Author: Sarah Lucas

The Title Isn’t The Benchmark Anymore. The Job Is.

Written by Sarah Lucas on August 27, 2026. Posted in News & Insights.

August 27th, 2026

The landscape has changed. Compensation is only one visible symptom of a deeper shift in the building materials leadership market.

$850,000 isn’t the story. The job behind the $850,000 is.

A recent conversation with Craig Webb of Webb Analytics put a number in front of us that was difficult to ignore.

QXO’s incoming President and Chief Operating Officer, Ken West, will receive an annual base salary of $850,000. His target annual bonus is equal to 125 percent of that salary. Before long-term equity enters the equation, the target cash compensation alone approaches $2 million annually. QXO’s filing also includes substantial long-term and new-hire equity awards.

It is an extraordinary compensation package.

But the more interesting story is not the number.

It is the job behind the number.

QXO is not simply filling another President position in the building materials industry. Through the acquisitions of Beacon, Kodiak Building Partners and TopBuild, the company says it has assembled a platform representing approximately $18 billion in combined annual revenue, 28,000 employees and 1,150 locations. Its stated goal is to reach $50 billion in annual revenue within the decade through acquisitions and organic growth.

That changes the conversation about executive compensation because it changes the scale of executive responsibility.

For generations, titles in the building materials industry told us quite a bit about the position behind the office door.

President General Manager Vice President of Sales Regional Manager

Those titles still exist. What has changed is how little the title alone may tell us about the job.

A General Manager may oversee a single location and a relatively contained P&L. Another General Manager may oversee several locations, hundreds of employees, multiple markets and a dramatically larger financial responsibility.

A President may lead a multigenerational family business with deep roots in a particular region. Another may be helping lead a national organization with tens of thousands of employees through acquisitions, integrations, technology transformation and an aggressive growth strategy.

The title can be identical.

The job is not.

And increasingly, neither is the compensation.

That raises a larger question for an industry undergoing significant consolidation.

The Question

Will corporate-scale compensation begin to have a trickle-down effect on the rest of the building materials talent market?

Not because every family-owned business suddenly needs to compete with an $850,000 base salary. That would be an absurd comparison for most organizations.

The effect may be much more subtle.

As larger organizations continue acquiring businesses and expanding their reach, they create more leadership positions carrying broader responsibility, larger P&Ls, greater geographic scope and more sophisticated incentive structures.

That expands the opportunity set available to the industry’s strongest leaders.

A President at an independent company may be recruited for a divisional position within a much larger organization. A General Manager may suddenly have access to regional leadership. A successful VP of Sales may be presented with responsibility for a dramatically larger market and a compensation structure that reflects it.

When that happens often enough, compensation pressure does not remain confined to the largest corporations.

It begins moving through the talent market.

The question facing family-owned and independent businesses therefore may not be, “Can we match what QXO is paying?”

For most, that is the wrong benchmark.

The better question is:

The Better Benchmark

What is the job we are actually asking this person to do, and what is that responsibility worth in today’s market?

That distinction matters.

If a business is asking its next President to oversee multiple locations, modernize operations, build a leadership team, protect decades of customer relationships, develop a succession strategy, integrate new technology and carry complete financial responsibility for the organization, benchmarking that position against what the title earned ten years ago may no longer make sense.

The scope has changed.

The market around the role has changed.

And the opportunities available to the person qualified to fill it have changed as well.

This does not mean compensation becomes the only deciding factor.

Family-owned companies still possess advantages that large corporate organizations may have difficulty replicating.

A strong executive may value the ability to directly influence the future of a company. They may value access to ownership, faster decision-making, meaningful authority, community roots, culture, long-standing customer relationships or the opportunity to build something that carries a name and reputation beyond a quarterly earnings report.

Those things matter.

But they have to be real.

If an independent company cannot compete dollar for dollar with a corporate opportunity, then the authority, autonomy, influence and culture it presents to a candidate become even more important.

That connects directly to another challenge we continue to see in succession planning.

You cannot ask someone to accept less financial upside in exchange for the opportunity to lead and then withhold the authority required to actually lead.

At that point, the organization has surrendered both sides of the value proposition.

This is why compensation benchmarking based primarily on title is becoming increasingly dangerous.

The name on the door may be the same.

The scope behind it may have changed completely.

And consolidation is accelerating that change.

