Fourteen specialist vacancies filled, some open for two years before we started.
A water and wastewater engineering and construction firm
Project managers, construction and design managers and engineers for complex municipal water and wastewater infrastructure, screened on delivery record rather than credentials.
- 14specialist positions filled
- 2 yrssome roles had been open before the engagement
- 8role types, PM to municipal engineer
Fourteen highly specialized vacancies needed project and engineering professionals with experience delivering complex water and wastewater infrastructure. The firm had been searching; some of the roles had been open for two years when we started.
The problem was not a lack of project managers. It was a lack of project managers who had delivered this kind of project, for municipal clients, through the stakeholder and regulatory process that comes with it.
We focused the search on relevant municipal and infrastructure project experience, project leadership, stakeholder coordination and delivery track record, and set generic project management credentials aside.
Each candidate was qualified on the specific projects they had delivered before the firm saw them, so the firm's own engineers spent their interview time on the people who could do the work.
The parts of the method that did the work.
- 01
Delivery record over credentials
A PMP tells you little about a treatment plant upgrade. The projects on the résumé, and what happened on them, tell you everything.
- 02
The municipal dimension
Councils, utilities, regulators, public consultation. Candidates were screened on having worked inside that process, not just alongside it.
- 03
Long-open roles, re-briefed
A role open for two years has usually drifted from its original brief. We rewrote each with the hiring lead before searching.
- 04
A national and cross-border search
The pool for this experience is small and spread out. The search went where the projects had been built.
All fourteen challenging positions filled, including project management talent for complex water and wastewater projects, several of them vacancies that had resisted two years of searching.
A targeted search and a first-qualification process that reduced the hiring burden on the firm's internal teams.
- Project Manager
- Senior Project Manager
- Construction Manager
- Design Manager
- Municipal Engineer
- Water Resources Engineer
- Civil Engineer
- Project Coordinator
If you are hiring for roles like these.
- A role open for a year needs a new brief, not a new postingRevisit the must-haves with the hiring lead. Something in the original brief is filtering out the people who could do it.
- Screen on the project, not the certificateAsk what they delivered, for whom, and what went wrong. Credentials come second.
- Search where the work happenedSpecialist infrastructure experience lives in a few regions. Go to them.
- Protect your engineers' timeFirst-round qualification is not engineering work. Hand it off.
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