Here is the last fortnight in UK construction, as the trade press reported it.
Durkan Holdings finished its final contracting job and left contracting altogether after fifty years. Morgan Sindall split its Home Counties business in two and made four senior director appointments across London and the South East. HS2 appointed a chief programme officer from the Transpennine Route Upgrade. The KPMG and REC jobs report showed temporary vacancies rising for the first time in two years, with construction trades and engineering leading the gains. The August PMI eased, but firms are still cutting headcount and civil engineering had its worst month since 2020. CITB said the industry needs 206,000 more workers by 2030. Breyer Holdings folded after seven decades, with 285 jobs at risk.
Every one of those stories was reported as what it was: a corporate decision, a data release, an insolvency. Not one was reported as what it also is, which is a hiring event. That second reading is the whole reason this site exists. So let me show you how it works, and then tell you why I am giving it away.
What a recruiter sees in a headline
Recruiters do not read the news for the news. We read it for the movement of people it implies, usually three to six months before that movement shows up anywhere public. A few rules of thumb, using the fortnight above.
A restructure is a backfill. Morgan Sindall's reshuffle put four people into bigger seats. The press covered the four names. The hiring will happen one level down, in the posts they vacated and in the commercial and pre-construction roles a new business unit needs behind its director. Morgan Sindall tends to promote from within, so those backfills will cascade further still. If you are a commercial manager or project director in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire or the North London boroughs, that reshuffle is your market moving, not theirs.
A senior appointment is a statement about the next phase. HS2 hiring a chief programme officer with a Transpennine Route Upgrade and BAE Systems background is HS2 telling you its reset is nearly finished and delivery is next. Delivery phases need programme controls, supplier risk and package management at scale. The person at the top was the announcement. The teams underneath are the opportunity.
An exit is a cohort coming to market. Durkan did not collapse. It looked at contracting as a category, priced the regulatory risk, and chose to stop. That leaves commercial directors, project directors and design managers who have run contracting risk in a post-Grenfell environment and now know, from the inside, what it costs when a firm decides that risk is no longer worth carrying. Some will go with the regeneration business. The rest are the most informed hires a contractor could make this autumn, and most contractors will not think to look.
A collapse is a payment-risk map. Breyer, Devonshire Homes and Mansell each left subcontractors unpaid. For the people who worked there it is a bad month. For everyone else it is a live reading of which clients and which parts of the supply chain are carrying strain, and that reading should shape which offers you take, not just which ones you get.
Data tells you your negotiating position. The REC uptick and the PMI describe the same market from different ends: demand returning at the trades and engineering end while headcount at the top stays frozen. Put CITB's 206,000 next to that and the picture is a labour gap that is structural, not cyclical. If you are in the part of the market that is thawing, you are negotiating from a stronger position than the general mood suggests. If you are in the part still frozen, the time to prepare is now, because a thaw travels upwards.
None of this is clever. It is the habit of asking, of every headline, who gets hired because of this, who gets promoted, and whose seat just came open. Recruiters develop the habit because our livelihood depends on it. Almost nobody else in the industry is ever taught it.
Why I am publishing it
Recruitment runs on knowing things other people do not. Which firm is about to restructure, whose framework is about to be lost, who is unhappy and who is being courted. That knowledge is the product. The conventional wisdom is that you keep it in the drawer and sell it one placement at a time.
I have stopped believing that serves anyone, including me.
It does not serve the people building careers in this industry. They make the biggest decisions of their working lives, which firm, which sector, which patch, on the strength of a job advert and a conversation with whoever answered the phone. The information that would let them decide well exists. It is simply held by people with a commercial interest in releasing it selectively.
It does not serve the industry, which has spent a decade publishing skills-gap figures and then leaving the actual careers information scattered across a hundred websites, half of them out of date and most of them selling something. Ask a sixteen-year-old how to get into construction and time how long it takes them to find a straight answer.
And in the end it does not serve a search business either. A market where the best people can read the signals for themselves is a better market to recruit in. They move for the right reasons, to the right firms, at the right time. My job gets harder in one narrow sense and better in every sense that matters.
So the reading I do anyway, most mornings, is now published most mornings. The judgement I would once have saved for a candidate over coffee goes on the site, where the next person can find it too.
What you will find here
The site is built around that daily reading, with a few things added for the parts of a career a headline cannot help with.
News is what happened in UK construction, written for the hiring it sets off. Not a digest. Each story ends with what it means for your career, in your discipline, in your region.
Insights is where this piece lives: the longer reads on who is hiring at the top and where demand goes next, written while the signal is still a signal.
Movers tracks who is moving where at the senior end, and which seats their moves leave open. By the time an award is public the shortlist has usually moved; Movers is an attempt to get you there earlier.
Thoughts is opinion with skin in the game. Careers, hiring, leadership, and the habits that get people promoted, including the ones nobody spells out for you.
The weekly question is one question a week, hung off what moved in the market. Vote with one tap, reply under your name, and read my take on the Friday.
Ask Anything is the question you would put to a mate in the industry, if you had one who had already done it. CV, pay, a move you are weighing up, a contract clause nobody will explain. Answered properly, in the open, where the next person can find it.
The pathways are twelve structured routes through the industry's disciplines: early careers, then commercial, planning, estimating, operations, design management, design and technical, MEP, bid management, digital and BIM, health and safety, and finally a pathway on mentoring itself. Lessons, exercises, an exam at the end of each module, and a certificate when you finish the route.
Mentoring matches people coming through with directors who have already made the climb. Matched by a person rather than an algorithm, and it costs nothing.
Starting out is one straight answer to "how do I get in?": apprenticeships, T Levels, courses and universities, and why the first ten years decide the next thirty. Alongside it is an open invitation to employers, colleges and governing bodies to list what they offer, lend us their directors for an hour a month, and stress test the guide until it is right.
What it costs, and what the catch is
It is free. You sign in with an email address; there is no password and no card. I run an executive search firm and I will not pretend the two are unconnected. Some people here will one day hire through it or be placed by it. Most never will, and the site works for them exactly the same. Everything on it is free, and there is no sequence of emails designed to turn you into a lead.
The catch, if there is one, is that it is written by one person with one point of view, and I would rather be corrected in the comments than be politely wrong. Tell me where I have misread a signal. That is the point of doing this in the open.
Next time a headline crosses your desk, try the question. Who gets hired because of this, and whose seat just came open? If you would like it worked through for you most mornings, join. It is free.
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