QXO describes the building products market as an $800 billion industry and has openly stated its intention to reach $50 billion in annual revenue within a decade. Its acquisitions of Beacon, Kodiak Building Partners and TopBuild further expand the scale and breadth of the organization across insulation, roofing, waterproofing, lumber and building materials.

Whether other companies pursue that same scale is almost beside the point.

The presence of organizations operating at that scale changes the environment in which everyone else competes for talent.

The building materials industry has historically been defined in large part by independent, regional and generational ownership. That identity is not disappearing overnight, nor should anyone assume that consolidation eliminates the competitive strength of those businesses.

But the landscape is changing.

And as the industry becomes increasingly influenced by large, acquisition-driven organizations, family-owned businesses may have to think differently about what it takes to attract and retain exceptional leadership.

Not necessarily by becoming corporations themselves.

Not necessarily by matching every compensation package.

But by understanding what the position they are offering is actually worth, what competing opportunities look like, and why an exceptional leader should choose theirs.

···

Because the title is no longer the benchmark.

The job is.

With Thanks

Our thanks to Craig Webb of Webb Analytics for bringing the QXO executive compensation filing to our attention and, more importantly, for continuing to challenge the industry to look beyond the headline numbers at what they mean. Craig will also be joining the SnapDragon podcast as a special guest, where we will continue conversations around consolidation, ownership, leadership and the forces reshaping the building materials industry.

Sources

QXO, Inc. Form 8-K, August 24, 2026; QXO investor materials, July 2026; QXO public acquisition and company materials.

The Offer Conversation Is the Final Interview

Written by Sarah Lucas on August 20, 2026. Posted in News & Insights.

August 20th, 2026

The offer letter is not the finish line of the hiring process. It is the beginning of a candidate’s final decision.

Most organizations invest weeks, sometimes months, identifying the right hire. Job descriptions are refined. Recruiters source passive talent. Multiple interviews are conducted. Reference checks are completed. Compensation is approved. Calendars are coordinated across departments.

Then, after all of that effort, many companies reduce the most critical stage of the hiring process to a single email with a PDF attachment. The offer is sent. The candidate is told to let us know what they think. And everyone waits.

Ironically, the stage that often receives the least strategic attention carries the greatest risk. That is where many hiring teams lose momentum, not because the offer is weak, but because the moment is treated as paperwork instead of persuasion, alignment, and trust building.

According to Talent Board’s 2024 Candidate Experience Benchmark Research, communication quality remains one of the strongest drivers of candidate satisfaction throughout the hiring process. Candidates consistently report that responsiveness, transparency, and meaningful communication influence not only whether they accept an offer, but also how they perceive the employer long before their first day on the job.

The offer conversation is not an administrative step. It is the final interview.

01 · The Wider LensBeyond compensation

When hiring managers think about offer acceptance, compensation is usually the first variable discussed. And compensation certainly matters, to an extent.

Decades of organizational research suggest candidates evaluate opportunities through a much wider lens. In their landmark meta-analysis published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Chapman, Uggerslev, Carroll, Piasentin, and Jones found that candidates evaluate organizations based on multiple factors, including organizational reputation, recruiter interactions, leadership, perceived fit, career growth, and the overall hiring experience, not compensation alone.

Research by Cable and Judge demonstrated that perceived organizational fit plays a significant role in job choice decisions. Candidates are asking themselves a fundamental question:

Can I see myself succeeding here?

Salary helps answer one question. Conversation answers dozens more.

02 · Facts vs. ConfidenceWhy the conversation matters

A written offer communicates facts. A conversation communicates confidence. Before candidates review salary, bonus, benefits, or relocation assistance, they want to understand something much more important: why me?

The strongest hiring leaders answer that question before discussing compensation. They explain why the candidate stood out. They describe the impact they expect the individual to make. They reinforce the opportunities that lie ahead. Only then do they discuss the offer itself.

Research in behavioral economics helps explain why this sequence matters. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work on framing demonstrated that people evaluate identical information differently depending on the context in which it is presented.

A salary figure viewed in isolation becomes something to compare. The same salary discussed within the context of career growth, leadership confidence, and long-term opportunity becomes part of a much larger decision. The offer has not changed. The context has.

A written offer communicates facts. A conversation communicates confidence.

03 · The Real QuestionEvery hiring process ends with one question

Long before candidates ask themselves whether the salary is competitive, they are asking a much more personal question:

Do I believe this is the right move?

