The Rados Method is the framework I use to judge a biotech leadership hire. Two factors, in fixed order: stage fit, then need fit. Most searches check neither. The hire that costs you the next round is the one no CV shows. I find it in 60 minutes, while the move is still a choice.
Average is expensive.
I built the method over fifteen years in biotech search and more than a thousand executive conversations.
You hire a strong person for a seat this stage did not need. Or the seat it did need stays empty. The hire works out. The company still stalls. A flat round. A year of runway gone.
The right role, the wrong person for the stage. The CV fits. A year in, the work stops feeding them. The energy thins. The best work stops. By the next raise, that seat is the gap investors price first.
I see both every year. Both are expensive, and both are visible before anyone signs. Whether you build the company or back it, the cost lands on you.
Every search I run starts with the whole market, not with who happens to be available. The basics of the job description come first, and I check them on every candidate: skill, experience, location, contract type, availability, languages. Every serious HR team or agency checks the same list. It is the visible part of a candidate, and it says almost nothing about whether the hire holds. My briefing does not start there. It starts with the company. Two fits, in fixed order: stage fit, then need fit. Those two are new. Most searches stop at the job description, and a year later everyone is surprised. People get hired for their skills and let go for their personality. That does not have to happen. It happens because nobody checked the two fits.
What does your stage demand, and what does it feed?
A Series A company and a Phase 2 company do not need the same CFO. Every biotech breaks in patterns, and the patterns are set by where the company came from and where it is in its life. So I start there, not with the empty seat. I place the company on a six-stage lifecycle from what I can observe: the round, the headcount, the clinical phase, the board. Not from what the founder hopes it is.
The stage sets two things. Which capabilities the seat demands right now, and which needs the seat can feed. That is the profile I search against, not the title.
Not a prescription. The shape of where a company stands and the stage it is heading into.
| Stage | Round | Clinical phase | Headcount | What to think about |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01Formation | Seed | Discovery | 2 to 10 | Founding team gaps |
| 02Build | Series A | Preclinical | 10 to 30 | Function leadership |
| 03Translation | Series B | Phase 1 | 30 to 50 | Clinical leadership |
| 04Inflection | Series C | Phase 2 | 50 to 100 | Strategic shift |
| 05Scale | Crossover | Phase 3 | 100 to 250 | Execution at scale |
| 06Maturity | Public | Commercial | 250 plus | Succession planning |
Seed to Public is where I work.
The CFO who gets you through Seed is not the CFO who gets you through Series C. Four seats, at Build and at Scale, the way I see them on mandates.
At Build. Series A, 10 to 30 people.
The job is conviction and storytelling.
You sell the science to investors who bet on it and on you. You hire the first ten, the people who define the company. You are still in lab meetings, because no one else is senior enough to call the science. The board is small and friendly. Strategy and operations blur into one thing called what we do this week.
What I look for: storytelling power, scientific credibility the founders trust, conviction that survives a no, real network depth in the therapeutic area, hiring scars.
At Scale. Phase 3 and pre-commercial, 100 to 250 people.
The job is institutional leadership.
You run multi-site clinical operations, a real BD function, a finance team with its own CFO, and a board with crossover investors who think in quarters. You are not in lab meetings. If you are, something is wrong. Most of your time goes to people, capital markets and the question whether the company gets acquired, goes public or launches on its own.
What I look for: a 100-plus organisation run before, public-markets or pre-IPO exposure, BD and partnering muscle, and the patience to let other people make the calls you would have made yourself two stages ago.
Some founder-CEOs grow into this. Most do not. The honest ones know which they are.
At Build. Series A, 10 to 30 people.
In the strict sense there is no CFO job yet.
There is a financial manager job: a clean monthly close, the cap table, support for the next round, the science budget translated into investor language. The CEO still makes the financing decisions. Most companies hire too senior here, and both sides end up frustrated.
What I look for: operational discipline, investor reporting craft, cap table fluency, and comfort next to a CEO who owns the financing strategy.
At Scale. Phase 3 and pre-commercial, 100 to 250 people.
Now it is a CFO job.
