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 New York’s AEC market aren’t moving — a deep backlog of stable work, a thin bench of senior talent, and every reason to stay put. The upshot for a hiring firm is simple. The person you most want to hire almost certainly wasn’t looking. Someone had to reach them, earn a conversation, and convince them it was worth an hour of their time.
So by the time that estimator or project architect or highway engineer is across the table from you, the hardest part of the search is already done.
And then, more often than not, the firm blows it.
Not with a rude question or an obvious misstep. With something quieter and more common: they run the interview as a test the candidate has to pass — when the candidate is actually deciding whether the firm is worth leaving a good job for.
The mistake, plainly
Most firms interview to confirm the candidate can do the work.
That instinct made sense in a different market. When people are lined up for the job, your problem is sorting — you screen, you verify, you weed out. The interview is a filter.
But you don’t have a sorting problem with a senior AEC hire right now. You have a persuasion problem. The resume already told you this person can do the work. The portfolio, the project list, the PE, the years in the field — the competence question was answered before they walked in. Spending the hour re-confirming it isn’t diligence. It’s wasting your one shot.
Meanwhile the candidate is running a completely different interview in their head. They’re not asking “can I do this job.” They know they can. They’re asking: is this a step forward, or a lateral move with a new logo? Will I work with people I respect? Does the person across this table actually understand what I do? Would I be giving up a good situation for something better — or just different?
When a firm spends the whole hour evaluating and almost none of it answering those questions, the candidate draws the obvious conclusion. This firm sees me as a hire to be vetted, not a person to be recruited. And the best ones — the ones with options, which in this market is most of them — quietly decide to stay where they are.
Why good firms keep doing it
This isn’t a competence problem. Some of the firms that do this worst are excellent at the actual work.
That’s part of why it happens. A principal who’s brilliant at running a project review walks into an interview and runs it like a project review. Technical, probing, looking for the gap. It’s the muscle they have.
It happens when interviews get handed to an HR generalist who’s screening for general fit because no one briefed them that this candidate is already sold on the work and needs to be sold on the firm. It happens when a firm hasn’t hired at this level in a few years and is running on old reflexes from a looser labor market. And it happens out of a kind of pride — a sense that the candidate should want this, should be proving they want it, rather than the other way around.
I watched this happen recently. A Buffalo firm needed a senior estimator. The candidate they got in front of was the kind you wait years for — twenty years in commercial work, looking to move back to Western New York for personal reasons, already half-sold on the move before the interview started. HR and the hiring manager spent the hour asking the standard run of questions. Nothing wrong with any of them. Nothing memorable about any of them either. The candidate told me afterward he just didn’t get a warm feeling — nobody in the room seemed particularly interested in him, just in checking that he could do the work. He took the other offer. The firm that won him didn’t have a better job. They had a better hour.
What it actually costs
There are two ways this goes wrong, and the second is worse than the first.
The first is the one you can see: you lose the candidate. They take the other conversation, the search drags on, and you’re back to the thin bench.
The second is invisible until much later. You “win.” You hire the qualified person — and because you never asked what they actually wanted, you never learned that this role doesn’t give it to them. They’re competent, they’re fine, and eighteen months later they’re gone, because the job was a step they took, not a step they wanted. You confused “can do the job” with “will build a career here.” That’s the same mistake the staying-put engineers in my last post are wrestling with from the other side — job security and career security aren’t the same thing, and that’s as true for the firm doing the hiring as it is for the person being hired.
A search that ends in a hire who leaves isn’t a search that worked. It’s the most expensive version of one that didn’t.
What to do instead
The fix isn’t a technique. It’s a posture.
Walk in assuming the competence question is settled and your real job is two-way. Spend at least as much of the hour understanding what would make this a genuine step forward for them as you spend confirming what they can do. Ask the question almost no one asks a strong senior candidate: what would have to be true for this to be the best move you’ve made? Then actually listen to the answer, because it tells you both whether you can win them and whether you should.
Get a principal in the room early, not just at the final round. A senior estimator, architect, or engineer wants to talk to someone who speaks their language and can speak credibly about the work. Making them wait three rounds to meet anyone who does signals where they’d rank once hired.
And sell honestly. Not a pitch — the real version. What the work is, what it isn’t, what they’d own, where it could go. The candidates worth hiring can smell a recruiting performance, and they respect the firm that levels with them.
None of this means lowering the bar. You’re still evaluating — hard. You’re just doing it while remembering that they’re evaluating too, and in this market, they can afford to.
Getting them in the room was the win. The interview is where you either close the distance or hand it back. Spend it accordingly.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the most common interviewing mistake AEC firms make?
Treating the interview as a one-way test of whether the candidate can do the job, when the strongest senior candidates have already proven that on paper and are really deciding whether the firm is worth leaving a good situation for. The result is an hour spent re-confirming competence instead of understanding the person and giving them a reason to move.
Why does this matter more now than it used to?
Because the labor market has flipped. When candidates are plentiful, interviewing as a filter makes sense. With a thin bench of senior architects, engineers, and estimators and a deep regional backlog keeping people in place, the best candidates aren’t applicants to be sorted — they’re people with options who have to be persuaded.
How should a principal approach a senior interview differently?
Assume competence is settled and make the conversation two-way. Spend real time understanding what would make the role a genuine step forward for the candidate, get a principal who speaks the work into the room early, and describe the opportunity honestly rather than performing a pitch. Evaluate hard — but remember the candidate is evaluating too.
Isn’t it risky to stop testing technical ability in interviews?
You don’t stop evaluating — you stop spending the entire interview on a question the resume already answered. Verify what genuinely needs verifying, then use the rest of the time on motivation, fit, and what the person actually wants, which is where most failed hires actually come from.
What happens if we get this wrong but still make the hire?
That’s the costlier failure. Hiring a qualified person whose real motivations you never understood often means hiring someone who leaves within a couple of years because the role was a move they took, not one they wanted. A hire who leaves is the most expensive kind of search.
Lynn writes about hiring, careers, and the talent market in Western New York’s architecture, engineering, and construction community. More at nordstromwilliams.com.
Next in this series: what a principal should actually be listening for in the first ten minutes of an interview — the signals that tell you who’s in front of you before the resume questions even start.