Putting multiple construction recruiters on one contingency search creates a race to submit rather than a competition to find. You get CVs faster from a heavily overlapping pool, your name circulates three times in a small market, and the firm that would have done the careful work has no reason to.
Putting multiple construction recruiters on one seat feels like the obvious move. Three firms, no retainer, whoever finds the person gets paid. You have created competition, transferred all the risk, and cost yourself nothing.
Then the CVs arrive in a rush, two firms submit the same senior estimator eleven minutes apart, and your VP of Operations spends a Thursday reading eight resumes that all appear to have been sent before anyone read the brief.
That is not a coincidence, and it is not three firms being lazy. It is exactly what the arrangement pays for.
What do multiple construction recruiters optimize for?
Speed of submission, because that is what the arrangement rewards. In a contingency race only the first firm to submit a candidate you hire gets paid, so every hour spent qualifying a candidate is an hour a competitor might use to submit them first. The rational strategy is to send fast and let you filter.
Follow the incentive through and the behavior stops being mysterious.
A recruiter working your search alongside two others has roughly a 33 percent chance of being paid, against 100 percent for a firm engaged alone. Against that expected value, the careful work makes no sense: a two-hour conversation to establish whether a project manager has genuinely run guaranteed maximum price work on negotiated healthcare projects costs the same whether or not they are ever paid, and it slows them down.
So you receive volume, quickly, unqualified. Which is what people describe when they say the recruiter “did not understand the role”, and the diagnosis is usually wrong: the recruiter understood the role fine and understood the economics better.
- Submission volume rises. More CVs, arriving sooner, which reads as productivity in week one.
- Qualification falls. The filtering work moves onto your desk, where it costs your VP of Operations rather than the recruiter.
- Match quality falls with it. Nobody is incentivized to tell you a candidate is wrong for the role. Any submission is a lottery ticket.
That is the direct cost. The indirect one is worse, and it lands somewhere you never see.
What does a construction market see when three firms call?
A market contacted three times about one seat concludes the hiring firm is desperate, disorganized, or both. A senior estimator contacted three times in one week about the same seat draws a conclusion about the employer, and the strongest candidates draw it fastest, because they have the least reason to tolerate it.
Construction hiring markets are small in a way that makes this expensive. The number of people in a metro who can genuinely run preconstruction for a mid-size general contractor is measured in dozens, not hundreds. They know each other. They meet at bid openings, they sat on the same joint ventures, and word travels between Houston, Atlanta and Nashville faster than any employer expects.
| What you intended | What the market experiences |
|---|---|
| Competition between firms | Three calls about one seat in five days |
| Wider reach | The same overlapping pool, contacted repeatedly |
| No risk, pay on results | A role that reads as hard to fill or badly run |
| More options for you | Fewer strong candidates willing to engage |
The fourth row is the one that costs you the search. A strong, employed project manager who is approached three times about one role does not think “this is a popular job”. They think something is wrong with it, and a role they suspect is broken is not worth the personal risk of a conversation.
And the person you most wanted was the most likely to reach that conclusion, because they had the least to gain by ignoring it.
Does using multiple construction recruiters at least get you more reach?
Not meaningfully. Three firms working the same metro reach a heavily overlapping pool, because they source from the same platforms, the same associations and the same networks. What multiplies is not coverage. It is duplicate submissions, ownership disputes, and the number of times your name is spoken.
The reach argument would hold if each firm had a genuinely distinct network. Occasionally that is true: a firm specializing in heavy civil work in one state genuinely does reach different people than a commercial building specialist in another. Structure that deliberately, by segment, with each firm briefed on which population they are working, and it can be made to function.
That is not what three-way contingency usually is. It is three generalists working the same metro, which is why the same estimator arrives twice in one morning, and why you will then spend an hour on a conversation about which firm introduced them first. A written ownership rule prevents that argument, and most of these arrangements never have one.
There is one situation where the whole approach is not merely inefficient but impossible. When the seat is currently occupied, three firms in the market means three times the chance the incumbent hears about it, and the incumbent hearing about it is the failure condition. That is confidential executive search for mandates that cannot be publicly posted, and it cannot be run as a race by definition: the arrangement’s whole mechanism is broad, fast, uncoordinated market contact.
What should you do instead?
Engage one firm properly, with a written brief, a defined shortlist timeframe, and the ability to walk away at a date if it is not working. You keep the accountability that competition was supposed to create, and you get the qualifying work that a race removes.
The objection is obvious: one firm means no competitive pressure. So build the pressure into the terms rather than into the market.
Ask for a stated shortlist timeframe and hold them to it. Selah’s operational baseline is a three-day average to shortlist, which is a baseline rather than a contractual promise, but it is the kind of number a firm should be willing to state and be measured against. Set a review date. Agree what happens if it passes with nothing shortlistable.
Keep the model honest on price too. Contingency Search at 20 percent of first-year cash compensation, payable on placement, already transfers the risk: nothing is owed until someone starts. You do not need a race to achieve that, because the race was never what protected you. The payment trigger was.
The firms that fill senior construction seats well are not the ones with the most recruiters working the problem. They are the ones where a single person understood the seat well enough to explain to a reluctant, employed estimator why this job is worth the risk of a phone call. Three people cannot do that job. One person does it, or nobody does.
So pick the one firm you would trust with the brief, and write the accountability into the terms instead of into the market. That is a harder decision than sending three emails, and it is the one that fills the seat.
Sources and further reading
- AGC of America and NCCER, 2025 Workforce Survey, national results: AGC survey PDF
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, Cost Estimators 13-1051: BLS OEWS
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, Construction Managers 11-9021: BLS OEWS
- AGC of America, construction data and industry surveys: AGC data