That question rarely gets answered in an offer letter. It gets answered during conversation. One of the greatest advantages of a verbal offer is the opportunity to uncover uncertainty before it becomes hesitation. Experienced recruiters and hiring leaders often ask questions such as these:

Questions That Discover, Not Persuade

How are you feeling about everything we have discussed?

Is there anything that would prevent you from accepting if we move forward?

What concerns do you still have?

These questions are not designed to persuade. They are designed to discover. Many declined offers have little to do with compensation. Concerns often center around reporting relationships, career trajectory, relocation, work-life balance, family considerations, start dates, or the inevitable counteroffer from a current employer. Those concerns are rarely cleared up over email.

04 · The Fragile WindowThe highest-risk moment in hiring

The period between extending an offer and receiving an acceptance is often the most fragile point in the hiring process. Candidates seek advice from spouses, mentors, colleagues, and friends. Current employers begin preparing counteroffers. Questions that seemed insignificant during interviews suddenly become major decision points.

Research published in the Academy of Management Annals emphasizes that candidate experience is cumulative. Every interaction shapes how candidates evaluate an employer, and the offer stage is the moment when that entire experience is tested.

Organizations that remain engaged during this period, through thoughtful and transparent conversation, help reduce uncertainty before competing narratives take hold.

05 · Where A Partner Earns ItThe recruiter’s value does not end with the search

One of the most overlooked responsibilities of an executive recruiter begins after the interviews are complete.

The best recruiters do not simply communicate compensation. They facilitate alignment. They identify concerns before they become declined offers. They help hiring managers understand what truly motivates candidates. They prepare candidates for one of the most significant career decisions they will make.

In many searches, the offer conversation is just as valuable as sourcing the candidate.

The offer conversation is where a search is won or lost. Managing that final window is where a real search partner earns the engagement.

Why Work With SnapDragon

The SnapDragon Standard

We don’t send offers hoping they work. We send offers knowing how they will land.

Leadership Architecture · Precision Search · Since 2004

Private Equity · Manufacturing · Distribution · Retail

www.snapdragonassociates.com

References

Cable, D. M., and Judge, T. A. (1996). Person-Organization Fit, Job Choice Decisions, and Organizational Entry. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 67(3), 294 to 311.

Chapman, D. S., Uggerslev, K. L., Carroll, S. A., Piasentin, K. A., and Jones, D. A. (2005). Applicant Attraction to Organizations and Job Choice: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Correlates of Recruiting Outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(5), 928 to 944.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Kahneman, D., and Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263 to 291.

Society for Human Resource Management. (2024). Candidate Experience and Communication in Hiring.

Talent Board. (2024). Candidate Experience Benchmark Research (CandE Benchmark Research).

Academy of Management Annals. (2023). The Collective Candidate Experience: Theory and Business Unit Consequences.

The Finance Seat is Now the Growth Seat

Written by Sarah Lucas on August 13, 2026. Posted in News & Insights.

August 13th, 2026

The Finance Market

Jared Abbott

Operations Manager, Executive Finance & Accounting Recruiter

Finance leaders in the building materials industry have stopped handing the numbers to decision-makers. They are the decision-makers now, and a growing number of them are running the company outright. Here is what that shift is doing to succession, candidate evaluation, and how offers need to be built.

The most important shift in the finance market right now is not a salary band. It is a change in who holds the pen. Finance leaders are no longer the people who produce the numbers and pass them upward for executive leadership to make the call. They are the ones pushing initiatives forward, thinking strategically, and driving the business. And I am watching a growing number of senior finance leaders move into positions where they run the company holistically rather than the finance function alone.

That is not a soft observation about titles. It changes what a finance search has to identify, what a succession plan has to build, and what an offer has to be structured around. The engine underneath all of it is movement: expansion, mergers and acquisitions, and strategic growth happening across this industry at the same time.

The Corner OfficeFinance is now a path to the top, not a terminal track

The CFO seat is no longer the top of a finance career. It is a step inside it. I am seeing senior finance leaders move out of the finance chair and into President seats, CEO seats, and board seats, where the decisions get made for the entire company. The distinction matters. These are not finance executives being handed a broader title as a courtesy. They are finance executives being handed the whole organization because financial discipline is what the business decided it needed at the helm.

