ABOUT CONNEXIS
Twenty-five years. Three industries. Over 5,000 placements. This is the story of how Connexis was built — and why it works the way it does.
Founder & President
Tony didn't start his career in recruiting. He started it in a pharmaceutical laboratory, working as a chemist for three years before making the transition into sales — first as a distributor rep at Thermo Fisher Scientific, then into capital equipment sales at Instrumentation Laboratory, and then Beckman Coulter, where he rose from sales representative to sales manager to Area Vice President.
He became a consistent President's Club winner — finishing in the top five of 80 to 90 people as a sales rep, and continuing to exceed goals as a manager. Before founding Connexis, he served as VP of Sales for a technology company.
At Beckman Coulter, a mentor invested seriously in teaching him how to identify and develop talent. Something clicked. He realized he was as interested in the people side of the business as the commercial side — maybe more. He had spent years learning what made a great diagnostics sales rep, what separated a strong field application scientist from an average one, and how to build a team that actually performed.
In 2001, he founded Connexis Search Group in Greenville, South Carolina — focused exclusively on diagnostics, life sciences, and medical device. The markets he'd spent his career in. He remains actively involved in searches today. Most of his senior-level candidate relationships are personal. That's not something you build from a database.
25
Years in the niche
5,000+
Placements made
2001
Year founded
25 yrs
Longest client relationships
We take a focused number of searches at a time. Not because we can't handle more volume — because diluted attention produces diluted results. When we take your search, we work it. Every day, until it's done.
We're not posting your job and waiting. We're calling the candidates who are currently succeeding somewhere else and need a compelling reason to consider moving. That's where the best people always are — and where a 25-year network makes the difference.
Not platitudes. The specific things that guide how we work every day.
If we can't fill your search, we'll tell you before we take it. If the candidate pool is smaller than you think, we'll tell you what it actually looks like. We'd rather have a difficult conversation at the start than a failed search at the end. That's the only way to build a relationship worth having.
We work in three industries. Not twenty. The depth of our network in diagnostics, life sciences, and medical device comes directly from saying no to everything outside those verticals for over two decades. Specialization isn't a positioning statement for us — it's a daily operating decision.
We move as fast as we can. But we will not present a candidate we don't believe in just to show activity. The placements we're most proud of aren't the ones we filled fastest — they're the ones still succeeding five and ten years later. That's the standard we hold ourselves to.
The professionals in our network are the foundation of everything we do. Without the trust of candidates who pick up our calls, engage seriously in our process, and stay in our network across multiple career moves — we have nothing to offer the clients who hire through us.
Many of the people we've worked with over the past 25 years have been with us across two, three, or more career moves. Some of the sales representatives we placed early in their careers are now the vice presidents and senior leaders who hire through us today. Those relationships didn't happen by accident — they happened because we treated the candidate side of every search with the same seriousness as the client side.
We don't pitch roles to people who aren't right for them. We don't oversell companies to get a placement. We don't go quiet after someone has invested time in a process. That's how you build a network that picks up the phone — and keeps picking it up twenty years later.
If you're a professional in diagnostics, life sciences, or medical device — whether you're actively looking or simply want to be on our radar for the right opportunity — we'd like to connect.
Connect with Connexis →Connexis recruits across diagnostics, life sciences, and medical device — these practices often intersect.
Practice Area
Our oldest and deepest practice — 25 years placing talent in reference labs and clinical laboratories.
Explore →Practice Area
Instruments, CDMOs, CROs, reagents, and biotech — the full life sciences tools and services market.
Explore →Services
Senior expertise without the full-time commitment — across all three of our practice areas.
Explore →Common questions about working with us.
Both. Executive and senior leadership searches, confidential replacements, and highly specialized technical searches are typically retained. Team-expansion searches and individual contributor roles often run contingent. We'll tell you upfront which model makes sense for your search and why.
Tell us about the search. A brief conversation — what the role is, why it's open, what you've already tried — gives us what we need to assess whether we're the right fit. If we're not, we'll say so. If we are, we'll discuss the engagement model and timeline from there.
Yes. We've helped pre-revenue startups make their first commercial hire and placed senior leaders at Fortune 100 organizations. The approach, the candidate profile, and often the engagement model differ significantly between the two — and we're experienced at both ends.
We work in three industries only — diagnostics, life sciences, and medical device. The candidates we reach, the questions we ask, and the evaluations we make are shaped by 25 years of exclusive focus on these markets. When we say a candidate is strong, it's because we understand what strong looks like in your specific segment — not because the resume looks good on paper.
Tell us about a search. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right firm for it.