Most project delivery problems that get blamed on "bad luck" trace back to a recruitment decision made weeks or months earlier.
By the time a construction project visibly starts to slip — missed milestones, quality issues, disputes over responsibility — the root cause is often a resourcing decision made weeks or months earlier. These five mistakes are the ones we see most consistently, across main contractor, M&E and infrastructure clients alike.
A “Site Manager” role on a fast-track fit-out requires a genuinely different skill set to a “Site Manager” role on a multi-phase new-build, but both often get recruited against an identical, generic job description. The fix is briefing the project, not just the vacancy — programme stage, contract form, team structure and specific pressure points, so a recruiter can assess candidates against reality rather than a template.
Under programme pressure, it’s tempting to fast-track a candidate straight to site and complete CSCS/CPCS, right-to-work and reference checks afterward. This creates two risks: a compliance gap that surfaces during an audit or incident investigation, and a candidate who turns out, on reference, not to be who their CV suggested. Compliance verification should be a gate before deployment, not a formality completed in parallel with it.
A CV listing “BMS experience” or “NEC contract administration” tells you almost nothing about depth of competency. Technical roles — M&E design and commissioning, commercial and contracts positions, senior civil engineering appointments — need technical vetting conversations, not just CV screening, or businesses risk discovering the gap in competency mid-project rather than before appointment.
Not every role carries the same project risk. A missing general operative is usually solvable within days; a missing commissioning engineer three weeks before a critical handover can threaten the entire programme. Businesses that don’t triage vacancies by actual project risk often allocate recruitment effort inefficiently — moving fast on low-risk roles and too slowly on the ones that matter most.
Many recruitment relationships end the moment a candidate starts. This misses the window where problems are easiest and cheapest to fix — a site culture mismatch, an expectation gap, an early sign a candidate isn’t settling. Structured aftercare in the first 90 days catches these issues while there’s still time to resolve them, rather than discovering a placement has failed only once a replacement is urgently needed.
Each of these mistakes stems from the same underlying pattern: treating recruitment as a transactional task to complete quickly, rather than a project risk to actively manage. Construction projects are resourced by people, and the decisions made about who fills which role — and how carefully that decision is made — directly shape whether a programme holds together or comes apart under pressure.
Our five-stage process — Discovery, Shortlisting, Vetting, Interview Support, Aftercare — exists specifically to close these five gaps, on every placement we make, regardless of how much time pressure a client is under.