The person runs a finance team, structures institutional financings, models commercial scenarios with real revenue assumptions, and sits opposite analysts and crossover investors as a peer. The IPO conversation is real. So is the acquisition conversation. The capital decisions are no longer the CEO's alone.
What I look for: CFO experience at a clinical-stage or commercial biotech, public-markets exposure if the path goes there, board command, and the judgement to push back on the CEO when the model says push back.
Some CFOs grow into the Scale job. Most do not. Hire the wrong type at the wrong stage and you pay twice: the salary, then the replacement search when the company is at its most fragile.
At Build. Series A, 10 to 30 people.
In most cases there is no CMO yet, and there should not be.
The asset is years from a patient. What the company needs is a medical advisor or a fractional CMO, two days a month, who helps the CSO shape the development plan and runs the early regulatory conversations. Jan De Kerpel put it bluntly on Willing to Win: a superb Chief Medical Officer three years before first-in-human is useless. Founders who hire one anyway watch the role drift or the person leave.
What I look for: medical training with operational instinct, comfort in a part-time seat, real chemistry with the CSO and the CEO, and the willingness to step aside cleanly when the time comes.
At Scale. Phase 3 and pre-commercial, 100 to 250 people.
Now the CMO is the senior clinical voice of the company.
Phase 3 in several markets, end-of-Phase-2 and pre-NDA conversations with regulators, a clinical organisation of 30 to 80 people, and the congress stage next to the CSO. The job is no longer getting the trial designed. It is getting it finished, the dossier filed and the medical community ready for launch.
What I look for: Phase 3 experience, ideally in the therapeutic area, a track record with the FDA and EMA, KOL relationships, and the spine to hold scientific integrity under commercial pressure.
The CMO who designs Phase 2 is almost never the CMO who runs Phase 3 in seven markets. Hire too early, or keep the same person too long, and you lose a year of trial momentum.
The CBO who closes the first licensing deal at Translation is rarely the CBO who structures a USD 500M partnership at Inflection. The first kind opens doors. The second negotiates from inside the room.
The COO is a rare hire before Scale and almost mandatory by commercial launch. In early biotech the CEO is the COO. In late biotech the COO runs the company while the CEO faces investors, regulators and acquirers.
The signals are different at every stage. These are the ones I watch for in a company heading into Series B, when the first functions are forming and the gaps start to show. They do not name the role yet. The point is to catch the gap while a move is still a choice, not yet a crisis.
Not sure which seat is due? Fifteen minutes on a call. I name the seat, the reason and whether it should be permanent or fractional.
Want to know if you need a CFO? Fifteen pages on when the seat is due, which of the three CFO jobs your stage needs, and what to check before you sign.
Will this person stay long enough?
Capability gets a person hired. Whether the seat keeps feeding the two of six human needs that drive them decides whether they stay and do their best work. The need stays constant. When the role changes, what feeds those needs changes with it, and a person can starve on the needs that matter most. Capability is the visible part, and everyone screens for it. Need fit is the part no CV shows.
Every executive I have sat across runs on two of six human needs.
Which two dominate, and whether the seat ahead still feeds them, decides whether they stay outstanding. A seat can carry a need in its title and still starve the person in it, because the stage quietly changed what feeds it.
A CFO whose two needs are Significance and Variety is at her best on a roadshow and in a fast raise. The three quiet years of steady finance that follow do not meet those needs. Same person, same skill, and within two years the energy is gone.
A CFO whose two needs are Certainty and Connection is the opposite. Steady governance and a settled team are exactly what she needs. A sudden pivot, all improvisation, wears her down.
Same CV. Same capability. Different stage. Who stays at her best depends on what the stage feeds.
Lay a person's two needs against the seat at the stage ahead, and a leader lands in one of four places.
If you are building or running the company, the question is whether the next stage will still feed you, or whether it is time to move on. If you are backing one, the question is whether the next stage still feeds the team you back. Coaching will not change a person, and should not. What changes the outcome is seeing the fit before anyone signs.
Start with the company. A mid-stage biotech, moving out of discovery into the clinic. Ask what the next stage actually rewards, and the answer is consistent: Growth and Contribution. The work turns from invention to disciplined development. The thrill of the new thins out. What feeds a leader now is the drug moving closer to patients, and the appetite to master a job that keeps changing.
