Built sector recruitment in the United Kingdom still leans on a habit that does not serve the people who actually run sites, contracts and buildings. A vacancy appears. A desk somewhere turns a job description into a Boolean string. Fifty CVs arrive. A hiring manager who already has a live programme then spends evenings discarding people who do not hold the ticket, cannot work the hours, or have never run the type of job that was described. That is volume. It is not a search.
VS Recruitment works the other way. Viktorija Sherriff headhunts. She opens a named search for a £450 engagement fee and works her own network — construction, facilities, site and project management, property. She does not scrape job boards. She does not spray CVs because a filter said a headline matched. It is slower than a same-day longlist. It is also how you avoid interviewing people who were never going to be allowed on site.
Why construction recruitment keeps wasting time
Construction and facilities are unforgiving of fiction. A project manager who cannot sit in a progress meeting without someone translating is not a “development opportunity”. A facilities lead who has run a helpdesk and now wants a multi-site contract is not interchangeable with someone who has already held the P&L. The built sector knows this. Recruitment processes often pretend otherwise, because it is easier to send volume than to pick up the telephone to someone you already know.
The pain is familiar. You need a site manager who will still be there at the back end of a programme, not a contractor shopping three roles. You need a facilities director who understands a client’s building as an operating asset. You need a property operations hire who can talk to both the board and the night porter. Those people are usually in post. They are not refreshing a job board at lunchtime. They move when someone they trust describes a brief that is real.
Credentials that actually matter on site
If the role needs a CSCS card, that is not a keyword — it is a condition of being on site. If you are hiring a manager who claims to run live works, SMSTS is the sort of ticket you check rather than admire on a PDF. None of this is a substitute for judgement. It is the floor.
Health and safety duties on a construction project sit with the client and the other dutyholders. They are not outsourced to a recruiter. The Health and Safety Executive publishes the construction pages employers actually use, including the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015. See the HSE construction guidance and the CDM 2015 text on legislation.gov.uk. VS Recruitment will not pretend to be your CDM adviser. What Viktorija will do is refuse to treat a missing ticket as a paperwork detail to be “picked up later”.
Every UK employer also has to check that a successful applicant has the right to work. That duty is the employer’s. The process is on GOV.UK: check a job applicant’s right to work. A headhunter who has been in this market for a decade does not treat that as a surprise at offer stage.
Facilities and property are not a softer version of construction
Facilities management hiring has its own version of the same problem. The title “facilities manager” covers everything from a single building supervisor to a director running a national contract. Volume agencies flatten that. They send you people who have supervised a helpdesk and people who have held a hard-FM contract as if those were neighbouring rungs on one ladder. Property operations is similar: an asset that must stay open, safe and commercially useful is not a spreadsheet of reactive tickets.
The people who can run that work are usually already doing it for someone else. Construction recruitment language (“we have ten candidates”) is the wrong promise. You need one or two people who will still make sense after the first winter, the first audit, the first client meeting that goes badly.
What a network-only search is for
A network is not a secret list of unemployed people. It is a set of relationships built over a decade in the built sector, plus the newer digital and AI work Viktorija now takes on. When a search opens, she calls people she can already reach. She describes the brief without turning it into an advertisement. She listens for the person who is actually movable, not the person who is always “open to opportunities” because they are always on the market.
That is why the fee is upfront and modest. £450 is not a placement invoice. It is the cost of starting a proper search instead of a broadcast. If the brief is not a fit — wrong sector, a role she cannot honestly reach, a process that only wants volume — she will say so before anyone pays.
If you are hiring in construction, FM, site or project management, or property, and you are tired of sorting other people’s databases, that is the conversation. Start a search with a plain note: the role, the site or contract, and what “good” looks like on a Tuesday. Built sector recruitment is not a numbers game. It is a named search, done by someone who has sat on this side of the industry long enough to know the difference.