After the Series B: The Hiring Sequence That Shapes the Next 18 Months

The round has closed. For most biotech companies, a Series B represents a significant institutional endorsement of a clinical stage programme, providing the capital to advance clinical development, expand the core team and prove enough science to support the company's next stage of growth.

The announcement has gone out. Now comes the less visible part: deciding which roles to fill first, which can wait, and how to build a team capable of delivering against the milestones the funding was raised to achieve. For biotech leadership teams, getting that sequence right can shape a significant part of the next 18 months. The issue is not simply whether the right expertise eventually joins the business, but whether it arrives early enough to influence the decisions, programmes and functions that depend on it.

Series B and Series C biotechs often hire around relatively short windows tied to clinical milestones or capital raises. When a critical search opens too late in that window, the consequences extend beyond delayed headcount. Decisions can be postponed, programmes can lose momentum and important milestones can move with them. The sequence matters as much as the speed.

After a Series B, hiring sequence matters because some roles directly enable the work of others. Filling every vacancy at once can stretch leadership capacity and overlook critical dependencies, while bringing the right people in at the right stage allows each hire to shape the decisions, systems and teams that follow.

The instinct after a funding round is understandably to move on everything simultaneously. The board wants a VP of Clinical, the CSO wants to expand the process development team, commercial has been promised a medical affairs lead, and HR is fielding requests from multiple directions while trying to establish which search should take priority.The problem is not that these roles are unimportant. They may all be important, but they are not necessarily equally urgent at the same moment. Treating them as though they are creates two common challenges.

The first is competition for internal management bandwidth. Every senior hire requires time from the people already in the business, particularly the leaders who will interview, manage, integrate and brief those new hires. Running five senior searches simultaneously does not automatically produce five hires in parallel. Without sufficient internal capacity, it can instead create five searches competing for the same limited attention.

The second is the dependency chain. Some roles create the foundations for those that follow. A regulatory affairs leader who joins early can shape the IND or IMPD strategy that the clinical team will later execute. A CMC lead brought in while critical process decisions are still being made can influence the foundations that quality and manufacturing teams will subsequently build upon.

Getting those dependencies in the right order is therefore more than good workforce planning. It reduces the likelihood that new leaders arrive only to revisit decisions that were made before the necessary expertise was in the business.

The first hires should be the leaders whose decisions shape the programme work that follows, typically across CMC and process development, regulatory affairs and clinical operations. The exact priorities depend on the programme stage and existing team, but delaying these roles can mean critical scientific, manufacturing and regulatory decisions are made without the expertise they require.

CMC and process development leadership. If the lead programme is approaching IND or IMPD submission, or manufacturing process decisions are still being made at bench scale, a CMC lead or VP of Process Development can shape much of what follows.

CMC issues can become a significant factor in regulatory review and approval. More immediately for a Series B company, decisions around process parameters, manufacturing partnerships and analytical method strategy can become increasingly difficult and expensive to revisit as development progresses. The person who joins while those decisions are still being shaped can therefore have considerably more influence over the programme than someone brought in once the foundations have already been established.Regulatory affairs strategy. The regulatory leader in a scale up should be much more than a submission manager. They help define how the company engages with regulators, shape the regulatory pathway and ensure the clinical development strategy is being built with future submission requirements in mind.

A regulatory strategy needs to account for the requirements of the jurisdictions in which a company intends to develop and manufacture its product. Addressing those considerations early can prevent the business from discovering later in development that important decisions need to be revisited. Experienced regulatory professionals are also among the specialist profiles for which companies across European life sciences hubs compete, making this a search that benefits from starting before the need becomes urgent.

Clinical operations leadership. If Phase I or Phase II activity is expected within the next 12 months, clinical operations leadership should ideally be in place before major CRO decisions are finalised. An experienced clinical operations professional can assess vendors, challenge assumptions, identify delivery risks and help shape the relationship the company will rely on throughout the trial.

Bringing that person in after contracts have been signed can leave them spending their first months managing a vendor relationship and operating model they had little involvement in designing.

Commercial, market access and senior finance or operations hires can often wait until later in the post Series B journey because their greatest impact tends to come once the programme and organisation have matured further. Hiring them too early can add cost and complexity before the business has reached the stage where their expertise creates the most value.

Commercial and market access hires. These roles can feel urgent because they are highly visible to boards and investors. For a company with a lead asset in Phase I or early Phase II, however, their greatest impact may come later, once the clinical data package is developing and market access planning becomes more commercially meaningful.Bringing senior commercial expertise into the business too early can mean building plans around clinical assumptions that may change significantly before filing. There are, of course, exceptions. A medical affairs leader with deep disease area expertise who can work alongside clinical and regulatory colleagues to inform development strategy may create value much earlier than someone whose primary remit is preparing for a launch that remains several years away.

Heads of finance and operations. The senior finance or operational leadership a biotech eventually requires may not always be the immediate priority after a Series B closes. The right timing depends on the complexity of the organisation, existing leadership capability and what the next stage of growth requires.The objective should be to scale these functions in line with the organisation rather than automatically ahead of it. Bringing in additional senior infrastructure before the business requires it can create cost and complexity without solving the most immediate programme dependencies.