A recent President search in the Midwest ran exactly this way. The company had internal candidates available and went outside anyway. What they wanted was someone with a diverse portfolio and a finance background: the knowledge base, the understanding, and the credibility that came with it. The decision was financially driven. This company wanted to take itself to the next level, and what they realized was that they needed a finance leader at the helm to run all facets of the organization.

If you are building a leadership bench, that search is worth sitting with. Those internal candidates were not passed over on performance. They were passed over because the profile the business needed for its next chapter had not been developed inside the building.

SuccessionFP&A is where the bench is thinnest, and the need is largest

We talk constantly in this industry about bench strength and succession planning. When I apply that to the finance space, one function comes up before any other, and it is financial planning and analysis.

My reasoning comes from looking at who is actually holding the senior seats. The CFOs, the VPs of finance, and the executives running finance departments today came up through the ranks on the FP&A side more than anything else. That is the track that produces the strategic thinker this market is paying for. It is also the track most companies have underbuilt, and the gap is widening, because the industry now needs that specific expertise in a way it did not in the past.

Bench strength is a phrase everyone uses. In finance, it has a specific address, and the address is FP&A.

The path forward is not complicated, but it does require a decision. Treat FP&A as a leadership track rather than a reporting function. Build the layer two levels below the CFO now, while there is still time to develop it. A company that waits until the CFO seat opens is not running succession. It is running a search under pressure, and pressure is expensive.

The Blended RoleThe finance and operations line has stopped being a line

Almost none of what the CFO role actually looks like today inside building materials companies lives on the balance sheet. The modern CFOs I work with are helping their organizations streamline operations, improve cash flow, and use technology to strengthen decision-making. They are building systems and installing accountability.

But the part I would point to as the real engine is the collaboration between finance and operations. That combined knowledge, and the ability to bring different departments and different aspects of the company together, is what drives growth forward. Operational excellence in this context is not a term for a slide. It is a working requirement of the finance leadership role.

Which means a finance search that screens only for financial acumen is screening for half the job. A candidate who can close the books cleanly and cannot work across the operations floor is not a candidate for this version of the role.

Reading CandidatesThe capability that decides finance searches is not on the resume

The thing that sticks out to me whenever I speak with a candidate, and it never shows up on a resume, is the way they can articulate what they do.

The old assumption was that you choose between the outgoing communicator and the analytical mind, that you rarely get both in the same person. What I am actually seeing in the best candidates in the market is that they can speak to their finance experience as though they are talking to someone who is not a finance person. And that matters more than it used to, because of how much cross-collaboration these roles now carry with other departments. Those departments do not speak finance language, and someone has to translate.

Technical accuracy gets a candidate to the interview. Translation gets them the seat.

This is exactly the kind of variable a credential screen cannot capture, and it is why SPACE evaluates candidates beyond the credential. Two candidates can present identical technical backgrounds and land in completely different places on the one dimension that determines whether they succeed inside a cross-functional executive team.

Candidate SignalAI adoption tells me something about initiative

I had a conversation recently with a candidate about exactly this: how finance and accounting executives integrate AI-driven systems into their work without feeling that their job security is under threat. My answer is the same one I would give anyone. The smartest ones, and the ones making the biggest impact, are using the technology to their own advantage to make their work more effective and more efficient.

The second half of what I am seeing is the more useful part for anyone hiring. Candidates are going out and earning additional certifications in AI and technology-enhanced software platforms on their own time, outside their profession and outside their full-time job, specifically to make themselves more marketable and more valuable.

A candidate who spent their own time and money building technology capability is telling you how they will operate once hired. That signal is available in the interview, if you ask for it. So ask for it directly. Not whether a candidate is comfortable with technology, because everyone answers yes to that. Ask what they went and learned on their own initiative in the last eighteen months, and what it changed about how they work.

CompensationThe offer is being won on structure, not on base

It is a competitive market. That is the first thing I say when a client asks me about compensation for finance leadership right now.

I have had conversations this week with senior finance leaders and executives who are open to a discreet, confidential conversation, and who expect any package to align with where they are in their career and what they have actually accomplished. What I am seeing on the company side is a structure built on considerably more than base salary. It is incentive-laden and bonus-driven, tied to specific KPI metrics on personal performance and on company performance together.

The logic behind that is sound. Companies want these leaders driving growth, and they want them to benefit when the company benefits. If revenue and EBITDA grow, the finance leader has done the job, and the compensation should reflect it.

