Director, Clinical Operations search

If one search is going to be open six months at a growing biotech, it is this one. Not because the people do not exist, but because the title covers an unusually wide range of actual jobs and companies rarely specify which one they are hiring.

At a 40-person company, Director of Clinical Operations means personally managing two studies, owning the CRO relationship, writing the SOPs, and doing the work. At a 900-person company it means managing four CTMs who do that. Both are Directors. A candidate from the second, dropped into the first, discovers they have not personally opened a site in six years.

What we actually assess

• Hands on the work, or hands on the people who do it. The single most useful question at this level is what they personally did last quarter, not what their team delivered.
• Study rescue. Nearly every Director candidate has a study that went badly. The ones worth hiring can tell you exactly when they knew, what they changed, and what they would do differently. The ones to avoid describe it as something that happened to them.
• Vendor and CRO oversight in practice. Whether they have held a CRO to a remediation plan, or only attended the governance call where somebody else did.
• Enrollment reality. Sites that under-enroll, protocols that need amending, and the judgment about when to add sites versus fix the ones you have.
• Inspection exposure. Having sat in an FDA or EMA inspection, or supported one, changes how someone runs a study. It is a fast signal.

Where these searches go wrong

Hiring the big-company Director for the small-company job

The resume is stronger, the brand names are better, and the person has genuinely not done the hands-on work in years. This is the most common expensive mistake in the role, and it usually surfaces at month four.

Requiring the therapeutic area when the constraint is the phase

Companies filter hard on indication and loosely on trial phase, when phase is usually the better predictor. Running a first-in-human study and running a global Phase III are different jobs regardless of the disease.

The band sits under the market and nobody says so

Director of Clinical Operations compensation varies widely by company stage and location. A band built from an old grid does not produce rejections, it produces a pipeline that quietly never fills.

Too many firms on the role

When four agencies are working the same Director search, the strong candidates get four calls in a week about one job and conclude the company cannot get organized. The role becomes harder to fill in direct proportion to how many people are chasing it.

How we run it

We settle the scope question first: is this a doer or a manager of doers, and what does the next two years of the portfolio require. Then we map companies at comparable stage and phase, approach directly, and assess against the real work.

Shortlist typically inside two weeks, with written assessments and honest flags. If we think you are looking for the wrong profile, you will hear it early, which on this role is worth more than any amount of extra sourcing.