VP, Clinical Development search

Clinical development leadership is a different search from clinical operations, and treating them as adjacent is where a lot of companies lose months. Operations answers how the trial gets run. Development answers what trial to run, why, and whether the data will support the claim you need.

The pool is small. It gets smaller with every requirement about degree, therapeutic area, and phase experience, and smaller again because the strongest people are usually deep in a program they are not going to abandon mid-readout.

What we actually assess

• Ownership of a development plan. Whether they authored the strategy or executed someone else's. Both are real experience; only one is this job.
• Protocol judgment. Endpoint selection, inclusion criteria that survive contact with real sites, and the willingness to argue with a founder about a design that will not read well to an agency.
• Regulatory-facing experience. Not regulatory affairs, which is a separate function we do not recruit for, but having sat in agency meetings and answered for the science.
• Data interpretation under pressure. What they did with a signal that complicated the story, and whether the answer involves having told people early.
• Working with operations rather than around it. The VP of Clinical Development who designs protocols that cannot be executed creates the operational problem that shows up two years later.

Where these searches go wrong

MD, PhD, or either

Many companies default to requiring an MD without working through whether the role needs one. If the person will act as medical monitor or carry patient-facing accountability, it does. If the role is development strategy and program leadership, an experienced PhD may be a stronger candidate and the pool roughly doubles. This decision should be deliberate rather than inherited from the last job description.

Therapeutic area absolutism

In development, TA depth genuinely matters more than it does in operations. But "oncology" is not one market, and a candidate from an adjacent indication with the right phase experience is often stronger than a same-indication candidate who has only run late-stage work.

The close takes longer than anyone plans for

Senior development leaders move on a longer cycle. They have equity to think about, a readout they may want to see through, and a family conversation about location. A six-week process assumption is the most common reason a good candidate is lost.

How we run it

We settle the degree question and the therapeutic boundaries before mapping, because both change the market fundamentally. We approach directly, assess for real ownership rather than proximity, and are explicit with you about who is realistically movable and on what timeline. On a search this narrow, an honest pool assessment in week two is worth more than a long shortlist in month two.