Hire a Senior Project Manager, Confidentially

Why are good construction project managers not applying to your posting?

Because a senior project manager with a full backlog and a bonus tied to it is not reading job boards. They are reachable, but only by an individual approach that does not put their current job at risk.

The senior project manager seat is the one contractors try hardest to fill through postings, and the one where postings work worst. The people who are good at it are busy, paid, and mid-project. They are not looking, which is different from not moving.

This is also the seat where a bad hire is most expensive relative to salary: a project manager who cannot forecast does not fail visibly until the job is 60% complete and the fade is already in the WIP.

What a senior project manager actually owns

The job's commercial outcome: Buyout, change orders, billing and the monthly forecast. Ask what their last job made against what it was bought at, and who found out first when that changed.
The subcontractor relationships: Whether the subs on their last three jobs would work for them again is the single most useful reference question available.
The schedule they actually believe: Not the one submitted. Ask where the float really was and who else knew.

What a generic search gets wrong

It fills the seat from the applicant pool, which selects for availability rather than quality. The strongest candidates for this role are the ones who have to be approached individually, and who will not engage with anything that could get back to their current employer.

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

We already have this posted. Why is nothing coming in?

A posting reaches people who are looking. In a market where good project managers are carrying backlog and a retention bonus, that is a small and adversely-selected group. The search that works is direct, individual and quiet.

Do you place project managers by sector?

By sector and by delivery method — healthcare, data centre, multifamily, heavy civil, federal — because what transfers between them is less than a résumé suggests. We screen on the work, not on the vertical label.

What does the guarantee cover?

Every placement carries a replacement guarantee: if the hire leaves within the window, we run the search again. The window and its conditions are published in full on our pricing page rather than negotiated per search.