A construction leadership search fails in week one, not at shortlist. The common causes are a seat that was never defined, a compensation position nobody stress-tested, an inherited problem the client did not disclose, and a process too slow for the people it is trying to attract. All four are visible before sourcing starts.
Nobody notices a construction leadership search failing while it is failing. It looks like progress: resumes arriving, interviews scheduled, a shortlist forming.
The failure announces itself twice, both times late. Once at shortlist, when three plausible people are presented and none of them is right and nobody can say precisely why. And once at month nine, when the person who was hired leaves, and everyone concludes the search was unlucky.
Where does a construction leadership search actually fail?
At the definition, in the first week. Everything downstream inherits it. When a seat is defined loosely, sourcing produces candidates who match the description rather than the job, and the mismatch stays invisible until someone is sitting in the chair.
This is not a claim that sourcing does not matter. It matters enormously, and in a market where 91.7 percent of the 1,041 contractors answering the salaried-hiring question in the 2025 AGC and NCCER workforce survey reported difficulty filling salaried positions, finding people is genuinely hard work.
But sourcing failures look different. A sourcing failure produces too few candidates, and everyone can see it happening. A definition failure produces plenty of candidates, all of whom seem reasonable, and it is invisible right up until it is expensive.
The distinguishing question is simple. If a firm cannot say how many people in Dallas or Atlanta plausibly fit the seat at the offered number, the seat has not been defined. A genuinely hard search can answer that question with a small number. A badly defined one cannot answer it at all.
What are the four ways it goes wrong?
An undefined seat, an untested compensation position, an undisclosed inheritance, and a process slower than the market. Each is diagnosable in the first week, and each produces a different visible symptom weeks later, which is why they get misattributed.
The undefined seat is the most common. A title covering a scope it does not describe: a “project manager” carrying a project executive’s concurrency, a “preconstruction manager” who is really running commercial management. Candidates who fit the title do not fit the job, and the ones who could do the job screen themselves out because the posting reads junior to them.
The untested compensation position is the most avoidable. A number set from what the last person earned, or from a national band, without asking what the market pays for this scope in this metro right now. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes metro-level wage data for construction managers and cost estimators, and the spread between markets is wide enough that a national figure is close to meaningless.
The undisclosed inheritance is the most damaging, because it does not fail the search. It fails the hire, six months after everyone congratulated themselves. Someone accepts a role, discovers in month two that the department has been under-resourced for two years or that the owner on the main job is genuinely difficult, and starts taking calls.
The slow process is the most frustrating, because the firm is doing everything else right. The strongest construction leaders are not looking. When one agrees to a conversation, the window is days, and a client who takes eleven days to schedule a second interview has usually lost them to a firm that took two.
| Failure | Visible symptom, later | Detectable in week one by |
|---|---|---|
| Undefined seat | Plausible shortlist, nobody quite right | Asking what the seat signs without approval |
| Untested compensation | Offers declined, or accepted then reneged | Asking how many fit at this number, in this metro |
| Undisclosed inheritance | Good hire leaves at month nine | Asking why the last person actually left |
| Slow process | Strong candidates withdraw mid-process | Agreeing the interview calendar before sourcing |
What does a failed construction leadership search cost?
Two fees, two vacancies and a seat with a history. A placement fee at 20% of a $150,000 base is $30,000, paid twice across the two searches. The vacancy cost, at roughly a quarter of the seat’s annual cost for three months, is about $37,500 each time.
Across two searches that is $60,000 in fees and roughly $75,000 in vacancy. That arithmetic is uncomfortable enough. The part that does not appear in it is the seat’s reputation, which is the cost that compounds. Selah runs this as a project executive search.
The second search runs into a question the first one never faced. Candidates ask why the last person left after nine months, and every honest answer raises a doubt about the firm rather than about the departed individual. The pool that was hard to reach the first time is now harder, and the strongest people in it have the least reason to take the risk.
There is a third cost inside the firm. The department has now watched two people fail in the same chair, and the internal reading is rarely charitable to the leadership above it. That is a flight risk problem the second hire inherits on day one.
How do you prevent it?
Spend the first week on definition rather than sourcing. Write what the seat controls, test the compensation against the actual market, disclose the inherited problems, and agree the interview calendar before a single candidate is approached.
None of that is difficult, and all of it is uncomfortable, which is the real reason it gets skipped. Writing down what the seat controls forces a decision the firm may have been avoiding. Testing the compensation risks learning that the number is wrong. Disclosing the inheritance means saying out loud that the owner on the main job is difficult.
The discomfort is the work. A search that surfaces those three things in week one is a search that has already improved its odds more than any sourcing technique will.
- Define the seat in writing, including what this person signs without approval
- Test the number against what the market pays for this scope in this metro
- Disclose the inheritance, including the parts that are unflattering to the firm
- Agree the calendar before sourcing, so speed is a commitment rather than an intention
Where the incumbent is still seated, add a fifth: a discretion plan. That is confidential executive search for mandates that cannot be publicly posted, and the leak risk it manages is a failure mode all its own, sitting alongside the four above rather than replacing any of them.
Who does this not apply to?
A firm filling a well-understood seat it has filled successfully before, with the same interviewers and a settled compensation position, is already doing all four informally. Writing them down costs an hour and changes little.
Everything in this piece is aimed at the other case: a seat that is new, or has changed, or has already been filled once badly. That last category is the one worth the most attention, because the instinct after a failed search is to look harder at candidates. The candidates were rarely the problem.
If you are about to start a search that a previous one already failed, the useful first hour is spent on what the seat is, not on who might fill it. That is where we start with employers, and it is also the argument for writing the hiring brief before anyone opens a resume.
Sources and further reading
- AGC, Associated General Contractors of America
- NCCER, construction education and research
- BLS wage data, construction managers (11-9021)
- BLS wage data, cost estimators (13-1051)