Every week the major UK contractors, consultancies and client bodies advertise a handful of director seats, and nobody counts them. The Senior Hiring Index does: how many leadership roles are open across the market today, how many were added this week and this month, which functions and regions they sit in, and which employers are adding the most. The counts come from a daily sweep of around ninety employers' own careers pages, so they describe the senior market itself rather than the agency adverts around it.
Senior Hiring Index
Who is hiring leaders in UK construction, counted every week.
The index
90 leadership roles open across 28 UK employers on 14 October 2026: director, head-of and chief seats in operations, commercial, pre-construction, technical, planning and safety. 51 were added in the last 28 days and 25 in the last seven. The series began on 17 September 2026, so the first like-for-like comparison, this month against last, arrives in November. A further 16 director-level seats are open in finance, people and the support functions.
By function
| Function | Open now | Added, 28 days |
|---|---|---|
| Operations and delivery | 38 | 21 |
| Commercial | 18 | 9 |
| Other leadership | 13 | 6 |
| Pre-construction and work winning | 11 | 9 |
| Technical and design | 6 | 4 |
| Safety, quality and sustainability | 3 | 2 |
| Planning | 1 | 0 |
By region
| Region | Open now | Added, 28 days |
|---|---|---|
| North of England | 35 | 18 |
| London and the South East | 31 | 18 |
| Midlands | 10 | 6 |
| Scotland | 5 | 3 |
| South West | 3 | 3 |
| Northern Ireland | 2 | 2 |
| England, unspecified | 2 | 1 |
| Elsewhere in England | 2 | 0 |
Employers adding the most, last 28 days
| Employer | Added | Open now |
|---|---|---|
| Balfour Beatty | 7 | 13 |
| M Group | 6 | 6 |
| Kier | 6 | 5 |
| Taylor Wimpey | 4 | 4 |
| Willmott Dixon | 4 | 3 |
| BAM | 4 | 2 |
| Wates | 3 | 5 |
| Sir Robert McAlpine | 3 | 3 |
| HS2 | 2 | 8 |
| Skanska | 2 | 3 |
Week by week
| Week beginning | Leadership roles added |
|---|---|
| 14 September 2026 (from 17 September 2026) | 0 |
| 21 September 2026 | 5 |
| 28 September 2026 | 7 |
| 5 October 2026 | 14 |
| 12 October 2026 (to date) | 25 |
How to read it
Open now is the number of leadership adverts live on the day shown. It moves slowly, because a director seat takes six to eight weeks to fill through a search and longer through an advert, and a fair share of the seats counted here are still open a month after they appear.
Added, 28 days is the pace. When it rises, employers are deciding to hire ahead of the work; when it falls, they are holding. Read it with the pipeline: the hospital programme, AMP8, the nuclear schemes and the data centre builds each pull a recognisable set of seats onto this page in the months before they mobilise.
The employers tell you where the decisions are being made. A business adding four or five leadership seats in a month is reorganising, growing into a new region or sector, or replacing people who have left, and each of those is worth a conversation with the people around it.
The functions tell you which part of the business is under pressure. Pre-construction seats lead when the order book is being rebuilt; operations and delivery seats lead when it has been won; commercial seats follow both.
An advertised director seat is a decision already made
By the time a Tier 1 advertises a Commercial Director, the business has agreed the budget, the brief and the reporting line.
The index counts those decisions as they are made, which is earlier than any announcement.
Methodology
The index is counted from the careers pages of a watchlist of UK construction, civil engineering, building services and infrastructure employers, including the client bodies on the major programmes, swept daily. A role enters the index on the day it is first seen and stays as open until the sweep stops seeing it. Titles are classified by function from their wording, and locations by region from the town the advert names. Associate, assistant and deputy director titles, non-executive seats, and adverts on staging or sandbox sites are excluded. The series starts on 17 September 2026, when the watchlist reached its present size; anything first seen before that date is part of the opening picture and is not counted as added. Weekly figures are Monday to Sunday. The monthly edition is published in the first week of each month.
The index is a count of adverts, not of appointments. The appointments themselves, as they are announced, are recorded on senior appointments in construction.
The seats on this page are the seats I fill
Most of the roles the index counts are advertised because a search has not been run, and a good share of them are still open when the index moves on to the next month. A retained search maps the whole market, approaches the people who are not looking, and presents a shortlist that has been assessed. The brief, the assessment and the salary band for each seat are set out under roles.
01What does the Senior Hiring Index count?
Director, head-of and chief roles advertised by a watchlist of around ninety UK construction, civil engineering, building services and infrastructure employers, including the client bodies on the major programmes. A role is counted once, on the day it is first seen, and is held as open until the sweep stops seeing it. Associate, assistant and deputy director titles are excluded, as are non-executive seats.
02Which functions does the headline count?
Operations and delivery, commercial, pre-construction and work winning, technical and design, planning, and safety, quality and sustainability: the seats that run the work and win it. Finance, people and the support functions are real director seats and are counted beneath the headline rather than in it.
03How often is it updated?
The sweep runs daily and the page re-reads it several times a day. The weekly series starts on 17 September 2026, the day the baseline was set, so its first week is a part-week, and the monthly edition, with a like-for-like comparison against the month before, is published in the first week of each month from November 2026.
04Does an advertised role mean the seat is still open?
Not always. A role is held as open while the employer keeps advertising it, and taken out when the advert comes down, whether that is because the seat was filled, withdrawn or closed and re-advertised. The "open now" figures are a count of adverts, which is the best public proxy for seats, not a count of appointments.
05Why are the numbers smaller than the job boards suggest?
A job board counts every posting, including the same role syndicated to several sites, agency adverts for unnamed clients and manager-level titles. The index counts a named employer advertising a named director seat, once. That is a smaller number, and the one that describes the senior market.
06Can I use these figures?
Yes, with attribution to the Lechley Senior Hiring Index and a link to this page. For the underlying method, or a cut by sector or programme, email scott@lechley.com.
Start a conversation
If one of the employers on this page is yours and the seat is still open, or if you are weighing a move into one of them, I would welcome the chance to talk. No hard sell, no obligation.
What the seats on this page pay is in the salary guide. Who has just been appointed to them is on senior appointments in construction. How a retained search fills one is on the method page.
