An Inch Wide and a Mile Deep

There's a line about expertise I keep coming back to: be an inch wide and a mile deep. It's usually offered as advice to founders. Choose something narrow, then learn it better than anyone else. It also happens to be the best description I've found of how senior search should work in engineering and infrastructure, and it runs against the way most of my industry presents itself.

Width is easy to sell

Open most recruitment websites and you'll find a version of the same page: every sector you can name, every level from graduate to chair, permanent and interim, at home and abroad. Width sells because it sounds like safety. If a firm covers everything, surely it can cover you.

For a lot of hiring, width is the right answer. If a business needs forty site managers across a regional framework, a firm with a large database and a big resourcing team will get there faster than I would. I've called those firms the supermarkets of hiring before, and I don't mean it unkindly. A supermarket is exactly where you go for milk.

The trouble comes when the same model is pointed at a board appointment. Width gives you access to people who are looking for a move. At the top of engineering and infrastructure, the people a client most wants are rarely looking, and they aren't sitting in anyone's database waiting to be found.

What a mile down looks like

Thirty years in one part of the market gives you things no website can list.

It starts with reading a CV properly. "Led the delivery of" a major programme can mean the person ran it, or that they sat two layers below whoever did. On paper the two read the same. If you've spent years around the client and the delivery partners on that programme, you know which questions separate them, and you usually know somebody who was in the room.

Depth also means knowing the market while it moves: who has been passed over for the top job, or whose major contract is about to end and what that will do to the team around them. None of it is published. It comes from conversations held over years, most of which had nothing to do with a live assignment.

It's what lets you read a brief, too. In my last article I wrote about briefs that end up describing a unicorn, where every requirement is reasonable on its own and together they describe someone who doesn't exist. Knowing which requirements the role can live without comes from having watched people succeed and fail in that kind of job over a long period. A generalist can run the filters. It takes depth to tell the client which one is the horn.

The deepest part is trust. A senior leader who is content where they are will take a confidential call from someone they've known for fifteen years, and will usually ignore the same call from a stranger with a better-written job description.

Where our inch sits

Anyone who has looked at Imperium's company page will have an objection ready, so I'll deal with it. We list infrastructure, construction, energy, utilities, rail, transport, water and property among others, and on the face of it that doesn't look like an inch.

The inch is leadership of complex, capital-intensive delivery, and the sectors are where that work takes place. The major contractors and consultancies delivering rail programmes are, in large part, also delivering water and energy work, and senior people move between them because the job underneath is recognisably the same. It involves very large sums of money, long timescales, public scrutiny and a delivery chain that can fail at any link. A programme director on a major rail upgrade has far more in common with one running a water treatment programme than either has with a senior leader in retail or banking. When I wrote Roti. Kapra. Makaan., the point was that what a family needs and what a nation needs are one list at different scales. Our sector list works the same way.

Depth has a price

Depth takes years to build and it doesn't scale. A lean firm can only hold so many relationships at the level that counts, and that means saying no to work that falls outside them.

Clients pay part of the price too. A retained search with a specialist asks more of the client at the start, because the conversation about what the role actually needs is longer and less comfortable. That early conversation is where most of the value of depth is delivered, well before anyone is shortlisted.

How to test for it

Every firm describes itself as specialist, so the word on its own is worth very little. Four questions will tell you more. Ask who they would call first about your role, and why that person. Ask where your ideal candidate is most likely to be working today and what is happening inside those businesses. Ask what they would challenge in your brief. And ask how many of the people they'd approach they have spoken to in the past year about something other than a job.

A firm built for width will tend to answer with process. A firm with depth will answer with what it already knows about your market, and you'll usually hear the difference in the first meeting.

The load and the ground

I've spent most of my working life around engineers, so I'll borrow from them to finish. Where a structure is heavy and the ground near the surface can't carry it, the answer is often a piled foundation: slender columns taken down until they reach strata that can bear the load. A senior appointment on a major programme is that kind of load. The shallow part of the market has its uses, but the leaders able to carry that weight are usually much further down, and reaching them takes something narrow, driven deep, over a long time.

Ikram Rabbani is Founder and Executive Managing Director of Imperium Executive Search, a retained search firm specialising in senior and board-level appointments across engineering, infrastructure, construction and the built environment.