Top Talent Accelerant

08/26/2026

The first day at MedTech World Asia was fantastic with a great conversation about the conference, the industry, and the value being brought to the ecosystem by Dylan Attard MD, MRCSI, MEnt. and his phenomenal team.

There is simply a remarkable energy around this event and the Medtech World team; genuine, sincere, and fun. Thank you Shara Layton and Yulia Yurevich for your efforts and support.

The cultural aspect of today’s adventures were fantastic and created a fun, relaxed environment to learn while networking, sharing ideas, and industry insights. The feedback and insight on the TTA has already been invaluablel!

Great dinner and awards ceremony tonight! I can’t wait for tomorrow’s panels, presentations, and networking opportunities.

Great start to this amazing conference!

Blue Goat Cyber
Lars van den Broek
Simon Terhürne
Rafael J. Veraza, PhD, MPH
Patrick Nowlin

08/21/2026

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/medtech-hiring-leadership-ugcPost-7496632820354854912-Lv7i?utm_medium=ios_app&rcm=ACoAAAI4XFYBg8pLaKJwURzLEETjVV9jpbBAiAM&utm_source=social_share_send&utm_campaign=facebook

Hiring the wrong person for a critical MedTech role can become an expensive mistake. Consider what happens next. Time has already gone into recruiting and interviewing. The new hire needs to be onboarded and trained. If the fit is wrong, the company has to address the disruption, reopen the position...

08/21/2026

Today is a day that I will enjoy for a while and never forget.

A candidate I helped make a strategic career move last year just found out she's being promoted to Fellow.

Let me back up.

Last year, I had the opportunity to support a VP of RA at a top-15 global MedTech company with a challenging problem. Their RA team wasn't broken — it was the opposite. A decade-long track record, 95% retention. The kind of team most companies would love to just… leave alone.

But a new technology acquisition changed the ground under them. They needed RA talent who understood , , , and PDCC well enough to build submission and compliance strategy — and to sit across the table from the FDA and hold their own on all of it.

That combination of experience barely exists in the market. Real talk: I could count the qualified candidates on one hand within a commutable distance, and it was hybrid.

The VP that I was partnering with made one thing clear from the start: culture mattered as much as capability. He wasn't going to protect a 95% retention rate by hiring someone who didn't fit the team.

In a niche area, we were able to find the right talent, and the entire process was 4 weeks.

She was moving from Class II to Class III devices — a real career leap — and what pulled her in wasn't the title. It was the culture. She could feel, even through the interview process, that this was a team worth joining and an opportunity to be mentored.

One of the main topics we discussed when she accepted the offer was who she could become professionally over the next few years and how that would benefit her personally!

Fast forward: last year she earned the highest annual review the company gives out.

And today, she's a Fellow!

I've known this was coming since April. Sitting on that secret for months made today's congratulations even sweeter.

She did the work. Over the years, the VP built a team worth staying for. I just got to be the person who made the introduction and managed the process to help her join the team.

This is the part of recruiting I love most — getting to be a part of a strategic hiring strategy and then having the opportunity to celebrate the results.

To the hiring managers developing and protecting a team like this one- how do you evaluate the ability to perform the technical aspects of the position versus the cultural fit?

08/20/2026

Thank you Blue Goat Cyber for having me on the podcast to talk about talent management in the age of , the Top Talent Accelerant, Inc. , and the importance around risk management in Medtech for AI, ML, and cybersecurity.

I love your passion for helping others and bringing solutions that prevent the disasters that effect patient safety physically and from a personal data standpoint, as well.

When Candidates and Companies Both Use AI

08/17/2026

Heading to Hong Kong for MedTech World Asia 2026 (Aug 26-28, HKCEC) to partner with my friends at Blue Goat Cyber, the best in the industry for solving complex MedTech and challenges.

Hong Kong isn't just another stop on the conference circuit — it's the capital of MedTech investment in Asia right now. #1 globally for biotech IPOs in 2025. $17.5B raised by HKEX-listed firms since 2018. Gateway to the Greater Bay Area's $2T, 86-million-person innovation corridor.

And the room reflects it:
35% Startups
25% Service Providers
20% Investors
10% HCP & Policy Makers
7% Government

I am excited for the presentations and the strategic conversations. The best talent conversations don't start with a job spec; they start with an understanding of the leadership team, who's backing them, the problem the product solves, and what they need to accomplish. That's exactly the mix in this room.

We will also be premiering our newest version of the TTA to help growth companies attract and validate talent more efficiently in the Age of .

If you're going to be there, let's connect — always happy to make introductions or compare notes on where the market is headed. If you're not attending but want eyes and ears on the ground, tell me what you're watching for.

08/12/2026

The coffee was excellent. The attitude wasn't.

So I decided to find a new café.

Limonta, Lake Como. Population: small. Restaurant options: smaller.

There's a café here I've been to 14 times in a month. Great coffee. But the owner has been rude to me twice, and rude to other customers — in front of me — twice more.

Classic small-market thinking: "Where else are they going to go?"

Here's the thing about scarcity — it makes people lazy. When demand outstrips supply, some businesses stop competing on service and coast on convenience. Why be kind when you're the only espresso machine for half a mile?

Turns out: because someone builds a second espresso machine, .2 miles up the hill. Slightly less convenient. Infinitely more pleasant. That's where my money goes now… and they are nice to everyone and go the extra mile to give great service.

I think about this a lot in talent management, too.

The best recruiters and leaders I know treat people well before there's anything transactional on the table — before the candidate is "in market," before the deal closes, before there's an obvious ROI on the relationship.

