On running a search firm on Christian principles.

If you run a construction business and you care how the people you work with conduct themselves, you have probably learned to discount the claim. "Faith-driven" appears on a lot of websites and commits almost nobody to anything. So rather than describe a belief, I want to describe the specific things it stops me doing.

The first is the easy one to say and the expensive one to keep. You get told what the market actually looks like, including when the answer is that the role as written will not fill at the salary offered. That conversation loses work. A recruiter who takes the search anyway collects the engagement and delivers a shortlist of people who were never going to accept, and by the time that is obvious the schedule has moved. I would rather lose the fee in week one than bill you for a search I already know is mispriced.

The second is capacity. Three live searches at a time is a real ceiling, not a marketing number. The reason is arithmetic rather than modesty: with a handful of placements a year, one badly-handled search is a material share of the reputation I am building. A firm that takes a fourth search takes it from the same hours, and the person who pays for that is whichever client is least likely to complain.

The third concerns the people on the other side of the table. Candidates are never charged anything, in any form, ever, and nobody is submitted anywhere without a real job order and their knowledge. That second half matters more than it sounds. Resume-spraying is common enough in this industry that hiring managers assume it, and a candidate whose CV arrives somewhere they never agreed to has been used as inventory.

None of this is unique to Christian conviction, and I would not claim it is. Plenty of people arrive at the same conduct from somewhere else entirely. It is just honest about where I got it, and it explains why the constraints stay put when keeping them is inconvenient.

Three passages sit behind the commitments above. They are here because they are the actual source, not because scripture makes a business argument more persuasive.

"Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men." (Colossians 3:23) The practical version: a recruiter who only ever agrees with you is managing you, not advising you.

"Let your yes be yes and your no be no." (Matthew 5:37) If a search is outside what can be done well, it gets declined rather than accepted and quietly under-served.

"A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight." (Proverbs 11:1) Fees are published, and the basis they are calculated on is stated in writing before an engagement starts.

The specific thing Selah does is confidential executive search for mandates that cannot be publicly posted: the search you cannot advertise, because the person currently in the seat does not know they are being replaced, or because the bid you are staffing for has not been announced.

Those mandates are where conduct stops being an abstraction. A confidential search hands one person your succession plan before your own management team has it. There is no contract clause that makes that safe; you are relying on how the person on the other end behaves when discretion costs them something.

The disciplines are preconstruction and estimating, project and construction management, and cost control and commercial management, for commercial building and heavy civil contractors and consultancies across the United States. Every placement carries a 120-day replacement guarantee. Values statements are easy to write; the guarantee is the part that costs something when the firm gets it wrong.

More about the firm and how a search runs, or start a conversation.