What We Do

The search is not the hard part.

Finding a Commercial Director with fifteen years of medical device experience and a credible network isn't difficult. There are hundreds of them. Contingency recruiters will send you six CVs within a week.

The hard part is knowing which one is right for the stage your company is actually at. Not the company you were twelve months ago. Not the company you're projecting to be in three years. The company you're right now: with the specific commercial challenge, the specific team dynamic, and the specific window of opportunity in front of you.

That's a different problem. It requires a different approach.

The Retained Argument

Two models. One delivers commercial leaders who stay.

I'll give you a clue, it's not the free one.

Picture the candidate profile for a moment. Working twenty projects at once. Success rate somewhere between 10% and 30%. No exclusivity. Racing three or four competitors, so speed is the strategy, not quality. Ninety-day guarantee.

You'd reject that candidate before the first interview.

That's the contingency model. When the fee arrives only on placement, speed wins. Not fit. Not stage-appropriateness. Not whether the person will still be there in eighteen months. Speed. The first credible candidate who accepts an offer closes the assignment.

Greg Savage, one of the most respected figures in global recruitment, put it plainly: pay recruiters like bounty hunters and you might just get bounty hunters.

The retention data confirms it. Independent research (Work Institute exit interviews; REC Perfect Match) puts first-year retention at 65 to 70%. Medtech commercial leadership runs tighter, though it isn't publicly benchmarked at industry level. Either way, well short of where it needs to be.

That isn't a sourcing problem. It's a model problem.

Retained search is built differently. One brief at a time. Dedicated. Unhurried. Built on a complete understanding of the commercial stage your business is at right now: not a year ago, not in three years. Now. With the specific challenge, the specific team dynamic, and the specific window in front of you.

Every candidate on the shortlist arrives with a full Innotech SIGNAL™ assessment: behavioural profile, competency evidence, video introduction, team benchmark, and Blair's written assessment. You see the complete picture before the first conversation.

The result: 96% first-year retention across 276 placements. Against an industry baseline of 65 to 70%.

The fee is 25% of first-year base salary, invoiced in thirds: commencement, shortlist, placement. Transparent, structured, aligned entirely to delivery.

I'll give you a clue, it's not the free one.

Innotech | SIGNAL™
Innotech | Signal

Most hiring decisions are made on the wrong evidence.

Structured Intelligence Guiding New Appointment Longevity

The interview is a performance. Both parties know this. The candidate prepares their best version. The hiring manager reads the room. Impressions form. Gut feelings take over. A decision gets made on approximately 45 minutes of mutually managed theatre.

It's the most widely used tool in commercial hiring. It's also one of the weakest predictors of whether someone will perform, fit the team, and still be there in two years.

SIGNAL™ was built to change what the CEO knows before that conversation happens.

Every candidate on an Innotech shortlist arrives assessed across five dimensions. The interview becomes a confirmation. Not a gamble.

01 Behavioural Profile +
A validated psychometric assessment mapping behavioural style, motivators, and stress responses. Where you share profiles of your existing team, SIGNAL benchmarks each candidate against your current make-up. You see not just who the candidate is: you see how they'll sit inside the team they're joining.
02 Competency Evidence +
Questions agreed with you at brief: written around the specific commercial challenges the role requires solving. The candidate responds without coaching or interview pressure. The candidate who interviews brilliantly and the candidate who has actually solved this problem before aren't always the same person. This is where you find out which is which.
03 Video Introduction +
Completed in the candidate's own time, without coaching. A candidate who does it thoughtfully is demonstrating genuine interest. A candidate who doesn't is telling you something worth knowing before the first meeting.
04 Team Benchmark +
SIGNAL maps each candidate's profile against your existing team's dynamic. The goal isn't fit. It's strengthening. The hire that fills a gap is more valuable than the hire that replicates what you already have.
05 Executive Summary +
Blair's written assessment. The judgement layer the data informs but can't replace. What the numbers say, what they don't say, and what Blair's read of the individual adds to both.

Most commercial hires fail quietly. The numbers just never arrive. Nobody calls it a failure. SIGNAL exists for the moment before that happens: it's why 96% of Innotech placements are still performing at twelve months, against an industry that accepts 65 to 70% as normal.

Bad Hire Calculator

You know commercial hiring is expensive when it goes wrong. Most haven't run their own numbers.

That gap is intentional. Most CEOs would rather not see it written down.

The calculator below takes three inputs from your business and returns the true fully-loaded cost of a commercial leadership mis-hire: direct costs, indirect costs, and the comparative cost of the same hire placed through a retained process with 96% retention.

No form. No email required. Your numbers stay on your screen.

Base salary only. No bonus or equity.
True Fully-Loaded Cost
Direct cost (salary paid, severance, replacement recruitment)
Indirect cost (lost revenue, management time, team disruption)
Same volume through Innotech, 96% retention
Recoverable

The number that comes back isn't a worst-case estimate. It's the documented cost, drawn from independent research into the true cost of commercial leadership mis-hires, including the Recruitment and Employment Confederation's Perfect Match report: salary paid to someone who leaves, management time that will not return, revenue that was never generated, and a team that watched it happen.

Most companies absorb this cost silently and begin the process again.

The retained search fee that prevents it is a fraction of what you just calculated.

Process

What you experience, at each stage.

Step 01
The Brief
A single conversation, typically 60 minutes.

