The skills that made you the person everyone relies on are not the skills that run a practice. Six things worth building now, while nobody has given you the title and the stakes of learning them are low. The last piece in this series argued that the move from department manager to practice leader isn’t the next …
Read more “If You Want to Lead a Practice, More Technical Depth Won’t Get You There”
Firms talk about recruiting far more than they talk about succession. The result is a generation of strong technical managers with no clear route into business leadership, and a generation of practice leaders with no obvious successor. Both sides are usually waiting for the other one to start the conversation. AEC firms spend a great …
Read more “Succession Planning in AEC Firms Runs in Two Directions”
The strongest senior hires you’ll ever make are the ones where you screened for judgment. The costliest failures are the ones you screened for skills alone. Almost nobody interviews for the first, and almost everybody thinks they already do. This is the last piece in a series about senior hiring in the Western New York …
Read more “The Difference Between Hiring for Skills and Hiring for Judgment”
The resume tells you what the candidate has done. The first ten minutes tell you who’s actually sitting in front of you. Most principals spend that window asking instead of listening — and miss the whole interview. In my last post, I made the case that most AEC firms run senior interviews as a …
Read more “What a Principal Should Listen For in the First Ten Minutes of an Interview”
In a market where the best people aren’t looking, getting a strong candidate in the room is the hard part. Most firms then spend the next hour undoing it. Getting a good senior candidate to sit down with you right now is an achievement. I wrote last time about why the best people in Western …
Read more “The Biggest Mistake AEC Firms Make When They Finally Land the Interview”
A record state construction backlog is the strongest retention tool WNY engineering firms have ever had. For the engineers it’s keeping in place, that’s worth a closer look. Every June, the calculus shifts a little. The spring scramble to get projects moving for the construction season has settled into a rhythm. This is the stretch …
Read more “Why Western New York’s Best Engineers Are Staying Put — and What It’s Costing Them”
On April 16, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced it was withholding $73,502,543 in federal highway funding from New York State over a dispute about how the state’s DMV issued commercial driver’s licenses. Most of the coverage has focused on the political fight between Albany and Washington. That’s not what this post is about. …
Read more “What $73 Million in Withheld Highway Funds Actually Means for Western New York”
In today’s competitive Architecture, Engineering, and Construction fields, attracting top talent goes beyond offering fair pay. It requires understanding what professionals seek in their next job. This article, inspired by FBI negotiation techniques, shows how empathy, smart questioning, and genuine conversations can improve your hiring process. Rather than treating interviews like interrogations, learn the importance of creating collaborative discussions that connect with potential candidates. Discover how to build an environment where top talent feels valued, leading to successful hires and long-term employee retention. Are you ready to enhance your recruiting strategies? Keep reading!
Searching for an AEC recruiter in Western New York might lead you to firms that look local but aren’t. Many national recruiting companies create city-specific pages designed to rank in Google, even if they have no real presence in Buffalo. In an industry where relationships and regional knowledge matter, that difference can impact hiring outcomes more than many firms realize.
Your resume isn’t just a document—it’s a project proposal where you are the deliverable. As a recruiter reviewing resumes every day, I see the same mistakes that instantly raise red flags and land candidates in the rejection pile. In the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction industry, your resume needs to prove value quickly and clearly. Here are five common resume mistakes that quietly signal something isn’t adding up—and how to avoid them.