I sit on both sides of the same hire every week. I hear what a hiring manager says about your resume after the call ends, and I hear what account executives say about an employer before they will agree to interview. Neither side ever hears the other. This post is the half of that conversation you do not normally get access to.
Everything below is specific to account executive and business development roles in home infusion, respiratory and home health. It is the desk I run. These hires do not behave like device or pharma sales, because the revenue does not come from a buyer signing a contract. It comes from referral relationships, and that changes what a hiring manager is actually buying when they hire you.
Your network gets you the meeting. Your numbers get you the interview. Your ability to explain how you produced those numbers gets you the offer. Most candidates prepare the first two and improvise the third, and the third is where the offer is decided.
What this guide covers
- Your network is the job, not a line on your resume
- How I read a number
- The questions to have answers for
- Growth, and being able to explain it
- Your job history should read as a series of decisions
- What account executives ask us before they take a call
- How we work with you, and why national coverage matters
- Frequently asked questions
01Your network is the job, not a line on your resume
In home infusion, respiratory and home health, almost nothing is sold to a procurement team. It is earned from the people who decide where a patient goes next. Discharge planners and case managers in the hospitals in your territory. Pulmonology, sleep and allergy practices. Skilled nursing and assisted living leadership. Care managers inside physician groups and ACOs. Depending on your therapy mix, wound care, infectious disease, gastroenterology and oncology practices as well.
A hiring manager is buying access and credibility with those specific people. That is why "strong network" on a resume is the least persuasive thing on it. Everyone writes it. Almost nobody evidences it.
What evidences it is specificity about the shape of the relationship rather than a list of names:
- Which types of referral source, in which systems and practice settings, and how long you have covered them.
- How you got in. The first conversation, who it was with, and how many visits it took before the first referral came through.
- Who would take your call tomorrow if you were selling something different, and why.
- What happens to those relationships when you move. Honest answer: some travel, some do not. Being able to say which is which reads as experience, not as a weakness.
- Where your coverage is thin, and the plan you would run to fix it in the first ninety days.
Naming the health systems and practice types in your territory is normal and expected. Offering a referral list, patient information, pipeline exports or anything else belonging to your current employer is not. Any hiring manager worth working for will downgrade you on the spot, because you have just shown them what you would do to them on the way out. I have watched it happen.
02How I read a number
Every account executive resume that reaches me has a percentage on it. The percentage is not the thing I am assessing. What I am assessing is whether you can take it apart.
| What the resume says | What I ask next | Why it changes the answer |
|---|---|---|
| Achieved 118 percent of quota | Who set the quota, and what was it built on? | A soft number in a mature territory and a hard one in a market nobody has opened are not the same achievement. |
| Grew the territory year over year | Growth from what base, and what else changed that year? | Growth on a small base is easier. A competitor leaving the market or a new payer contract can carry a year on its own. |
| Top performer in the region | Ranked where, out of how many? | Third of twenty eight tells me more in four words than a percentage does in a paragraph. |
| Record quarter | How much of it came from your top two or three referral sources? | Concentration. One account can make a quarter look like a career, and it can leave with one discharge planner. |
| Consistent performer | What did month on month look like across the year? | Steady delivery is usually worth more than one spike, because it is the thing that repeats in a new territory. |
| Managed a book worth X | Did you inherit it or build it? | Same number, completely different job. Both are respectable. Only one of them is a story about you. |
The number I trust most is rarely the biggest one in the pile. It is the one the candidate can pull apart in front of me without getting defensive.
Context is not an excuse, it is evidence. A product launch, a competitor exiting your market, a payer contract won or lost, a territory realignment, an intake or billing problem that cost you two months of referrals: all of that belongs in the story. Strong account executives volunteer it. Weaker ones hope nobody asks. I always ask, and so will the hiring manager, usually in the second interview where it is much harder to recover.
03The questions to have answers for
These are the questions I use, and close variants of them are what you will get from the hiring manager. There is no trick in any of them. They are simply hard to answer well without preparation.
- Why did your number move, and what did you actually change to move it?
- How did you open your best referral source? Who was the first conversation with, and how long until the first patient?
- What happened in your worst month, and what did you do in the four weeks after it?
- How do you split a week between new referral sources and protecting the ones you have?
- What did you lose, and why did you lose it?
- Why did you leave each role, and why at that point rather than a year earlier or later?
Prepare each one as a short story with a beginning and an end: what the situation was, what you did, what happened as a result. Two minutes each, not ten. The candidates who get offers are almost never the ones with the most impressive figures. They are the ones whose account of their own performance holds together under a second and third question.
04Growth, and being able to explain it
Year over year growth and month on month consistency answer two different questions. Year over year tells a hiring manager what you can build. Month on month tells them what you can be relied on to repeat. A candidate who can speak to both, in their own words and without reading from a slide, is immediately in a different bracket.
What you built
Where the territory was when you took it, where it was when you left, and which part of the difference you are claiming as yours.
What you repeat
The shape of a normal month for you. How many new referral conversations, how many active sources, what your week looks like when nothing is on fire.
What it rests on
How much of the number comes from your top few sources, and what you were doing about that before anyone asked you to.