Base salary alone is no longer a competitive offer at this level.

If a client is constrained on base, that is workable, and I will say so directly. But it is only workable if the package carries a real performance-linked component and a defined review point. An offer that is thin on base and vague on upside does not read as competitive to a senior finance leader. It reads as unserious, and the candidate will treat it accordingly.

The SpecExperience has moved ahead of certification

I want to close on something we do not talk about enough, because it runs against what a lot of job specifications still assume.

Certifications are valuable assets for individual candidates, and I would not tell anyone to skip one. But I am finding fewer clients and fewer companies looking for people who come with specific certifications, and less of a need for them overall. What has taken their place is experience. The proven ability to succeed across different roles and to move up through the finance organization now carries more weight than a specific certification at the end of a name.

The practical consequence is worth acting on before your next search opens. A certification requirement your team no longer genuinely cares about is a filter, and every filter removes qualified candidates from a slate. Write the specification against what the role actually requires, not against what the previous version of the posting said.

Where We Come InEvery finance search is built around what the business is becoming

We do not screen against what the job description says today. Every finance search we run is built around what the business is trying to become. That means a defined process, a structured evaluation through SPACE, and a compensation conversation that happens before the offer rather than after it.

If you are building a finance leadership team into a growth plan, an acquisition, or a succession event, we should be aligned on the market before the search opens.

Start the Conversation

Jared Abbott

Operations Manager, Executive Finance & Accounting Recruiter

(603) 323-0977 · jared@snapdragonassociates.com

We ran this exact search for a company that went outside to put a finance leader over the whole business. See how these searches land before you open yours.

See The Case Studies

The SnapDragon Standard

We don’t send offers hoping they work. We send offers knowing how they will land.

Leadership Architecture · Precision Search · Since 2004

Private Equity · Manufacturing · Distribution · Retail

www.snapdragonassociates.com

The Degree Requirement is Disappearing. What Replaces It Decides Everything

Written by Sarah Lucas on August 6, 2026. Posted in News & Insights.

August 6th, 2026

We have been hearing the same thing from a lot of our hiring managers lately: the four-year degree is coming off the requirements list. Clients who used to treat a bachelor’s as non-negotiable now care far more about who has actually run the plant, carried the number, or built the team than about where someone went to school.

We are seeing it across several of our searches right now, and the data backs up what we are hearing in these conversations.

The Client SignalWhy our clients are dropping it

When we ask why, the answer is almost always some version of the same thing. Finding the right person matters more than checking the credential box. More than one client has told us their strongest operator would have been screened out by their own job posting, and in a market this tight, they cannot afford to lose good people to a line on a form.

Others have simply stopped seeing the connection between a degree earned years ago and how someone runs a shift, a branch, or a number today. What they want from us now is proof of performance, not proof of enrollment. The wider market is moving the same direction.

The DataThe shift is real, and the math is simple

The 2026 numbers show it. Seventy percent of employers now say they hire on skills, up from 65 percent a year ago, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. The old shortcuts are fading with it. In 2019, nearly 73 percent of employers screened candidates on GPA. This year only 42 percent still do.

The logic is hard to argue with. Roughly 62 percent of American adults do not hold a bachelor’s degree, so every unnecessary degree filter quietly removes most of the market before the first conversation.

70%

Of employers now hire on skills, up from 65 percent a year ago. GPA screening has fallen from nearly 73 percent in 2019 to 42 percent today. The shortcut is disappearing across the market, not just on our searches.

The Reality CheckWhat we tell clients before they celebrate

Here is the part we make sure our clients hear. Taking the line off the posting is the easy part. Harvard Business School, working with the Burning Glass Institute, looked at what actually happened after companies dropped the requirement. On paper it looked like a movement. In practice, removing the line raised non-degree hires by only about 3.5 percentage points, and across the wider market fewer than 1 in 700 hires were affected. The same research found that 45 percent of the companies that publicly dropped the requirement did so in name only.

We see exactly why. The requirement leaves the job posting, but the old instinct stays in the room. The Indeed Hiring Lab reported late in 2025 that the share of job postings asking for a bachelor’s degree has been climbing back up since early 2024, even as the skills-first conversation gets louder. Hiring teams keep screening for the credential they said they would stop screening for, because nothing was built to replace it.

1 in 700

Hires actually affected after companies dropped the degree requirement, with the change lifting non-degree hires only about 3.5 points. 45 percent of the companies that publicly dropped it did so in name only.

