Rapid placement of a full medical device sales team

One of the major players in in-vitro diagnostics, our partner for almost two years, was experiencing an increased demand for its products. Based on this, it was able to quickly develop a secondary range and increase sales by more than 90% in one year. This good health allowed it to grow its sales force on a specific medical niche and thus to create a new division from scratch, requiring the recruitment of five sales representatives for the French territory.

The challenge

Following the good figures and the quality of the new product line, the demand was growing from the various target customers (mainly private and public hospitals). Indeed, the formalization took place at the end of August and we had to quickly recruit the five profiles so that they could participate in the international congress of the group in November and be trained to start in 2023 in order to move the business forward.

Beyond the commercial and scientific skills, the main challenge was to quickly propose candidates who could start in November and to be able to respond quickly to customer needs and to assert their new leadership in this market.

In general, there are a lot of sales people with specific medical device experience in France, but there is also high demand for these skills, so this talent pool isn’t always looking for a new role, which added to the challenge of getting them through the recruitment process and in place in time.

Our solution

We launched the search after a constructive exchange with the commercial manager and the HR partners. Several criteria were identified:

  • Scientific skills
  • Commercial experience
  • Idiomatic skills
  • Mobility
  • Availability
  • Salary

Given the speed at which the client needed the recruitment process to follow, we knew tapping into our existing candidate base would be the best option given we already knew many of them personally, including their career aspirations and for what kind of project they would consider taking a new role.

With this base we were able to identify a panel of relevant candidates and following our in-depth discussions, we were able to quickly put forward the personalities who were motivated and ready to make themselves available quickly.

The aim was to respond quickly to our client’s needs, so we favoured hunting and networking to find suitable candidates efficiently, but we also launched traditional job advertisements on specialised websites to further expand our talent pool for this project.

The idea was not only to find good candidates on paper, but salespeople motivated by the project and ready to follow my client as soon as possible, which ensures longer term compatibility and employees more likely to not only stay in their new role, but to succeed in it.

The outcome

From receiving the client brief in August, by mid-October we had finalised the five recruitments, four of which could start in November with the fifth due to start in January, thus allowing the client to successfully launch its new division.