How to Find the Best Executive Search Firm for Your Needs

Filling a senior role takes months of someone's attention. You write the profile, source people, screen them, interview, check references, and negotiate. Many companies hand that work to an executive search firm. The firms are not interchangeable, though, and picking the wrong one costs you time you did not have to spare.

Contractors are not short on reasons to ask for help. In the 2026 workforce survey from the Associated General Contractors of America and NCCER, 87% of firms with open salaried positions said those roles were as hard or harder to fill than a year earlier. The 2025 survey found superintendents the hardest to fill, reported as difficult by 81% of firms looking for them, followed by estimating personnel at 77% and project managers and supervisors at 76%. About 30% of firms said they were using worker search firms or professional employer organizations to supplement their own recruiting (AGC and NCCER, 2025).

So plenty of contractors are shopping for a search partner. Here is what to ask when you are one of them.

Does the firm actually work in your industry?

A firm that fills construction roles every week knows what a superintendent on a hospital job does differently from one on a highway job. It knows the difference between a preconstruction manager and a project executive, and it knows which regional competitors have people worth approaching. A generalist firm has to learn that vocabulary on your time.

Test it. Ask the recruiter to describe the role you are hiring for in their own words, and ask what they expect the hardest part of the search to be. A firm with real depth will push back on your profile. It might tell you the salary band is under the market, or that the combination of healthcare experience and a PE license narrows the pool to a handful of people. Vague agreement is a bad sign.

Industry focus also affects reach. A firm that has recruited in your field for years has candidates it already knows, including people who are not looking at job boards. For a role like construction manager, where the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts about 609,100 jobs and projects 9% growth from 2025 to 2035, a lot of the best people are employed and not searching. Someone has to know who they are.

Who will do the searching?

Ask who is on the search, by name and by role. In some firms the person who wins the business hands the work to a junior researcher. In others the senior recruiter you meet is the one on the phone with candidates. Neither is automatically wrong, but you should know which one you are buying.

Ask also how many open searches that person carries at once. A recruiter with four searches can call every promising candidate back the same day. A recruiter with twenty cannot.

What does the process look like?

You are looking for a process you can describe back in a few sentences. Ask for:

• Intake. How does the firm learn what you need? A good intake covers the job, the team the person will join, the project pipeline, the pay range, and why the last person left.
• Sourcing. Where do candidates come from: the firm's own database, direct outreach, referrals, or ads? Direct outreach to employed people is the main thing you are paying for.
• Screening. What gets a candidate in front of you? The recruiter should be able to tell you what they check beyond the resume, such as project size, scope of responsibility, licenses, and reasons for leaving past roles.
• Reporting. How often will you get updates, and in what form? Weekly is reasonable for an active search.
• After the offer. Does the firm stay involved through negotiation, acceptance, and the first few months?

Skills and experience are the first filter. The better firms also try to understand your culture and your next three years of work, so the people they present can do the job and fit the team. If a firm cannot explain how it assesses fit, it probably doesn't.

How fast can it move, and what does it say about timing?

Nobody can promise a date. A candidate has to give notice, relocate a family, and decide. But a firm should be able to tell you how long searches like yours usually take, from kickoff to first interviews and from first interviews to accepted offer. Ask for the range, not the best case, and ask what slows searches down.

Speed should not beat quality. A firm that sends you six resumes in the first week because it pulled them from a database has not done much for you. A firm that sends you three people after a week of real conversations has.

Time-to-fill matters because vacancies are expensive. SHRM reports that cost per hire for executive positions has risen 113% since 2017, while nonexecutive cost per hire fell 27% over the same period (SHRM, 2025). Executive hiring is getting more expensive on its own. A long, unfocused search adds to that.

Do the references and reputation line up with the pitch?

Every firm says it is the best. Ask for references and call them. Ask for clients who hired for roles like yours, and ask each one the same questions:

1. Did the firm understand the role and your company?
2. How many candidates did you see, and how many were worth interviewing?
3. Did the search finish when the firm said it would?
4. Is the person still with you, and how is the work going?
5. Would you use them again?

Then read what is written about the firm online and compare it to the sales pitch. A reference that praises the recruiter but hedges on the result tells you something. So does a reference who cannot remember the search.

What happens when a hire does not stay?

Ask about retention directly. If a placed executive leaves in the first year, what does the firm do? Many search firms offer a replacement or a partial refund inside a defined window. Get the window, the conditions, and the remedy in writing before you sign.

The reason to press on this is that bad hires are common and not cheap. In a 2017 CareerBuilder survey of 2,257 hiring managers and HR professionals, 74% said they had hired the wrong person, and respondents put the average cost of one bad hire at $14,900 (HR Dive, 2017). The survey spans industries and job levels, so a senior construction hire, with salary, relocation and a disrupted project, will cost more. Our post on what a bad executive hire costs breaks down the pieces.

Retention also tells you how the firm screens. Firms that care about longevity ask candidates why they left each job, whether they have stayed through a full project cycle, and what they are looking for next. They will also tell you when a candidate is likely to leave.

What will it cost, and how is it structured?

Ask about fees in the first conversation. Typical points to settle:

• Whether the fee is retained, contingent, or a hybrid, and when each payment is due.
• What the fee is based on: first-year base salary or total cash compensation.
• Whether the firm will work on your search exclusively while it runs.
• What the guarantee covers and for how long.
• Whether the firm restricts itself from recruiting out of your company after the search.

Do not choose on price alone. A cheap search that turns up the wrong person costs more than a fair fee for the right one. But do not accept unclear terms either.

A short checklist before you sign

1. The firm can describe your role in specific terms and challenges your assumptions where it should.
2. You know who will run the search and how many other searches they carry.
3. The process, update schedule, and timeline range are written down.
4. You have spoken to at least two references with comparable roles.
5. The guarantee and fee terms are in the agreement.

The S.R. Clarke Group has recruited for the construction and infrastructure industry since 1979, from our office in Parker, Colorado. You can read more about how we work on the why S.R. Clarke page, see the roles we place, or read what to expect when you hire a search firm.

If you are hiring and want to talk through a search, start at /employers.