Your margin lives or dies in the project executive’s first three weeks.
General contractors, specialty trades, and design-build firms. Hiring discipline for operations leadership, project executives, estimators, and field leadership - the roles where margin and safety are made or lost.
The construction labor market is brutal. So is the cost of the wrong hire. A project executive who can’t hold schedule under owner pressure costs more than the entire search fee in a single project. A safety leader who tolerates near-misses costs more than that.
Most construction hiring runs through personal networks and past relationships. That’s a strength when it works. It’s a blind spot when it doesn’t. We layer behavioral screening over the network - so the people you already know are evaluated against the standard you actually need.
“A near-miss tolerated is a standard rewritten.”
THE KIND OF QUESTION THE INTERVIEW ASKS
“Walk me through the project where the schedule slipped in month one. What did you re-sequence, what did you refuse to cut, and where did margin land?”
THE FIELD STANDARD
The relationship network gets a screen, not a pass. Behavioral prompts are built from the margin-risk conditions of your project type.
You have re-bid work that a project executive’s first month lost.
In executive search since 1999
85% retention on placed candidates at 24 months, firm-wide
Retained and project engagement models
Devin Jaroslawski
Practice Leader
Devin runs the commercial construction practice - project executives and field leadership screened for how they protect margin when the schedule slips. His teams live in industrial markets every day.
Talk to DevinMargin is decided in the field leadership hire. The engine defines winning per project type, screens PMs and project executives for how they run a job when the schedule slips, and protects the decision from the relationship-hire reflex.
Qualigence installs the hire. LLI installs Guide Leader around it. One system, two doors.
- 01
Run the Diagnostic
The 23-question hiring-discipline diagnostic surfaces your exact gap in about ten minutes.
- 02
Strategy Call with a Practice Leader
A Practice Leader maps the gap to a solution - retained search, RPO, or Staffing - on your live requisitions.
- 03
The Install on Live Searches
The 6-Step Performance Engine™ runs on the open seats that matter most. Standards hold. Hires produce.
The relationship network gets a screen, not a pass.
THE STAKES
A near-miss tolerated is a standard rewritten - and margin follows the standard, job by job.
INSTALLED HERE
Project executives who protect margin when the schedule slips, and field standards that do not rewrite themselves under deadline.
- President / Division President
- VP Operations
- VP Preconstruction
- Project Executive
- Senior Project Manager
- Director of Estimating / Chief Estimator
- VP Safety / Director of Safety
- VP Field Operations
- Senior Superintendent
- Director of Business Development
- VP Finance / Controller
- Director of Virtual Design & Construction (VDC)
How do you screen a project executive who comes through personal referral?
We layer behavioral screening over the referral, not instead of it. The relationship tells you the person is trusted. It does not tell you how they run a job when the schedule slips in month one, when the owner pushes for a corner to cut, when a safety near-miss has to be called. We build those prompts from the actual margin-risk conditions of your project type.
What roles do you place most often in commercial construction?
Project Executive, VP Operations, Regional Director, and Chief Estimator are the highest-volume searches. We also run preconstruction leadership and operations director searches for mid-market general contractors. The screen is always built around margin exposure - the person in that seat determines whether the project returns what the estimate promised.
How do you handle the small candidate pool in commercial construction markets?
The pool looks smaller than it is because most firms source the same visible names. We go two layers deeper - operators who are not actively looking but whose results are visible in project outcomes, schedule performance, and client retention records. The screen then tests whether the candidate's results traveled with them or stayed at the last employer.
Stop hoping. Install the discipline that makes the next construction leadership hire produce.
23 questions. About ten minutes. A scored read of where your hiring breaks.
