Market and salary findings, hiring and recruitment trends, leadership, and career strategy — for mid-market engineering, construction, and technology companies across Canada and the USA, and for the professionals they compete to hire. Grounded in the searches we run and the RIQIndex™ Recruitment Health Index behind them.
Recruitment fails in nine distinct ways, and almost nobody inside a business sees more than two or three of them at once. What each one costs, why several of them cause each other, and how to measure all nine at once.
None of this is repackaged from someone else’s report. It is what we see: compensation moving inside live searches months before any survey records it, why strong candidates turn offers down in their own words, what leadership teams tell us behind closed doors, and where new technology is quietly rewriting what a role requires.
Plus the practical end — how to run a search, structure an offer, and hire against conditions that no longer behave the way they used to. For hiring leaders and the specialists they compete for. Short, occasional, no filler.
Everything here also runs on LinkedIn and X — the same intelligence, in your feed.
The premium a good engineer needs before they will leave a job they are not unhappy in — measured across 47 PHM placements rather than survey responses. Sixteen percent blended, and considerably more in some sectors than others.
Contingency, retained and contract fee ranges — what the percentage is actually calculated on, what a guarantee really covers, and the six questions to ask before you sign.
AI didn’t make hiring cheaper — it made judgement scarce. How AI-generated resumes, fake candidates, and new rules are quietly raising the true cost of a hire.
AI is built to be error-tolerant. People only grow by getting it wrong. Why that difference is exactly what hiring still needs a human for — no matter how intelligent the tools become.
Not the disciplines with the most postings — the ones where postings do not work. Structural, electrical, civil, mechanical and environmental, and why each is short.
What a good recruiter should ask you on a first call, and the questions worth asking them before your name goes anywhere.
Headline, software, location, credentials and the recruiters-only open-to-work setting — what changes which searches you appear in.
RIQIndex™ gives you a Recruitment Health Score — no pass, no fail — measuring where your recruitment stands. We have yet to meet another search firm that measures the problem before solving it — and PHM is one of the ways to raise that score.
When you’re ready to turn intelligence into the right hire, we’re here — engineering, construction, and technology, across Canada and the USA.