Hire a VP of Preconstruction, Confidentially

Which recruiter should a GC use to hire a VP of preconstruction?

One who can tell a department head from a senior estimator with a title. The seat owns which work the firm chases and whether the bench exists to price it — not the estimates themselves.

A vice president of preconstruction is the seat between the estimating department and the firm's growth plan. It exists when a contractor stops competing on capacity and starts choosing what to pursue, and it is usually created before anybody has written down what it owns.

It is a small population. Most firms hire it once, at the point where the chief estimator can no longer both run the department and sit in the pursuit decisions — and the search is almost always confidential, because creating the seat says something about the current structure.

What a vp of preconstruction actually owns

The pursuit decision: Go/no-go, and the discipline to decline work. Ask what they declined last year and what it cost them internally to do it.
The department, not the estimate: Hiring, developing and retaining estimators. A VP of preconstruction who is still personally pricing the biggest job has not made the transition.
The interface with operations and the owner: Whether what is bid is what gets built. A precon department that hands operations an unbuildable number is a leadership failure at this level.

What a generic search gets wrong

It presents chief estimators. The résumé overlap is near-total and the seats are different: one owns the accuracy of the number, the other owns which numbers the firm produces at all. Screen for the pursuit and department-building half, which almost never appears on a résumé unless asked for.

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

Is this different from a chief estimator?

Yes, though the résumés look similar. A chief estimator owns the estimate; a VP of preconstruction owns the department, the pursuit strategy and the bench. Firms that conflate the two hire an excellent chief estimator into a seat that then goes unowned.

We are creating this seat for the first time. Can you help define it?

That is the normal starting point. Before the search runs we work through what the seat owns, what it takes from the chief estimator, and who it reports to — because a brief that has not answered those three questions produces candidates nobody can evaluate.

Why does this search need to be confidential?

Creating or replacing a leadership seat in preconstruction signals a change to your estimating department, your competitors and sometimes your surety. Running it quietly means you control when that is discussed, and with whom.