Chasm Partners’s Pam Zients on healthcare executive recruitment

On Fridays, we schedule our rounds with Healthcare Brew readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Pam Zients, a Denver-based partner at recruiting firm Chasm Partners. Her firm helps healthcare companies find and hire candidates for executive positions. Some of Chasm’s clients include pharmacy provider Aspen RxHealth, healthcare software company Iodine, and the New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System.

Zients discusses what her job is like and her transition into healthcare recruiting.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in healthcare?

I happen to be a partner at a firm where we only work with healthcare companies, so my background is years and years in healthcare. But most people know what an executive search firm does. We used to be called “headhunters,” and people still call it that.

The way I would describe it in terms of healthcare specifically though is that we work with growing healthcare companies—usually they are venture capital or private equity-backed—and we help them find top talent that is going to fuel their growth and ability to scale profitably. We all know that human capital is probably the most important thing that can make or break a company. Who you hire is critical, and getting those hires right is also critical, because I think a lot of people don’t realize the cost of mishires is very high.

What surprised you when you transitioned from working in healthcare consulting to recruiting?

From an intellectual and curiosity perspective, I am in some way more challenged than I’ve ever been in my career, because our clients do such interesting things across the spectrum of healthcare. I spent 20 years working with hospitals and providers. And I got into this role at Chasm, and my clients are in all different aspects of healthcare, and some of them do things that aren’t that easy to wrap your head around. Think about some of the artificial intelligence companies out there right now in healthcare. I have to dig in and really understand that to be able to articulate it and be able to sell it to candidates. So that was something that really surprised me—just how much I still had to learn about healthcare, even though I’ve been in the industry for so long.

What is the most fulfilling aspect of your job?

It’s meeting and getting to know these really smart, mission-driven people who really want to transform healthcare. A lot of them start a company because of a personal experience, so the mission aspect of these companies is really strong.

There’s a company that I’ve worked with for a couple years now called BrainCheck. And what they do is they empower frontline physicians—so the primary care physicians—to conduct an assessment on cognitive function. When you think about it, this is something I learned from them: Nobody dies of dementia, but most people die with dementia. We don’t have a great way to detect it early or help people have a care plan to start living with their changing cognitive function. And I think that’s super interesting and super important.

What healthcare trend are you most optimistic about and why?

For years, we’ve been talking about consumer-driven healthcare. I believe that’s a very positive trend, but I still say we have a long way to go in terms of helping people really understand the complexities of medical bills, and I still think the patient experience is really broken. Yet, I’m starting to see some momentum and companies that are coming up to help people navigate their way through the healthcare system.