Executive Search

Discovering, attracting, and retaining the right hires for your executive team requires meaningful expertise. Trust the expertise of a Cornerstone Partner – with an average tenure of 18-plus years – to deliver the 360-degree service you and your candidates deserve.

Over 20 Years of
Diverse Life Sciences Experience

When we say we are experienced, we mean we have seen everything. We understand the difference in culture and process from an established 100,000-person enterprise, compared to a VC-backed start-up making its first-ever external hire or a dynamic biotech growing from clinical to commercial stage seemingly overnight. You need someone that’s specifically right for your company. We listen, customize our proven process, and find the right talent.

Listen

We pause to understand your specific needs, timing, success stories, and internal culture to tell your compelling story to the market.

Plan

We’ll collaborate to create a fully customized, milestone-based plan of action with clear expectations, deliverables, and timelines.

Engage

Our proven process, perfected over 20 years, will confidently discover the right candidates. Our careful navigation of the dynamic client-candidate relationship leads to the right hire.

FIND YOUR CANDIDATES

Your Search Reflects Your Brand

Make the right first impression in the market with a life sciences executive search firm that effectively tells your unique story while maintaining active engagement throughout each step of the candidate’s process. Our focused experience allows us to share a common mission, utilize a proven process, and build genuine relationships.

Milestone-based Approach

Relationships Built over Decades

Partner-Led Searches

Industry Expertise and a Shared Mission

At Cornerstone, we have an unwavering appreciation for the shared mission across the life sciences industry: helping patients. We have cemented this mission by partnering with hundreds of companies over decades of focused life sciences executive search assignments.

No two searches are the same, which is why we firmly stand behind customizing each search to your specific needs, timing, culture, internal dynamics, budget, or other factors

Here’s how we do it:

The Cornerstone Approach

First, we listen. While other executive search firms have their way of doing things, we prefer to take your lead and learn first. Once we know you and your story, we assemble our team around your needs.

Led by a highly specialized and experienced Partner within the firm, your customized search starts to take shape. We work hand-in-hand with your hiring team in order to create a winning plan of action, based on performance milestones and a clear understanding of expectations.

We built our trusted process over 20 years of specialized executive search within the life sciences space. During this time, we have developed an expansive network of relationships, that we couple with a cutting-edge approach to our research, outreach, follow-up and advertising campaign to find the candidates you want.

From here, your search remains in the hands of a trusted Partner, who plays an active, end-to-end role. This includes the most critical communication in the process – the first interaction with the candidate themself. The candidate relationship is led by the Partner all the way to the offer stage and eventual onboarding.

Contact us today, so you can stop searching and start strategizing with one of our Partners through our customized process.

CONTACT CORNERSTONE

Frequently Asked Questions

What should I look for in a life sciences executive search firm?

Three things: specialization, who actually runs your search, and the depth of the network behind it. A generalist executive search firm learns your market on your time. Cornerstone has worked exclusively in life sciences since 2000, and a Partner leads every search from the first conversation through onboarding. The person you meet at the pitch is the person who calls your candidates.

When should a biotech or pharma company use an executive search firm instead of recruiting internally?

When the role is business-critical, confidential, or hard to fill, which describes most leadership hires. The executives you want are rarely applying to job postings. They are running programs, closing financings, and leading teams. Reaching them takes trusted relationships, and convincing them to move takes a credible advocate. That is the work an executive search firm is built for.

How does the Cornerstone executive search process work?

Listen, Plan, Engage. We start by understanding your science, strategy, culture, and what success in the role looks like in 12 to 24 months. We then build a milestone-based plan with clear expectations, deliverables, and timelines. Finally, we engage the market, identifying, assessing, and managing candidates through offer and onboarding, with a Partner accountable at every step.

How involved does our team need to be during the search?

Most heavily at two points: the kickoff, where we align on the role, the profile, and the decision-makers, and the final stages, when you are meeting candidates. In between, we do the heavy lifting and keep you informed with regular updates and market feedback. The searches that move fastest are the ones where the client commits to quick interview scheduling and clear, candid feedback.

How do you assess whether a candidate will fit our culture, not just the job description?

A resume tells you what someone has done. It does not tell you how they lead, make decisions under pressure, or work with a founder or board. We probe for that directly in our interviews, take references that go beyond the names a candidate provides, and can add objective pre-hire assessments when the stakes call for it. Culture fit is not a feeling. It is something we evaluate.