A one page summary of your own territory, written by you and carrying nothing that belongs to your employer, is one of the few things that genuinely separates candidates at interview. Not a print out from a CRM. Your own account of what you inherited, what you added and what it looks like now.
05Your job history should read as a series of decisions
Home infusion and respiratory are fast moving employers and people move. Three roles in four years is not, on its own, a problem. It becomes a problem when the reasons are all about what employers did to you and none are about what you decided.
"They restructured the territory, so I left." This is an accident.
"They realigned my territory and my referral base went to another rep. I chose to move somewhere I could build rather than start over inside the same company." This is a decision, and it is the same set of facts.
Interviews are lost on this more often than on performance. If you want the detail on where offers actually fall apart, we wrote about that separately in why great interviews still end in declined offers.
06What account executives ask us before they take a call
This is the half of the conversation hiring managers never hear, and it is the reason I am comfortable saying our read on this market is hard to beat. The questions below come up on almost every call I take with an experienced account executive, and you should be asking every one of them.
- Compensation structure, not just the headline. Base to variable split, caps or accelerators, how often the plan gets rewritten, and whether the reps currently in seat are actually reaching their targets.
- The territory. Greenfield or an existing book, how it is drawn, and above all why it is open. What happened to the person before you is the single most useful answer you will get.
- Operational backup. Can intake, pharmacy, nursing and billing deliver what you are being asked to sell? Service failures do not cost you a deal, they cost you a referral relationship, and you are the one who spends two years rebuilding it.
- Payer contracts and network status. You cannot sell what is not covered, and a gap in the contract portfolio will show up in your number long before it shows up in anyone else's.
- Leadership and ramp. Who you report to, how long they have been there, and what the expectation looks like at three, six and twelve months.
I get those answers before you interview, not after you resign. That is most of what a specialist recruiter is for.
07How we work with you, and why national coverage matters
Quad works across all fifty states, and on this desk that is a practical advantage rather than a marketing line. Home infusion, respiratory and home health hiring is intensely regional. The same title pays differently, carries a different book and reports into a different structure in Phoenix than it does in Tampa or Minneapolis, and openings cluster where providers are expanding. Covering the whole country means I can tell you what your experience is worth in more than one market, and whether the move you are considering is the strongest one available to you right now.
Nothing moves without your say so
Your resume does not go anywhere until you have agreed to a named employer. No spec sends, no scatter gun, no calls from three of our people about the same role.
You get the answers first
Territory history, comp plan, why the role is open, who you report to and what ramp actually looks like, before you spend an evening preparing.
Prep, debrief, counter offer
We prepare you for each stage, feed back properly after it, and deal with the counter offer conversation before it lands rather than on the day you resign.
If you want to see the wider healthcare and pharmacy markets we recruit into, our US specialisms hub lays them out, and the commercial side of infusion sits alongside the clinical roles covered on our specialty infusion recruitment and specialty pharmacy recruitment pages. For the background on why this part of the market is hiring so hard, read specialty and infusion recruitment in 2026. Live roles are listed on our US job search, and the way we run a search start to finish is set out in how a recruitment agency fills a role.
Frequently asked questions
How much of my number should I be able to explain?
All of it, at the level of what you inherited, what you added, where it came from and what could have taken it away. You do not need exact figures to the dollar in an interview. You need to be able to answer three consecutive questions about the same number without changing your story.
Should I bring a brag book or a referral list to an interview?
A summary you wrote yourself is fine and usually helps. Anything exported from your employer's systems is not, and offering a referral or patient list will cost you the offer with any employer you would want to work for. Talk about relationship types, settings and how you built them instead.
Can I move into home infusion from another healthcare sales background?
Frequently, yes. The strongest crossovers come from home health, respiratory and durable medical equipment, hospice, wound care and diagnostics, because the referral relationships overlap. What a hiring manager needs is evidence that you have built referral sources rather than sold to a purchasing department. If that is your background, the conversation is about therapy and reimbursement knowledge, which is learnable, rather than about how you sell, which is not.
What should I ask about the compensation plan?
The split between base and variable, whether commission is capped, whether accelerators exist above target, how often the plan has been rewritten in the last three years, and whether the reps currently in the territory are hitting their targets. The last question is the one that tells you whether the plan is real.
Will you send my resume out without telling me?
No. Nothing goes anywhere until you have agreed to a specific, named employer. In a market this small, discretion is not a courtesy, it is the whole basis of the relationship.
Do you only recruit in certain states?
We recruit account executive and business development roles across the United States, with live vacancies concentrated wherever providers are expanding. If you are open to relocating, tell us early, because it usually widens what we can put in front of you considerably.
Thinking about your next move?
Send me your background and the territory you cover. I will tell you what is live in your market, what it is realistically worth, and whether now is the right time to move. No resume goes anywhere without your agreement, and if the honest answer is that you should stay where you are for another year, you will get that answer too.
Hiring account executives rather than looking for a role? Start on our US employers page, or read how we work.
Next in this series: the same hire seen from the other side, covering what hiring managers in home infusion and respiratory are really screening for, and where their account executive searches go wrong.