Neeljym Search Group

06/05/2026

One thing commercial firms are starting to realize:

When experienced supers and PMs leave right now, a lot of them are not going to competitors.

They’re going to data center and mission-critical projects.

The compensation is higher, the backlog is stronger, and many of those projects are years deep already.

That’s a different kind of hiring competition than commercial contractors were dealing with five years ago.

06/05/2026

The Quiet Risk Inside Industrial Sales Organizations

The most dangerous sentence in industrial sales is probably this:

"Don’t worry. He’s been with us forever."

A lot of manufacturers hear that and assume stability.

Sometimes it means the company has tied years of customer trust, account history, and operational knowledge to one salesperson without realizing how exposed the territory has become.

Then the salesperson retires, or worse, a competitor hires them away.

That is usually when you discover the CRM never contained the real account strategy.

The salesperson did.

The veteran rep knows:

* who really influences decisions inside the plant
* which customers buy based on responsiveness instead of price
* which accounts are vulnerable to competitors
* which relationships matter during shutdowns, delays, or production problems

Most of that knowledge never fully makes it into the system because the territory has been running on experience and relationships for years.

The dangerous part is that most transitions look fine in the beginning. The handoff meeting goes well. The customer says all the right things. Revenue stays steady for a while.

Then the warning signs start to show up slowly.

Calls become less frequent. Quote activity softens.

Competitors suddenly get access to meetings they could never get before.

By the time you notice the revenue problem, you realize too late that the relationship problem started months earlier.

The manufacturers handling this best started planning long before retirement or resignation happened. They bring younger reps into customer relationships earlier.

They involve applications engineers and technical support teams in more account conversations. They make customer knowledge part of the company instead of leaving it tied to one individual territory manager.

That takes more effort upfront, but it protects revenue long-term.

A lot of manufacturers think they have a recruiting problem right now. Many have a succession and knowledge-transfer problem that recruiting alone will not solve.

06/04/2026

We’re seeing more commercial contractors lose candidates late in the hiring process right now.

Most are tied to data center and AI infrastructure projects pulling experienced talent out of the broader commercial market.

06/04/2026

06/03/2026

A lot of commercial contractors are running into the same issue right now.

Experienced supers and PMs are just harder to pull out of the market than they were a few years ago.

Data center work is a big reason why.

The compensation is strong, the backlog is huge, and experienced people know they have options right now.

06/02/2026

Data Centers Are Pulling Experienced Talent Out of Commercial Construction

Commercial contractors across the country are running into the same problem:

Experienced construction talent is getting harder to hire and harder to keep.

Not because construction is slowing down.

Because data center projects are pulling a large share of experienced field leadership out of the market.

Superintendents. Project managers. MEP coordinators. Commissioning professionals. Traveling leadership.

The people commercial contractors rely on to keep projects moving.

Many still treat this like a short-term recruiting issue.

It isn’t.

Data center construction has created compensation and hiring pressure most contractors haven’t had to compete with before.

Higher pay packages. Aggressive per diem. Faster advancement. Strong backlog. Constant recruiter activity.

Experienced supers and PMs are getting multiple calls every week.

Some drop out mid-interview. Others get pulled back with counteroffers from hyperscale and mission-critical work.

And even firms with strong retention are now competing in a tighter labor pool.

The pressure is spreading beyond data centers.

Healthcare, industrial, manufacturing, and large commercial projects are all competing for the same leadership talent.

This is no longer just a labor shortage.

It’s a leadership shortage.

Labor still exists.

What’s scarce are experienced people who can run complex jobs without schedule issues, coordination problems, or costly rework.

Firms adapting fastest are changing how they recruit, how quickly they hire, and how seriously they treat retention.

This market is unlikely to normalize soon.

AI infrastructure and data center expansion are still accelerating.

Competition for experienced construction leadership is increasing, not slowing down.

Those who recognize it early will have the advantage.

Those who don’t will keep wondering where the talent went.

05/29/2026

A lot of MGA hiring processes still evaluate underwriting talent like the job stops at risk selection.

It doesn’t.

Underwriters today are balancing broker relationships, portfolio performance, reinsurance pressure, profitability, growth expectations, and operational speed all at once.

Some people adapt well to that environment.

Some don’t.

The market changed faster than a lot of hiring models did.

05/29/2026

MGA Hiring Models Are Outdated

Most MGA underwriting hiring models are still built around a much simpler insurance market.

A lot of firms still hire based on deep technical underwriting experience inside one lane and assume that automatically translates into performance inside a modern MGA.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it absolutely doesn’t.

The underwriters who succeed today are often dealing with far more than risk selection. They are balancing reinsurance expectations, broker relationships, portfolio volatility, delegated authority pressure, growth targets, and operational speed all at once.

That environment exposes a different set of strengths.

We’ve seen plenty of technically strong underwriters struggle once the pace, complexity, and moving pieces start increasing inside MGA environments.

We’ve also seen less traditional profiles perform extremely well because they understand how underwriting decisions impact distribution, capacity relationships, profitability, and the broader portfolio over time.

That’s the part hiring models still seem to miss.

The industry keeps calling this a talent shortage, but a lot of it looks more like a definition problem.

Many firms are still trying to hire for a version of underwriting that existed when markets were more stable and underwriting decisions were less connected to everything happening around them.

The market changed faster than the hiring models did.