Not because it's strategic. Because it's how they operate. They are “seed planters”… investing in others.

And here's the quiet economics of it: talent markets, like small lakeside towns, feel like monopolies until they don't.

The AI-Medtech candidate you were short with in 2023 is the hiring manager evaluating your firm in 2026. The engineer you ghosted is now referring three people — to someone else.

Scarcity tempts you to think you don't need to be kind. Relationships remind you that you always did.

Supply and demand isn't just about who has leverage today. It's about who remembers how you treated them before you needed anything from them.

That café will be fine — for now. But .2 miles up the hill, someone's building loyalty they don't even know they're earning yet.

08/10/2026

The biggest bottleneck in Medtech AI right now isn't the algorithms. It's the people who can own them.

For years, regulatory and engineering sat on different floors. They handed documents back and forth. They spoke different languages. That worked — until AI became embedded in diagnostics, imaging, and surgical tools.

Now the question every R&D leader is quietly asking isn't "does this AI system work?" It's "who owns it when it doesn't?"

And most organizations don't appear to have a good answer.

Demand for talent that's genuinely fluent in both AI/data science AND regulatory-clinical requirements is outpacing supply by roughly 3x in some segments. These aren't roles you backfill in a hurry — they're increasingly the difference between a device getting CE marked and one sitting in regulatory limbo.

A few things I'm watching:

→ Compliance is shifting from a department to a distributed capability — embedded across product, engineering, clinical, and quality teams, not owned by one group.

→ Early talent is becoming more valuable than seniority alone. Several R&D leaders have told me distinguished engineers are no longer the priority hire

— people who can grow into hybrid fluency are.

→ Retention is its own problem. Talent coming from pure tech backgrounds often hits regulatory friction and wonders how anything ever ships. If you're hiring from outside Medtech, onboarding into that reality matters as much as the technical vetting.

If you're building or scaling a Medtech AI team, the skill you should be hiring for isn't "knows AI" or "knows regulatory." It's both, at once.

What are you seeing on your end — is this hybrid gap showing up in your hiring too?

08/07/2026

I was 22 years old in this picture with my respiratory therapy manager at Select Hospital. The reason that I went into healthcare was to help people.

It is the reason that I think patient outcomes are so important. What is the point in the ventilator setting? You don’t change the rate, I-time, tidal volume or pressure without evaluating the patient. How did they tolerate the therapy?

Did it improve comfort? Improve their blood gas? You perform weaning protocols and evaluate parameters to see if they can handle actual weaning.

After moving from over a decade of clinical work to over a decade in commercial leadership roles for medical device companies….

Never in a million years did I expect to get into recruitment or talent management. I had never considered it…..Once the decision was made, I didn’t have to think about the industry, because I knew I wanted to help people join companies that were manufacturing devices bringing positive outcomes to patient populations.

To our families…. Our friends…. Which is why clinical, regulatory affairs, quality, and engineering were just….. obvious for me.

I needed to work with people that were creative and passionate about their work… and the result. It had to be of great quality… for the patient, the clinician, the family member supporting their loved one.

I was excited about the three accepted offers in July. The real joy was their excitement though.

Two in design and development… their passion for what they were going to get to work on and the vision to help the team in specific areas.

The third, a Director of RA and Compliance Systems…. their excitement over the product pipeline, where the team needed support, and how they would partner with the quality team to improve risk management and help products get to market more efficiently.

The journey has been interesting; A different decade and a different part of the Medtech eco system. Not direct patient care…. Not directly supporting the clinicians, either.

I get to partner with the companies and the talent to help them get it right before it reaches either.

And it never gets old hearing their excitement for how they are ultimately going to help improve patient safety, outcomes, access, and improve risk management.

Never…..

08/06/2026

The Trust Gap: Why AI Is MedTech's Biggest Challenge in 2026

MedTech's biggest challenge in 2026 isn't the technology. It's trust.

AI is now in nearly every corner of the industry — diagnostics, imaging, remote monitoring, surgical robots. FDA-cleared AI/ML devices topped 1,400 by the end of 2025, nearly doubling in two years.

But adoption is outpacing the foundation underneath it:
→ Data is exploding, yet most of it stays siloed and unusable

→ Regulatory complexity keeps growing

→ Ex*****on inside companies is uneven — data quality and change management are lagging

→ More autonomous devices (closed-loop systems, implantable drug delivery) raise real questions about who's in control

The companies pulling ahead aren't the ones with the flashiest models.

They're the ones investing in the unglamorous stuff first: clean data pipelines, honest validation, regulatory processes built into the workflow instead of bolted on at the end.

They are the companies that are being intentional about talent management relevant to people interactions. People matter in the Age of AI.

One question worth asking your team this week:

Could you explain — in plain language — how your AI model reaches its output? Would that explanation hold up to a regulator, a clinician, and a patient?

If not, that's where to start.

Sources: Medical Economics, PTC, Deloitte, AWS Life Sciences Symposium, Med-Tech Insights (2026)

07/30/2026

A new algorithm quietly changed what a medical device could tell clinicians — and the paperwork didn't catch up.

In a warning letter issued this May, the FDA flagged a sleep apnea device manufacturer for pushing a firmware update that added new detection capability — distinguishing between two types of respiratory events — without filing the required premarket notification first.

The change wasn't cosmetic. It altered the clinical data doctors use to judge whether therapy is working. A separate, earlier update meant to fix a shutdown defect also went unreported.

It's a clean example of a risk medtech manufacturers are watching closely: when does a "software update" become a regulatory event?

Curious where you'd draw that line 👇