Now look at the founder. I would argue most founders run on Significance and Variety. It is why they founded a company at all. Variety is the pull of the new, the unknown, the next problem no one has solved. Significance, for a founder, is usually the need to make the calls. To be the one who decides. Those two drives are exactly what starting a company demands, and exactly what the early stages feed.
So the same drives that made the founder build the company are the ones the next stage stops feeding. He has done nothing wrong. The stage changed under him. The work that used to run on his energy now runs on something he is not built for, and the energy thins a quarter at a time.
This is the transition. The leader who fits the next stage is wired differently from the one who founds. Not the same person grown up. A different person for a different chapter.
Founders thrive on Variety and Significance in Formation and Build. From Translation on, the stage starves those needs. For a CEO the threshold runs a little wider, into Inflection and Scale.
That is what I do with the two fits together. Stage fit tells me what the next stage will reward. Need fit tells me what the founder actually runs on. Lay one against the other, and the gap shows up early, long before the strain does. For the one building the company, it is the chapter where their drive stops matching the work. For the one backing it, it is the seat the next stage will test, before the round prices it.
One person, both sides of the table. I did not invent the method at a desk. I shaped it on mandates and sharpened it through study. Three sources.
Fifteen years in biotech executive search. More than a thousand executive conversations that ended in a placement. Four biotech cycles, watched end to end.
Tony Robbins' three questions for partnering and his six human needs, refined through years in his Mastery University and Business Mastery programmes. A trained eye for how a leader decides under pressure.
Person-job fit from Amy Kristof-Brown: whether a role meets a person's needs predicts staying better than capability. Self-determination theory from Deci and Ryan. Mindset from Carol Dweck. Organisational lifecycle and founder-transition research from Greiner, Adizes, Wasserman and Ibarra.
The Rados Method is how I, Christian Rados, judge a biotech leadership hire. It turns on two fits, always in this order. Stage fit: what your stage demands, and what it feeds. Need fit: whether the seat keeps feeding the two of six human needs that drive the person in it. I check the basics of the job description on every candidate, as every serious HR team or agency does. Most searches check neither fit.
Stage fit is the company side. Every biotech breaks in patterns set by where it came from and where it is in its life. I place the company on a six-stage lifecycle from what I can observe: the round, the headcount, the clinical phase, the board. The stage sets two things. Which capabilities the seat demands right now, and which needs the seat can feed. That is the profile I search against, not the title. It prevents the wrong role for the organisation.
Need fit is the person side. Capability gets an executive into the seat. Whether the seat keeps feeding the two of six human needs that drive them, Certainty, Variety, Significance, Connection, Growth or Contribution, decides whether they stay and do their best work. It prevents the wrong fit.
Founders building a venture-backed, clinical-stage biotech, and the investors and boards backing them. A founder uses it to see which leadership move is due before it forces itself. An investor uses it to see whether the team they back fits the stage ahead.
In one of two ways. The wrong role for the organisation: a capable hire for a seat the stage did not need, or the seat it did need left empty. No need fulfilment for the person: the right role and the wrong person for the stage, where the work stops feeding them and their best work goes with it. Both are visible before anyone signs.
A 60-minute call, one-on-one, with no brief and no pitch in advance. We start with where the company is, not with a role, and you leave with the one move that is due. If a search follows, it is a scoped mandate for the seat the call points to: permanent, interim or fractional, or a board seat. The call costs nothing. You pay when a search runs, not before. If you want a first read before the full conversation, a 15-minute call names the seat that is due.
Fifteen years of biotech executive search and more than a thousand executive conversations. Leadership performance training, including Tony Robbins' six human needs. And empirical research: person-job fit from Amy Kristof-Brown, self-determination theory from Deci and Ryan, mindset research from Carol Dweck, and organisational lifecycle and founder-transition research from Greiner, Adizes, Wasserman and Ibarra.
We look at your company, not at a lifecycle in the abstract. No brief in advance, and no pitch. We start with where you are, not with a role. Whether you are building the company or backing it, you leave knowing the one move that is due, and what it takes to go into the next round from strength.
Or write to christian@rados-recruiting.com. Where the method has been applied: executive search experience.