When the resume lists a strong firm, a senior title, and architecture or engineering experience, it can be easy to say yes. On paper, this person looks exactly like what you need for your next senior construction role.
Despite the perfect resume, something nags at you. Are they actually right for your company?
Listen to that instinct. A strong background is a real asset for construction executives, but it doesn’t tell you how someone leads. The gap between achievements and job titles on resumes and the person’s real leadership skills and style can make or break a hire.
Resumes Don’t Tell the Whole Story
Bringing leaders from other fields into the C-team at your construction company brings new strengths. Candidates from manufacturing can sharpen your operational discipline and efficiency. An executive with design knowledge knows the technical terms needed to communicate directly with your teams. Engineers can apply scientific rigor to understanding and solving construction problems.
But job titles and firm prestige don’t give you any real information about these skills. Whether a leader from another industry will be a good fit for construction depends on how they developed their skills.
Consider an architect who led complex design processes across long timelines at a large firm. They are probably used to delivering plans based on stakeholder consensus and client feedback cycles. That’s valuable, but not for construction. Your delivery process is much faster and requires on-the-spot decisions without perfect information. A leader accustomed to thorough, review-heavy processes may struggle to lead in a quick, decisive construction culture.
Then there’s the matter of trust. In design and engineering environments, executives establish their credibility from technical expertise and education. Senior leaders may earn their position and direct their teams based on their experience with complex challenges or understanding of industry regulations.
In construction, you earn people’s trust through your actions. Field crews look for someone who can make decisions under pressure, own up to their choices when things get complicated, and follow through on their plan.
Crossover leaders may adopt the same approach to earning trust, but differences in credibility across industries mean that some won’t. So you can’t be sure that an engineering candidate who holds the same title at a firm about the same size as your construction firm will be able to earn your crew’s trust. You need more than a job title to figure that out.
Leadership Traits Predict Success
The resume is just a starting point for recruiting C-level executives in construction. Knowing a candidate’s past can give you insight into the strengths and weaknesses they bring to the table. And instead of asking about a candidate’s achievements, you can learn how the candidate performs under difficult, high-stakes conditions.
If you’re not looking for prestigious titles or successful firms on the resume, what should you look for in crossover candidates? The strongest construction leaders, regardless of industry, typically demonstrate the following capabilities.
- Decisiveness under pressure. Construction projects rarely allow for extended deliberation time. Leaders make calls with incomplete information and live with the consequences in real time. When you ask strong candidates about making decisions in uncertain circumstances, they can articulate what they knew, what they didn’t know, and why they moved when they did.
- Cross-disciplinary collaboration. This is a core capability for successful construction leaders. The different teams in your company speak different professional languages, work to different rhythms, and even think differently about success. Leaders who can build relationships and maintain trust across such diversity have typically worked in cross-functional teams and didn’t spend their career in a silo.
Since construction is where plans meet reality, talented executives can execute under changing conditions. This is where construction companies often see a gap in crossover candidates. Design experts often excel at strategy and stall when projects change. You want a practical and adaptable leader who can get things done.
How to Effectively Evaluate Crossover Candidates
None of these predictors show up on resumes. You only discover a candidate’s true qualities and applicable experience through a direct, specific C-level search that goes beyond credentials and pedigrees. Retained executive recruiters and other hiring experts build their hiring processes around the following steps to evaluate candidates more deeply.
Align Stakeholders on the Role
The most important work in a construction leadership search starts with alignment inside your own organization. Key stakeholders need to agree on what the new leader needs to accomplish within your company. Then you can measure every candidate against your defined outcomes.
Creating a shared standard focuses the search, eliminates many disagreements, prevents hiring based on gut feelings, and streamlines the recruitment process.
Connect with Proven Leaders
Posting your opening on a job board is one way to attract candidates, but that approach often forces companies to rely on resumes to filter through leaders you know nothing about. You are just hoping that you don’t eliminate the right hire.
Executive headhunters for construction companies take a more informed approach. They use a network of executives, former clients, industry experts, university leaders, board members, and investors to reach leaders who’ve demonstrated their skills. A list of interested executives from a network-based search is full of leaders with solid reputations and proven experience in construction.
Structure Interviews Around Leadership Skills
Rather than asking candidates to describe their background in broad strokes, explore specific past situations in interviews. Surface their operational instincts, such as how they handle:
- Projects running behind schedule
- Conflicts between field operations and design leads
- Decision-making without complete information
- A loss of confidence between teams
Structured interviews turn candidate answers into comparable data. When you map your interviews from your success outcomes and ask consistent questions, you evaluate every candidate on the same dimensions. You get a clear, defensible picture of who has the necessary leadership skills for your construction C-team.
Test for Cultural Fit
Cross-over executives with all the necessary leadership skills to succeed in construction can still fail if they don’t fit your company culture. Someone with the wrong communication style can frustrate and isolate other leaders. And a leader who doesn’t share your values or vision for the future can clash with people and take your company in a different direction.
You can test candidates for cultural fit by building it into every stage of your executive search. Discuss key motivations for leaders in your stakeholder alignment. Reach out to leaders who have successfully worked in similar environments or share your same values. Include questions to assess cultural fit in all your interviews, and consider involving a panel of current leaders to observe the group dynamics in real time.
The Value of Looking Deeper
Architects, manufacturers, engineers, and executives from other fields bring a fresh perspective to your operations. So if your team is shaped by leaders from within the construction industry, adding crossover candidates can give you a significant advantage over your competition.
And as long as your executive search discovers whether candidates have the capabilities to lead in construction and the soft skills to fit your organization’s dynamics, you can celebrate the added depth your new hire will bring to your company.
