PHM Search is a founder-led engineering recruitment agency for mid-market companies across Canada and the USA, and into construction and technology too. Engineering recruiters, a staffing agency, headhunters — we have been called all three. The work is closer to executive search: we are hired to solve a problem, not to fill a requisition.
Headquartered in London, Ontario — recruiting into Vancouver and Victoria, Calgary and Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina and Winnipeg, Toronto, Ontario, Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax — and across the United States.
Across more than 20,000 candidate interviews and 300+ organizations, this kept proving true: recruitment quietly decides whether a company executes its plan — and almost none of it was being measured. So we built the tool to do just that, and we still do the hardest part of the fixing: executive search and specialist recruitment for employers.
Retention is a three-year rolling average, measured at 36 months, across all senior-level placements. Fill rate is on exclusive contingency searches.
It isn’t a tagline we landed on. It’s the whole business, compressed into three words.
It starts with us — the calls made, the market mapped, the right people found who were never on a list. Doing exactly that, since 2000.
Two meanings, deliberately. To get talent is to reach them — the senior people who aren’t looking. And to get talent is to understand them — what actually makes someone right for the work.
And it runs both ways: the companies who need talent to execute, and the professionals who are it. We sit between the two — and get both.
First reading, a promise. Second, the method.
There is a belief taking hold that AI will make recruitment obsolete. We do not share it. AI is built to be error-tolerant; people learn only through their own mistakes, and that is where humility, honesty and a real will to grow come from.
Read what we believe, in full →
I started PHM in 2000 on one conviction: hiring is where strategy is decided, and recruitment is how it gets executed. Twenty-six years and 20,000 interviews later, I’m more certain of that than ever — and it’s why we built a way to measure it. If you’re weighing a hire that matters, I’d like to hear about it.
Built for the 50–1,500+ person company, where a leadership hire reaches every corner of it — not the enterprise mandates the global firms are structured to chase.
Real technical fluency in the sectors we cover. We understand the roles we place, and the work they’ll be accountable for.
A vacancy is rarely the whole story. RIQIndex™ exists because the symptoms surface in the role you are trying to fill, the cause sits somewhere else, and nobody had been measuring either.
A career of leadership placement behind every search, personally accountable — rare depth, and a single point of ownership from intake to start date and beyond.
We’re always glad to meet talent acquisition and sourcing consultants who want to go deep in engineering, construction and technology recruitment — remote-first, with genuine mentorship and a specialist firm behind you.
We have yet to meet another search firm that measures the problem before solving it.
A senior role sitting open is the costliest thing in hiring, and it is rarely the only thing going wrong. Most mid-market companies cannot say which part of their recruitment is losing them money — so the open seat gets treated as the problem, when it is usually the symptom that finally cost enough to notice. RIQIndex scores nine markers of recruitment health — from time to hire and candidate loss to compensation pressure — and tells you which gap is the expensive one.
Free for the founding cohort, confidential, and the report is yours to keep — whether or not we ever work together.
Mike Pak, who founded the firm and still does the work himself. He is not managing a team of recruiters or signing off on other people’s shortlists — every PHM search is run by the founder, first conversation to start date. That puts a hard limit on how many the firm can carry at once, which is the point rather than the drawback.
London, Ontario, and we recruit right across Canada and into the United States. Senior search is national work — a shortlist worth having is rarely drawn from one city — so we run mandates wherever the discipline takes us. There is a market page for Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, Halifax, Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon and Winnipeg.
Since 2000. The number that counts is not the years on the shingle, though — it is that a senior engineer who is not looking still takes the call. That comes from staying in the same sectors long enough for the introductions to compound, and it is not something a firm can buy or hire in.
Because it is where a single hire still moves the whole business, and where the founder can stay on every search. Roughly 50 to 1,500 people: big enough that the role matters, small enough that you talk to the person running it rather than being assigned a team. Above that range you are usually better served by a firm built for volume mandates, and we will tell you so rather than take the work.
No. We have never paid for a job posting. Most recruitment agencies work the other way round — the role goes onto the boards, applications come back, and the agency sorts them. That only reaches people who were already looking, which is the group a company can find without paying a fee. The engineering and construction jobs we fill are filled by direct approach.
Yes — quietly and selectively. We would rather add one person who wants to own a sector than five working to a desk quota. If that is the kind of move you are weighing, say so when you get in touch.
An advisory conversation about the hire ahead of you — senior or specialist — and where the right person is likely to come from. Not a commitment.