Traction in the U.S. · Life sciences
Every line of that job description says what the person should be. Not one says what they do on Monday.
Read the job description your board just approved. 10 years in the industry. Proven track record. Established network. Executive presence. Not one line says what they do in week one.
Now picture the hire it produces. 25 years in, a vice-president title from a company everyone recognizes, a package around USD 250,000 all in. 10 months later: four first meetings, one inherited pilot project stalled since spring, and a resignation letter saying the company was not ready to support the role.
The letter is right. You did not write a bad requisition. You wrote a good one, in the only format anybody hands you. Every question in the recruiter’s brief, the board pack, and the applicant tracking system wants a noun: years, title, network, industry. Not one asks what the person does on the first Monday. Often it is not even written by the person who knows what the work is. The thinking was sound. The format could not describe the work.
The short version
Write the job as things that get done: the accounts called in week one, the pilot projects signed, the two numbers answered for on day 90. Then audit two contexts, the machine that produced the candidate’s track record and the machine you are handing them. A modest CV that performs your verbs beats a marquee CV that performed someone else’s.
Track records travel with their machinery
The assumption buried in “proven track record” is that results travel with the person. Sometimes they do. Where the next job carries the same brand, lead flow, and buyer, the number repeats.
Your U.S. entity is not that job. The USD 40 million region on the CV was produced by a system: a brand that opened doors, a team feeding meetings, 15 years of inbound, customers who took reference calls, a legal department that turned contracts in days. The person was real. So was the machine. Only one arrives on your payroll.
In medical devices the gap is easy to see. A 510(k) clearance gives you the legal right to sell. As of 2026 it does not put you on a group purchasing organization contract, and it does not carry you through a hospital’s value analysis committee, where a clinician, a supply chain lead, and a finance analyst decide whether your device displaces something already on the shelf. The vice president sat in those rooms with a signed GPO contract, a published study, and a regional team of reps. Your hire has none of it yet.
The machinery changes by sector, the question does not. At a utility, week one is the capital plan agenda before the budget closes. At a defense prime, the program office before the requirement is written.
What a track record actually proves
Be fair to the CV. It proves the person can operate inside the machine that produced it, which is narrower than “proven” suggests. The rolodex is context too. Those names lean toward the employer he just left, and a courtesy call still ends where every U.S. deal ends: a buyer asking for proof, a path to a pilot project, and a reason this helps their Monday number.
A European industrial company hired a senior executive with 25 years in the sector, personal relationships with the decision makers, and a track record everyone recognized. What the CV could not show: no experience building from zero, and none opening a door for a name nobody had heard of. The resignation letter came 10 months later. The company did not hire the wrong person. It described who to hire, and never described the work.
Three moves, all of them verbs
1. Write the job as verbs, before you write the requisition.
Start from the next 12 months: the beachhead, the 30 to 50 named accounts, the motion that already works in founder hands. Put the doing on one page.
- Week one: these 20 named accounts, this proof kit, first meetings with these titles.
- The motion as the founder runs it today: discovery, into a paid pilot project, into a written conversion trigger.
- Quarter one: the actual number of first meetings with named accounts, and of pilot projects signed, with triggers attached.
- The two numbers on the day-90 scorecard. Nothing measured in activity.
- What the company supplies: the proof kit, the references, and founder time every week, in hours.
If you cannot write the verbs, you do not have a job opening. You have a wish list with a salary.
2. Audit both contexts, theirs and yours.
Theirs: for every number on the CV, ask what produced it. Brand or no brand. Inbound or outbound. A team or alone. References on tap, or built from nothing. The sharpest version is the reference call script below.
Yours: three things want to be true before the requisition opens. The proof kit exists: outcome numbers, a reference, a live integration, the security answers. The Ideal Customer Profile repeats, meaning your last three U.S. deals resemble each other on paper. The motion is teachable, meaning the founder can teach it in a week.
If you cannot name three U.S. deals that resemble each other, that is information, not a verdict. It is also the answer. The job does not exist yet. The founder is still the hire, in-market one week a month, until roughly 10 U.S. customers create a visible pattern.
Skip your side and the hire inherits discovery, which is founder work: it takes authority to change the product, the price, and the pitch in a single meeting. An employee has none of that in month one, unless you deliberately grant it.
3. Make the interview a working session, running both ways.
The profile that survives is the seller-builder: someone who has personally done your verbs, at your stage, and can build the playbook while running it. You will not learn that by asking about the old job.
Hand the candidate the proof kit and three accounts from your beachhead list. Work the problem together for an hour. Listen for whether they start from your proof and the buyer’s Monday number, or from “I know some folks over there.”
Then expect the audit to run the other way. A seller-builder worth hiring asks what is in the proof kit, who your last three U.S. customers were, how much founder time they get, and what happens in month nine if the pilot projects convert and nobody funded the second hire. Someone who does not ask has not worked out whether the job can be won.
Scripts you can use this week
The interview prompt:
“Here are three accounts from our beachhead list, and our proof kit. Walk me through, step by step, how you get a first meeting with the [title] at each of them, this week.”
The reference call question:
“When [candidate] hit that number, what did the company hand them: brand, inbound leads, a team, references? And what did they build from nothing?”
The line for the board, when the marquee CV arrives:
“We are not buying what this person was. We are buying what they will do here, and here we have none of the machinery that produced that number.”
Decision lens, before you open the requisition
- Can you put week one on one page right now, with the accounts named?
- Take the candidate’s best number. How much was them, and how much was the machine around them?
- Does your context supply what the work needs: a proof kit, an ICP that repeats, a motion you could teach in a week?
Think Slow. Act Fast. Win Big.
Think Slow. Write the verbs and audit both contexts before you meet a candidate. The requisition is the last document you write, not the first.
Act Fast. Once the page is real, move. The seller-builders you want are employed and slightly bored, and a page of named accounts is what recruits them.
Win Big. The hire who does ordinary things in your context beats the CV that did extraordinary things in someone else’s.
The requisition format asks who a person has been. The market pays only for what gets done. One page, written before the search opens, is the difference. It costs an afternoon.
Thomas Riebs, JD
Managing Partner
Traksjon
Think Slow. Act Fast. Win Big.
Los Angeles, California, USA
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