INSIGHTS
The difference between urgent and important in a search
Every open role feels urgent to the person who has to explain, again, why it is still open. That pressure is real and legitimate. It is also a poor way to decide who gets hired.
Urgency is about time. Importance is about consequence. A role can be genuinely urgent — the team is understaffed, the work is piling up, the hiring manager is doing two jobs — without being the role where a wrong decision does the most damage. Conversely, a role can feel less pressing week to week while quietly being the one where getting the hire wrong will cost the company a year of rework, a client relationship, or a compliance exposure that no one notices until it is too late.
In Finance & Accounting searches, we see this most clearly around controller and finance-leadership hires. The pressure to fill the seat is constant — the close cycle does not wait, the board deck does not write itself. But a controller hire is also one of the highest-consequence decisions a growing company makes: it shapes what the numbers say, how defensible they are, and how much the CEO can trust them under scrutiny. Treating that search with the same urgency-first logic as a transactional accounting role tends to produce fast hires and slow regrets.
In Construction & Development, the pattern shows up around project and development leadership. A project manager gap is loud — subcontractors call, schedules slip, someone has to sign off on daily decisions. It is tempting to fill it with whoever is available soonest. But the cost of getting a development lead wrong is not measured in the weeks the seat sat empty; it is measured in the budget overruns, the schedule slips, and the client relationships that a poor leadership fit produces over the following two years.
None of this argues against speed. It argues for being honest about which kind of speed a role needs. Some searches genuinely reward moving fast: the risk of an empty seat outweighs the risk of a slightly imperfect fit, and a contract placement or an accelerated direct-hire process is the right call. Other searches reward patience even under pressure, because the downside of the wrong hire dwarfs the downside of a few more weeks of vacancy.
Our job in these conversations is often less about sourcing candidates and more about helping a client separate the two questions before the search begins: how urgent is this, really, and how important is it, really. The answer determines the shape of the search — timeline, evaluation depth, whether contract continuity buys the room needed for a more deliberate direct-hire process to run alongside it. Getting that framing right, before the first candidate conversation happens, is usually what separates a search that resolves the pressure from one that simply relocates it six months down the road.
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