No pitch deck, no credentials presentation. Blair's job in that conversation is to understand the commercial stage your business is actually at, the specific challenge the hire needs to solve, the team dynamic the person is joining, and the behavioural profile that stage of company genuinely requires. You'll know within that conversation whether this is the right engagement. So will Blair.

Step 02
The Search
Six weeks, from brief to confirmed interviews.

In week one, Blair establishes the behavioural benchmark for the role using the McQuaig Job Survey: completed with you, not for you. This anchors the entire search in the specific behavioural profile the role requires, not a generic commercial leadership template. Market mapping and sourcing runs through week two. Structured assessment and evaluation runs through week four. Shortlist review at week five. Interviews confirmed by week six.

You receive a progress update at the two-week mark. The search doesn't go quiet and then reappear with CVs. You know exactly where it stands throughout.

Week 1
Behavioural benchmark
Week 2
Market mapping & sourcing
Week 3
Progress update
Week 4
Structured assessment
Week 5
Shortlist review
Week 6
Interviews confirmed
Step 03
The Shortlist
There are no CVs.

When candidates are assessed and ready for your review, they appear in your dedicated Innotech SIGNAL portal: accessible on your schedule, not ours. Log in at any point and you'll find each candidate's complete profile: behavioural assessment, their responses to the competency questions you agreed at brief, video introduction, team benchmark where applicable, and Blair's written assessment.

You're not reading generic profiles assembled for a generic role. Every element of what you see was built around your brief, your team, and the specific commercial challenges your next hire needs to solve. The shortlist is a considered recommendation, not a starting point for negotiation. If Blair isn't confident in a candidate, they aren't in the portal.

Step 04
The Decision and Beyond
The placement is not the finish line.

The offer process is managed. Counter-offer conversations are handled. Blair remains the point of contact through the candidate's first ninety days. The retained fee includes a replacement guarantee: if the placement doesn't work within the agreed period, Innotech conducts the search again at no additional cost. That guarantee is only possible because the process that precedes it is rigorous enough to make it a rare conversation.

A Transformation Assignment

A service division that needed rebuilding, not managing.

A UK medical device company asked me to find a Head of Service for a fifty-person service division that was, by any internal measure, in serious difficulty. High attrition. Low morale. No service management software. No spares management. No vision for the staff to get behind. SLAs that the commercial organisation was undermining. A field workforce operating without accountability or a coherent operating model.

The instinct in that situation is to hire a strong operator. It's the wrong instinct. A broken service organisation doesn't need someone to manage what exists. It needs someone to rebuild the operating system, confront the commercial organisation where it has overreached, and hold a field workforce to a standard that hasn't existed before. Those are different people. They interview differently, they read differently on a CV, and they have fundamentally different behavioural profiles.

The candidate turned the division around in twelve months. Within twenty-four it was a business enabler, not a cost centre. Over the two years that followed he repeated the process across three more business units. The hire paid for itself not once but repeatedly.

"Blair's ability to quickly understand my fit with the organisation and where my past experience and skills would complement the challenges of the role was second to none."
Head of Service, UK medical device company
On Confidentiality

The hire itself is the signal.

On several occasions I've been asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement before a client shares the full brief. In a number of those processes, every candidate signed one too.

I mention this not as a credential but as context. The work at this level involves information that is genuinely sensitive: restructures that aren't yet public, acquisitions in preparation, commercial situations the board hasn't yet disclosed. The companies that engage Innotech aren't hiring quietly because they're disorganised. They're hiring quietly because the hire itself is the signal.

Discretion at that level isn't a service feature. It's the baseline expectation. It's also why no transformation case study on this site names the company involved. The clients who have been through those processes know who they are. That is enough.

What I Will Not Do

I only take assignments where I'm confident I can deliver.

A few months ago I took a call from the CEO of a US interventional cardiology company. Commercial Director, US market, 40 percent growth target, team of 25 reps. Exactly the kind of assignment I exist for.

Then came the compensation details. Base at 180k, OTE at 280k. The profile he was describing: a battle-tested Commercial Director with a verifiable history of hitting aggressive growth targets in interventional devices, was landing between 340k and 420k in the current market. I had placed a comparable role three months earlier at 220k base, 375k OTE.

I told him directly. The package would attract either desperate candidates or underperformers who couldn't get better offers elsewhere. Neither outcome served him, the eventual hire, or my firm. I declined the assignment and offered to share market benchmarking data instead.

He wasn't happy. He respected the candour.

I only take assignments where I'm confident I can deliver a result that reflects well on everyone involved. When I can't, I say so immediately and point toward someone better placed to help. That isn't a positioning claim. It's how retained search has to work if the 96 percent retention figure is going to mean anything.

If you're wondering whether your brief is one I can genuinely help with, the fastest way to find out is a thirty-minute call. I'll tell you within the first ten minutes.

Book a Call

If You've Read This Far

The conversation is probably worth having.

Most people who reach this point already have a brief in mind. Some are ready to move. Others are six months away and want to understand the process before they need it. Both are the right time to talk.

Thirty minutes. No pitch deck. No credentials presentation. Blair will ask about the commercial stage your business is at, the specific challenge the hire needs to solve, and what has or hasn't worked in previous searches. At the end of that conversation you'll know whether this is the right fit. So will Blair.

There's no obligation beyond the conversation itself.

Or if you have a specific question before committing to a call, email blair.anderson@innotechrecruit.com directly. It'll reach Blair, not a team.

Book a Call