Why your commissioning engineer search is stalled

Three reasons most Cx searches drag past 90 days, and what changes when you treat the talent pool as closed instead of open.

A senior commissioning engineer search shouldn't take 90 days. When it does, the pattern is almost always the same.

1. You're treating the pool as open when it isn't.

A senior Cx engineer with data-center experience is one of maybe 300 people in North America. They don't post résumés on Indeed and they don't apply to job ads. Most of them are working, fully utilized, and the ones who aren't are typically inside an EPC firm where their next move is internal.

When your in-house TA team posts a Cx role to LinkedIn Jobs, the applicants are not the people who can do the work. They're the wrong-titled, wrong-experience adjacent candidates. The hiring manager screens 30, dislikes them all, and the search dies.

What changes: treat the pool as closed. Map it. Reach out directly. Stop assuming the right person is going to apply.

2. Your comp band is two years stale.

Cx engineer comp moved 40% in the last 24 months. If your band was set in 2024, it's not competitive in 2026. We see this every week, clients with a $145K band trying to fill a role that's now paying $190K + 15% bonus elsewhere.

What changes: benchmark before you post. We do this as part of every engagement, but you can pull a current band off comp data alone in 30 minutes if you know where to look.

3. The hiring manager hasn't decided what the bar is.

Three rounds in, the hiring manager is still rejecting candidates "for reasons", culture, fit, vibes. None of which were in the scorecard. Usually because there was no scorecard.

What changes: before sourcing, get the hiring manager to write down what success looks like in 12 months. Specific, measurable. Then build the scorecard backwards from there. If a candidate hits the scorecard and gets rejected, the scorecard was wrong, fix it, don't kill the candidate.

A stalled Cx search isn't a sourcing problem 90% of the time. It's one of these three. If yours is past 60 days and not closing, ping us, happy to look at it free of charge and tell you which one's the actual blocker.