Somewhere right now, a medical device is sitting in a drawer. It cleared. It worked. The science is solid, the clinical data is there, and the regulatory path is behind it.
Nobody knows it exists.
That image is why I do this work.
I've been in recruitment long enough to know the difference between people who see it as a job and people who see it as something else. I'm in the second group. Not because I'm especially virtuous, but because I stumbled into a sector where the stakes are too high for it to be anything less.
Before medtech, I spent the better part of a decade in the energy industry, building project management teams for large offshore construction projects. It taught me what high-stakes hiring looks like. What the cost of getting it wrong really is. Those lessons didn't leave when I changed sector.
In 2017, my father died of a heart attack. He went to sleep one night and didn't wake up. I was 5,000 miles away in Houston.
What followed was something close to an obsession. I wanted to understand what might have caught it earlier. That search brought me to HeartFlow, which had developed a diagnostic tool using CT scan data to build detailed 3D models of the heart's arteries, and then to Cleerly, approaching the same problem from a different angle. Both were offering something that hadn't existed a decade earlier: an accurate, non-invasive method of identifying cardiac risk before it became a cardiac event.
The statistic that stopped me: over 50% of people who die from a heart attack experience no prior symptoms. None at all. Had my father encountered this technology during a routine health check, we might have had more time together. I'll never know. But the question stayed with me.
Getting a device to that health check is the problem. It costs an average of US$31 million to achieve 510(k) clearance, with 77% of that driven by regulatory and FDA-related activity. Clearance isn't the finish line. It's the starting gun for a completely different race: one requiring a completely different set of commercial skills. (And almost no one talks about that second race. The industry obsesses over regulatory milestones and largely ignores what has to happen next.)
That's where the hiring question becomes existential. There's no slack in the system at this stage. No institutional memory to absorb a mismatch. I became convinced early on that standard recruitment wasn't built for this, so I built something different. Using the McQuaig behavioural methodology, I developed a process that now averages 96% first-year retention across placements, validated across 3,000 searches. The industry average sits between 65 and 70%. Medtech commercial leadership runs tighter, though it isn't publicly tracked.
Better matches. Better data. Better decisions.
After five years, I'm still being corrected by people in this community who know things I don't. I'm fine with that.
The piece that stays with me: somewhere, a device cleared, it worked, and nobody knows it exists. Because the commercial hire wasn't right.
That's the problem I'm here to solve.