is one of the most common reasons we see a MedTech startup lose its first-choice candidate. Benchmark before outreach, against current data for the role, level and specialty, and set a range the board has already approved. Then decide who decides. A startup search can have many voices, and every one of them is entitled to an opinion, but exactly one person needs the authority to say yes, and every interviewer needs to know who that is. Write down the sequence of approvals too: hiring manager, CEO, board member if required. A candidate who hears “we need to run it past the board” after the final interview may already have accepted another offer.
Step 5: Design the interview process as if the candidate were the customer
In short: Fix the number of steps, the interviewers, the questions and the turnaround before the search opens. In FloodGate’s experience, many of the strongest MedTech candidates are employed and not actively looking, so a slow or improvised process can lose them.
Decide the sequence: a phone screen, one or two structured interviews, a final with the decision-maker, a reference and background step. Assign interviewers and give each a lane so candidates are not asked the same question four times. Use the same behavior-based questions for every candidate for a given role, scored against criteria derived from the outcome statements in Step 2. For a commercial role, for example: tell me about a time a customer chose your competitor; tell me about a time a strategy you tried did not work; tell me about a time you were told no. Commit to turnaround: feedback within two days, next steps scheduled before the current one ends, a decision within a week of the final. Then honor it. Candidates judge the company by its process, because it is often the part of the company they see most.
What a finished plan looks like
In short: One page per role: the milestone, the outcome statements, the non-negotiables, the compensation range, the decision-maker and the interview sequence with dates. If the page cannot be written, the search is not ready.
The discipline is not in the document. It is in the agreement the document records. When a search stalls, the cause is often a gap on that page: a milestone nobody agreed, an outcome nobody wrote down, a requirement nobody questioned, a range nobody approved, a decision-maker nobody named. Closing those gaps before the first candidate is contacted can be the difference between a search that takes six weeks and one that takes six months. And because a vacant critical role has a cost that builds while it stays open, it can also be the difference on the balance sheet. FloodGate has written separately about what recruiting really costs; the short version is that the fee is often not the largest number.