If candidate conversations consistently indicate that the offer sits below what comparable professionals are receiving elsewhere, increasing compensation is not simply about making the package more attractive. It is about correcting a mismatch between the internal benchmark and the external market. If the offer is already competitive and candidates are still declining, compensation is unlikely to be the primary problem.

Three hiring mistakes can consume valuable runway after a Series B: opening too many senior searches simultaneously, waiting for every brief to be perfect before entering the market, and underestimating how long specialist searches will take. Each creates a different delay, but all can leave critical roles unfilled when programme milestones arrive.

Opening all searches at the same time. The instinct is understandable. The funding is in the bank, the headcount plan has been approved and every function wants to move. But opening multiple senior searches simultaneously only works if the organisation has enough internal capacity to give each one the attention and decision making speed it requires. Without that capacity, interviews become difficult to schedule, feedback slows down and priorities begin competing with one another. What looked like an accelerated hiring plan can quickly become several slow moving searches.

Waiting for the perfect brief before starting. The opposite mistake is spending months trying to define every detail of a role before engaging with the talent market. For specialist regulatory, CMC and clinical positions, the strongest potential candidates are not necessarily going to become available at exactly the moment an internal job description is finalised. Starting with a clear understanding of the business problem the person needs to solve allows market conversations to begin while the finer details of the brief continue to develop. Those early conversations can also reveal whether the original requirements are realistic before valuable time is spent searching against them.

Underestimating time to hire for specialist roles. Highly specialised senior searches can take considerably longer than standard recruitment timelines, particularly when the brief combines technical expertise, regulatory knowledge, leadership experience and geographic constraints. The precise timeline will depend on the role and market, which is why it should be informed by live candidate availability rather than an assumed 12 week recruitment cycle. If a critical specialist needs to be in the business by a particular programme milestone, the search needs to begin early enough to accommodate sourcing, interviews, notice periods and the possibility that the first preferred candidate does not ultimately close.

The European life sciences talent market is highly uneven. While generalist and earlier career talent may be more accessible, experienced CMC, regulatory affairs and clinical operations leaders remain harder to secure, particularly in established biotech clusters where Series B companies compete with large pharma, CDMOs and other venture backed businesses for the same specialist talent.

Across major European life sciences clusters, including Leiden, Amsterdam, Ghent, Brussels and Basel, the people Series B companies need to move programmes forward are often the same professionals being approached by larger pharmaceutical organisations, CDMOs and other growing biotechs.That changes how these searches need to be approached. A specialist candidate who is already successful in their current organisation may have little reason to actively apply for another position, even if the right opportunity could persuade them to move.

For many of the specialist roles shaping European biotech hiring in 2026, targeted search and direct engagement are therefore increasingly important. Rather than relying solely on applications, companies need a clear view of where relevant expertise sits in the market, what would motivate those professionals to consider a move and how their opportunity compares with the alternatives those candidates are seeing.For a Series B leadership team, that makes talent mapping part of workforce planning rather than something that begins only once a vacancy formally opens.

The strongest post Series B hiring plans sequence recruitment around programme dependencies, treat talent acquisition as a parallel workstream to scientific development, and give search partners the business context behind each role. Together, these practices help leadership teams prioritise the hires that unlock the next stage of development rather than simply working through an approved headcount plan.

They sequence deliberately rather than simultaneously. The first three months should focus on roles that represent genuine programme dependencies. Depending on the business, that may mean CMC, regulatory and clinical operations leadership. The following months can then add the functions that build on those foundations, such as quality assurance, analytical development and biostatistics. The important point is not that every biotech should follow an identical sequence. It is that each hire should be mapped against the programme decisions and milestones that require that person's expertise.

They treat the talent market as a parallel workstream to scientific development. Companies do not need to wait until a search formally opens to understand the available talent pool. Market mapping for the most critical senior roles can begin before the funding round closes, giving leadership teams a clearer view of who is available, how long the search is likely to take and what will be required to attract the right person. That intelligence can then inform the hiring plan itself, rather than discovering after the round closes that a role assumed to take three months may require significantly longer.

They brief their search partners with business context, not just job descriptions. A CMC leadership search briefed around the programme stage, the manufacturing decisions that need to be made and the gaps within the existing team provides much more useful context than a list of technical requirements alone.

The goal is not simply to find someone whose CV matches the specification. It is to understand what the business needs that person to change, build or enable, and then identify candidates whose experience demonstrates that they can do it.

The 18 months after a Series B are shaped by a combination of scientific progress, capital allocation and execution. Having the right people in the business at the right time connects all three. The science is why the funding was raised, but the team plays a critical role in turning that funding into the milestones the business has committed to deliver.

If you're planning post Series B hiring and want to discuss which roles should come first, what today's market looks like and how to build a hiring sequence around your programme milestones, we'd be happy to share what we're seeing across biotech scale ups in Europe. Get in touch with our team here.