Before signing with a construction recruiter, ask what voids the guarantee, how the fee base is defined, who owns the candidate, and who will actually run the search. The headline day count on a replacement guarantee tells you almost nothing. The conditions attached to it tell you everything.
Every recruiter you speak to will offer a guarantee. The common one in the United States market is 90 days, replacement only, and it is the one thing almost nobody reads properly. Almost none of them will volunteer the list of circumstances in which it does not apply, and that list is where the actual product is.
That 90-day figure is the benchmark this article is arguing with. Not because 90 days is too short in itself, but because the number is the part you are shown and the exclusions are the part that decides whether it is worth anything.
This is a buyer’s checklist. We have included our own answers to every question, because a piece arguing for transparency that withholds its own terms would not be worth reading.
What questions should you ask a construction recruiter about the guarantee?
Four: what voids it, when it becomes live, what it pays out, and how long you have to claim. A guarantee is a contract term, not a reassurance, and the exclusions do more work than the headline number.
Ask these directly and get the answers in the agreement rather than the sales conversation:
- What voids it? The common exclusions are the role being filled from another source, redundancy or restructure, termination other than for cause, and a material change to the role after placement. All four are reasonable. You still need to know they are there.
- When does cover start? Many guarantees are live only once the fee is paid in full. Late payment can suspend cover entirely.
- Is it a replacement or a refund? These are very different products. A replacement search commits the firm to work again. A refund returns money and ends the relationship.
- How long do you have to claim, and how long do they have to deliver? A guarantee with no delivery obligation on the recruiter’s side is an intention.
Our own terms, so you can benchmark: 120 days, replacement only, never a refund or a credit. It is void if the role is filled from another source, if the candidate is made redundant or the role is restructured or the candidate is terminated other than for cause, or if the role is materially changed after placement. It is live once the placement fee is paid in full, and late payment suspends cover until payment clears. Two separate clocks then apply, and they are worth keeping apart: you request the replacement within 30 days of the departure, and we deliver the replacement search within 90 days of that request. That second 90 is a delivery obligation on us, not the length of the guarantee, which is 120 days. One replacement; if it does not hold, the obligation is discharged.
So: 120 days against a market norm of 90. The longer window is worth stating, but it is not the point. The point is that you can read every condition attached to it before you sign, which is the test to apply to any firm you are comparing us against.
How should the fee be calculated, and on what base?
On a defined base stated in writing before you sign. The percentage is the number everyone negotiates and the base is the number that decides the invoice, which is why an unstated base is the most common cause of a dispute at billing time.
The question to ask is simple: does the percentage apply to base salary, or to total first-year compensation including bonuses? On a $150,000 base with a $30,000 target bonus, 20% of base is $30,000 and 20% of total compensation is $36,000. Same percentage, same hire, twenty percent more invoice.
Our base: fees are calculated on first-year cash compensation, which means base salary, plus any contractual or target bonus stated in the offer letter, plus any signing bonus. Discretionary bonus, commission, equity, allowances and benefits are excluded. Where the bonus is discretionary, the fee is computed on base salary plus the signing bonus. Our published Contingency Search rate is 20% of that figure, payable only when a Selah-sourced candidate starts. The full schedule is on the pricing page.
| Question | What a vague answer costs you |
|---|---|
| Base salary or total compensation? | A materially larger invoice than you modeled |
| Is equity or commission included? | Disputes on incentive-heavy roles |
| When is the fee due? | Cash flow, and possibly guarantee cover |
| Is there a minimum fee? | A small hire priced like a large one |
| What happens on a second concurrent placement? | Terms you assumed applied to every hire |
Get all five in the agreement. A recruiter who resists putting the fee base in writing is telling you something useful. The longer version of that argument is in our note on the fee base.
Which construction recruiter actually runs your search?
Ask who does the work, not who is in the meeting. Then ask how long that person has been at the firm. On a volume desk the person who sold you the search is frequently not the person running it, and the person running it may not be there for your next hire.
This one matters more than it sounds, particularly if you hire repeatedly in one metro: a recruiter who knows the Houston or Nashville market by relationship is worth more on the second search than the first. A search relationship compounds: the second search with the same person is better than the first because they know your delivery model, your project mix, and what actually went wrong with the last hire. If your contact resets every eight to twelve months, you re-explain your business permanently and never get the benefit.
Three questions that surface it:
- Who is running the search day to day, and are they the person in this meeting?
- How long have they been with the firm?
- What happens to our search, and our candidate history, if they leave?
There is no polite way to ask the third one, so ask it directly. You are trying to find out whether you are buying a relationship or a transaction with a person attached. The same question applies to the reference checks: the person who had the control conversation with the candidate should be the one who makes the calls.
What about candidate ownership and off-limits terms?
Ask two things: how long the recruiter claims ownership of a candidate they introduced, and whether they will agree not to approach your staff. Both are standard terms, and both are frequently left out of a short agreement in ways that favor the recruiter.
Candidate ownership means that if you hire someone they introduced within a defined window, the fee is due even if you found the person independently later. That window should be defined and finite. An open-ended claim is not reasonable.
The off-limits question runs the other way: a firm that places into your company should not be recruiting out of it. Ask for the term, ask how long it lasts, and ask whether it covers the whole firm or only the candidates they placed. A recruiter who will not commit to any hands-off period is telling you their business model.
Does any of this actually change the outcome?
Yes, but not in the way the checklist implies. The questions above protect you from a bad contract. What determines whether the hire works is whether the recruiter can hold a technical conversation about the role, and that is tested differently.
Ask them to explain, without notes, the difference between a hard-bid estimator and a negotiated-work estimator, or between a project manager and a project executive on your kind of work. Ask what they would look for on a résumé to tell whether someone carried the estimate or merely assembled it. If the answers are generic, the shortlist will be too, and no contract term saves you from that. This is the practical test underneath choosing between construction search firms.
Then ask how they source. A firm that works from applicants and job-board responses is fishing in the pool of people who are actively looking. For senior construction roles, that pool systematically excludes the strongest candidates, who are running work and not applying to anything. That gap is the entire argument for confidential executive search for mandates that cannot be publicly posted, and it is also why the sourcing question predicts shortlist quality better than any term in the agreement.
Who should ignore all of this: if you are filling a role where you get thirty strong applicants from a posting, you do not need a search firm and you certainly do not need this checklist. Post the job. The questions above matter when the market is illiquid and the seat carries real exposure, which is a smaller set of hires than most recruiters would like you to believe.
The guarantee is the last thing that protects you and the first thing you are sold. Read the exclusions before you read the day count, and ask the technical questions before you ask about the fee.
Want our full terms in writing before any conversation about a role? Ask us.