Hire a Project Executive, Confidentially

When should you replace a construction project executive?

When the jobs are being run by their project managers rather than through them. A project executive who is still managing one job personally is an expensive senior PM, and the other three projects are unsupervised.

The project executive is the first seat where the job stops being delivery and starts being judgement about other people's delivery. It is also the seat where the most capable project manager in the business most often fails, because the skill that earned the promotion is the one they now have to stop using.

Most briefs for this role describe a bigger project manager: more square footage, more dollars, more complexity. That is a specification for the wrong hire.

What a project executive actually owns

Several jobs through several project managers: Ask how many projects they carried, how often they were on each site, and what they did when a PM was failing. The last answer is the whole interview.
The number, monthly: Forecast accuracy across a portfolio, not a project. Ask about their worst fade and when they first knew about it.
The client relationship above the PM: The seat exists partly so the owner has somebody to call who is not the person whose schedule is slipping.

What a generic search gets wrong

It screens on project size. A project executive who ran one $200m job is often a worse fit than one who ran five $30m jobs, because the second has actually managed through people. Screen on span of control and on what happened to the projects they were not standing on.

How the search runs

Selah Talent Partners runs confidential executive search for mandates that cannot be publicly posted. The role is never advertised, your firm is described rather than named until a candidate is serious, and no approach is made to anyone inside your business without your agreement.

One person runs the search end to end: the intake, every technical screening conversation, and the offer. A shortlist of three to five candidates who have each had a working discussion about the actual job is targeted at day 21.

Every placement carries a 120-day replacement guarantee. The fee, the guarantee and the conditions attached to it are published in full — see pricing — rather than quoted differently to each client. Candidates never pay a fee.

Send a confidential brief

Questions

Should we promote a superintendent or senior PM into this seat?

It is the most common internal move and it works when the person has already been running work through others informally. It fails when the promotion is a reward for personal delivery. Test for it before you decide, and run the external search in parallel if you are unsure.

How many projects should a project executive carry?

It depends on delivery method, project duration and the strength of the PM bench beneath them — not on a rule of thumb. We work the number back from your backlog and your current org chart rather than quoting one.

Can this be run without our current PX knowing?

Yes. This is one of the most common confidential mandates we run: the seat is occupied, the decision is made, and nothing can be said internally until there is somebody to say it about.