What Morgan Sindall's record half tells you about hiring

Results season opened this week and it did not open quietly. Here is the week that mattered.

From my desk

The most telling thing this week was not a contract award, it was the appointments column. Three senior regional and commercial moves in seven days, at Wates, Kier and Persimmon, and two of the three were succession moves rather than external hires. When contractors reshape regional leadership in the same fortnight the half year numbers land, they are positioning for the second half, not reacting to the first.

My own desk stayed weighted to the searches you already know about: healthcare leadership on both sides of the Atlantic and a ground engineering Commercial Director in Glasgow. A week of longlists rather than headlines, and the most useful conversations were candidates telling me what the half year statements look like from the inside.

The week in construction

• Morgan Sindall posted a record first half. Revenue up 8 per cent to £2.56bn and profit before tax up 21 per cent to £116m, with fit out delivering 40 per cent of first half workloads (Construction News). The margin story matters more than the revenue one: the group raised its construction margin target to 3.5 to 4 per cent, and margin confidence is what pays for senior hires.
• McLaughlin & Harvey won the £100m plus Rolls-Royce combat air facility in Bristol (Construction News). Last week I wrote about the defence pipeline in the abstract; this is what it looks like when it converts, research, manufacturing and assembly under one roof, starting on site later this year.
• Kier and Morgan Sindall are among 11 firms appointed to the new Merseyrail stations framework (Construction News). Frameworks remain the quiet engine of regional civils workload, and framework positions are exactly what regional directors are hired to win and defend.
• The Building Safety Regulator published its latest approval data: a median determination of 16 weeks on Category A and B refurbishment applications and 28 weeks on higher risk internal works (BCIS). Gateway time is now a line in the programme, not a footnote, and the smarter clients are starting to resource for it.
• The water sector kept spending. Kier took more than £51m of Severn Trent wastewater upgrades at Droitwich, Warton and Worksop (NCE), Galliford Try won £47.5m at Thames Water's Camberley treatment works plus a £31m clean water pipeline near Guildford (Construction News), and Arcadis joined Yorkshire Water's £80m AMP8 technical services framework (Construction Index). AMP8 is converting from framework seats into named schemes, and named schemes are what trigger hiring.

One more thing on water, because the awards above are only half the story. Five water companies have changed chief executive inside twelve months: Severn Trent, Pennon, Welsh Water, Affinity and South East Water. Three of the five hired from inside the sector, which tells you how shallow the pool of proven water leadership really is. Set that against a capital programme in the region of £100bn and the conclusion is hard to avoid: capability, not capital, is the constraint on AMP8.

It matters beyond the boardroom. New chief executives review what they inherit, frameworks, delivery partners and operating models included, so the first hundred days of each of these tenures is where relationships get reset and openings appear. I have written the full argument up in The Great Water Reset. If you lead in the water sector, or sell into it, it is worth ten minutes.

People on the move

• Kevin Grace becomes Commercial Director for London at Wates Construction, part of a wider leadership rejig in the capital (Construction News).
• Steve Lynn steps up to Regional Director for Yorkshire and the North East at Kier Construction. A 20 year Kier career, site manager to regional board, succeeding Dan Doherty who retires (Place Yorkshire).
• Richard Flamson joins Persimmon Homes North Midlands as Construction Director, arriving from Vistry (Housing Today).

Worth noting: at this level the strongest appointments are usually succession or relationship moves, not advertised hires. This week proved the rule.

Other areas of interest

A look behind the curtain this week, because a week of longlists deserves unpacking. When a search goes quiet from the outside, this is what is actually happening. The market gets mapped first: every business delivering comparable work, every leader in a comparable seat, usually 80 to 120 names before any judgement is applied. Then the cut. Who is credible, who is genuinely movable, who is a culture risk however good the record. Twelve to fifteen names survive.

Only then do the calls start, which is why silence from a search firm rarely means drift; it means the map is being drawn, and the conversations that follow are far better informed for it. If you want to test the quality of a search firm, ask how the map was built. It is the single most revealing question you can put to one, and the candidates who ask it always stand out.

One useful thing

If you are planning a move during results season, read the half year statement before the first conversation. Skip the headline numbers and go to the divisional targets. When a business raises a margin target or a divisional profit target, that is where next year's hiring budget sits. Morgan Sindall just raised both for fit out and construction. Ten minutes of reading and you know more about their hiring intent than most applicants ever will.

What I'm working on

My desk is still weighted towards healthcare leadership, with the Head of Health for Canada around Toronto and the Head of Health for the US west coast both live, building out the healthcare sector for a growing builder. Closer to home: the ground engineering Commercial Director in Glasgow, a Design Director in London, and Group Commercial Director and Chief People Officer briefs. If any of that is your world, reply and tell me. Everything I am running is at lechley.com/jobs.