Sinead founded Ardent Leadership in 2016 after twelve years running healthcare and life-sciences searches for a global firm. The company places chief executives, chief medical officers and scientific leadership into biotech, medtech and healthcare providers, from first funding round to listed group.
Nine people across London and Cambridge. Sinead holds the Healthcare & Life Sciences chair in the first volume of The Executive Search Ten.
Whether anyone told them the truth about the state of the business. Half the failures I've seen were people who accepted a job based on a picture that wasn't accurate, and then got blamed for not fixing something they were never warned about.
So we changed one thing at Ardent: the candidate hears the bad news from us, in plain words, before they say yes. We've lost placements doing it. We've never lost a placed person because of it.
In life sciences the bottleneck was never finding people. Everyone knows everyone; the science community is a village with a conference calendar. AI has made the long list free and the short list more valuable.
What it changes for the people I place is exposure: a chief medical officer's every public sentence is now searchable forever. The ones who thrive treat that as a discipline, not a threat.
Vision. Every failing biotech I have ever worked with had a visionary at the top of it. The successful ones had somebody who could kill their own favourite programme a year early.
The kindest thing a leader in science can do is stop something. Vision rarely stops anything.
An excuse, and in science a costly one. "Fit" is how labs end up looking identical for thirty years. The best appointment I made last year was somebody two interviewers called "not quite us". That was the point of her.
The real question is whether the person can work the way decisions actually get made there. That you can test. "Fit" you can only feel, and feelings have a type.
Someone who can speak to a regulator in the morning and a patient forum in the evening without changing what they believe between the two. Trials recruit on public trust now. Five years ago that was a communications job; today it is the chief executive's.
In founder-led science there is no succession plan because the founder is the company's origin story, and boards indulge that for years past its usefulness. You cannot succeed a myth. You can only succeed a job description, so the work is turning one into the other while the founder is still in the room.
It's a market with two currencies, money and belief, and the exchange rate swings wildly. In a funding winter the same chief scientific officer costs half what she did, and she is exactly as good as she was.
Rational? No. Predictable, once you accept the currencies? Almost.
Before Series B, usually. A seed-stage company paying my fee is spending science money on something its investors' network should do for nothing. I have said that to founders in the room with their investors, and the investors like it less than the founders do.
Ring me when the job is bigger than everyone you already know. Not before.
Science's intake is diverse and its boardrooms are not, which tells you the problem isn't the pipeline, it's the pipe. The attrition happens in the middle, quietly, one "not quite ready" at a time.
We changed what we count: not who was on the shortlist, but who was ruled out and in what words. Reading those words back to a client is uncomfortable and effective.
Half and half, and the half nobody prices is timing. The same person joining the same company two years earlier is a different appointment. In biotech the calendar decides more than the CV: where the trial is, where the cash is, where the founder is on the way to letting go.
A clinical director everyone called too quiet for a chief medical officer role. The panel wanted presence. I argued that the trial she'd held together through a safety scare was presence, just not the theatrical kind.
Quiet is not the absence of authority. Three years on, the board that nearly rejected her has asked her to present to it eleven times.
"What has a candidate taught you?"
A scientist I didn't place once told me she'd decided against the job in the first ten minutes, then stayed for the full hour out of respect for the process. I asked what happened in the ten minutes. She said the chief executive had described the science brilliantly and the people not at all.
I've listened for that ratio in every brief since. It has never once been wrong.
Asked at every sitting, answered without thinking too hard.