Build or Buy: The Ten-Year Engineer You Cannot Hire
For twenty years I ran a retained search firm, selling senior leadership talent into engineering-intensive businesses. I saw the cost and the failure rate up close.
Now I help firms build the people they used to hire me to find.
Hiring graduate engineers works. Firms have gotten good at it.
Hiring that same engineer ten years on, with client trust and the ability to run other leaders, does not work unless you are one of the largest firms in the world. That is the seat your succession plan sits on, and the market will not sell it to you.
Why hiring feels like the safer answer
A search has a start date, a slate, an offer and a finish. Somebody owns it. It goes on a plan and gets reported to the board.
Development has none of that. It is slower and easier to postpone.
Hiring also buys a track record instead of potential. The candidate has done the job somewhere else, which reads as evidence.
And a hire moves risk off your desk. The search firm carries a guarantee. If it fails, the failure has a name and the name is not yours.
None of this is stupid. It is how senior decisions get made when the clock is running.
The catch is that a bad senior hire bills eighteen months later and gets filed under turnover or culture fit. Nobody charges it back to the decision.
Meanwhile the internal candidate you passed over is two years into a career that stopped moving. He is taking calls.
What twenty years in retained search taught me about the failure rate
I was paid to find outside leaders and I was good at it. Take this as an inside view.
Strong candidates and a clean process still failed more often than anyone budgeted for.
Wharton's Matthew Bidwell put numbers on it. External hires are paid 18 to 20 percent more than people promoted into the same job. They score lower on performance reviews for their first two years. They leave, or get let go, at higher rates.
So you pay a premium, absorb two weak years, and carry a higher chance the person is gone before those two years are up.
The ones who survive past two years then get promoted faster than internal promotes. Outside talent is not weaker. The transition is what breaks.
What breaks it is firm-specific knowledge. A hire brings general capability and has to rebuild everything that was local to their last employer. Who actually decides. Which clients tolerate which conversations. How a pursuit gets won here.
In a consulting engineering firm that local layer is large. Technical judgment is calibrated to your markets and your risk appetite. Client trust does not travel on a resume. Credibility with your technical staff gets granted by peers over projects, not by a title.
The outside hire arrives with none of it and has to earn all of it while delivering.
The ten-year experience trap in the engineering labor market
ACEC's Workforce of the Future study puts 42 percent of engineering firm staff under ten years of experience, 28 percent under five. Senior professionals in the same study named the mid-career gap as one of their top concerns.
Wide floor, thin middle, and the people inside these firms already know it.
Think about what you are shopping for at ten to fifteen years of experience. Technical credibility, client trust, and the ability to lead other leaders s. Together in one person it is rare.
That group is small, employed, and their firms know exactly who they are.
The largest global firms also pay above market and offer project scale most firms cannot match. When five firms in a metro area chase the same fifty people, your recruiting process is not the constraint.
There is a second constraint underneath the recruiting conundrum. That constraint is readiness.
Two firms can run identical org charts and sit in completely different succession positions, because one spent four years pushing responsibility down and the other spent four years just keeping its best people busy.
Why engineering firms are the least practiced at absorbing outside talent
Russell Reynolds reviewed more than 200 executive committee members, EVPs and functional leaders at seven of the largest global engineering services firms. On external hiring they call it unusual for the industry and complicated by the industry's lack of proven success integrating outside talent.
That is a search firm saying it.
The reasons are structural. Engineering firms promote from within by default. Careers run long. Reputations get built project by project in front of the same people. Ownership is often internal, so the senior group grew up together.
An outsider walks in with no project history, which is the currency.
Yet boards under pressure are going the other way. Spencer Stuart found internal promotions dropped to 56 percent of S&P 1500 CEO appointments in 2024, down from 68 percent the year before. External hiring hit 44 percent, the highest since they started tracking in 2000.
That is cross-industry data, not ours. It makes sense. As pressure rises, boards look outside.
Yet doing more of this in an industry with one of the worst records making outside hires work is worth saying out loud before your next transition.
Yes, ome seats should be filled from outside. But the risk is obvious from the numbers. So when you do hire from the outside, be intentional about mitigating the risk through intentional hiring, onboarding, and coaching.Decide that on purpose.
A simple way to decide which roles you build and which you buy
Decide seat by seat. Five questions get you most of the way.
What does this seat need that nobody inside has done? Name the capability, not the title. Running other leaders, carrying a top-twenty client, running a P&L through a downturn, integrating an acquisition. Different gaps, different answers.
Is there a named candidate, or a type of person you hope shows up? A type is not a candidate. Most succession plans hold more types than names.
How long do you have? Building readiness takes eighteen to thirty-six months of genuinely bigger responsibility, not a training calendar. A seat that opens in ninety days is a different conversation from one that opens when a regional president retires in three years.
Has the firm ever had this capability? Buy what you have never had. Build what you already do well and currently cannot do without one specific person.
If you buy, who owns the integration for the first year? Client introductions, technical credibility, internal sponsorship, a real ramp. An outside hire with no integration owner is a gamble.
Plenty of seats land in the middle. Buy the specialist and build the leader. Hire a level below the seat and promote in two years.
One test on the build side. Which responsibilities move down a level in the next ninety days, and who senior is backing the person who catches them?
Building is not cheaper by default. It gets cheaper when it works, and it works when responsibility moves before it feels comfortable.
Ready to run a build or buy decision on one seat?
If a leadership seat opens in the next two years, the useful question is what that seat needs, who inside has done any of it, and how long you have before the decision makes itself.
A short conversation will sort your succession-critical roles into build, buy or blend, and find the two or three where the timeline and the risk overlap.
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