What WorksWhat the clients who get results do differently

The clients who get real change from this do one thing differently. They do not just delete a line. They put a real way to read people in its place. The research shows the payoff. At companies leading skills-based hiring, non-degree hires stay longer, with retention running 10 percentage points higher, and non-degree workers who moved into roles that used to require a degree earned 25 percent more on average.

That matches what we watch happen in our own searches.

The credential was never the thing that predicted performance. It was a stand-in for it. Take the stand-in away and you need a sharper read on the real thing, which is the work we do on every search through our SPACE framework.

The Leadership StakesFor the leaders we search for, the stakes are higher

For the leadership roles we work on, this matters more, not less. Our clients in building materials, manufacturing, and distribution are staring at a thinning bench. Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute project the sector will need 3.8 million workers through 2033, with close to 1.9 million roles at risk of going unfilled, and the pressure sits heaviest at the top as the plant managers, operations executives, and engineering leaders we all rely on retire faster than the pipeline replaces them.

1.9M

Roles at risk of going unfilled by 2033, inside a projected need for 3.8 million workers. The pressure sits heaviest at the top, where the leaders companies rely on are retiring faster than the pipeline replaces them.

When a candidate’s degree is three decades behind them, it tells us almost nothing about how they will run a region or a P&L next quarter. What they have actually built tells us everything.

Where We Come InWidening the pool is the easy part

So when a client tells us they are ready to drop the degree requirement, our answer is the same every time. Good. Now let us make sure you can read the people who walk through the door without it. That is the part we own. We evaluate every candidate on proven performance, sector depth, and fit, then position each one so you know how they will land before the offer goes out.

Taking a line off a posting widens the pool. Knowing exactly who to trust in that pool is what puts the right leader in the role and keeps them there.

Drop the degree line, and the read on the candidate becomes everything. That read is the search itself, and it is what we do.

See How We Search

The SnapDragon Standard

We don’t send offers hoping they work. We send offers knowing how they will land.

Leadership Architecture · Precision Search · Since 2004

Private Equity · Manufacturing · Distribution · Retail

www.snapdragonassociates.com

Sources

National Association of Colleges and Employers, Job Outlook 2026. Skills-based hiring at 70 percent, up from 65 percent; GPA screening down from 73 percent in 2019 to 42 percent in 2026. naceweb.org/job-market/trends-and-predictions/employer-use-of-skills-based-hiring-practices-grows

Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute, Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice. 3.5-point lift, fewer than 1 in 700 hires, 45 percent in name only, retention and salary findings. hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work

Indeed Hiring Lab. Share of postings requiring a bachelor’s degree climbing since early 2024. Reported November 2025.

Deel and Burning Glass analysis. Roughly 62 percent of U.S. adults hold no bachelor’s degree. deel.com/deel-works/skills-first-hiring-degree-requirements

Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute talent study. 3.8 million workers needed through 2033, roughly 1.9 million roles at risk.

The Market Pays for Margin, Not Volume

Written by Sarah Lucas on July 30, 2026. Posted in News & Insights.

July 30th, 2026

Five things moved building materials hiring this month. June jobs came in soft, the housing rebound was almost entirely multifamily, and the searches that cleared fastest all pointed at the same profile. Here is July, and what it changes about who you hire.

Labor MarketJune hiring missed, and nobody is moving

Employers added 57,000 jobs in June against a consensus near 115,000, and April and May were revised down by a combined 74,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unemployment fell to 4.2 percent, but the move came from people leaving the labor force rather than getting hired. Participation dropped to 61.5 percent, the lowest since March 2021.

The May Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey said the same thing another way. Openings held at 7.6 million and the quits rate stayed at 1.9 percent, at or below 2 percent for close to a year now. Openings exist. Movement does not.

57K

Jobs added in June against a consensus near 115,000, with April and May revised down a combined 74,000. Every one of those numbers describes a labor market. None describes the leader who has to run a building materials business inside it.

Housing & MaterialsThe housing rebound is multifamily, not single-family

June housing starts rose 19 percent to a 1.427 million annualized pace, the largest monthly increase since May 2023, on Census and HUD data. Composition matters more than the headline. Multifamily starts jumped 76.2 percent to 532,000, while single-family starts slipped to 895,000 and sit 3.2 percent below June 2025. Permits, the forward-looking number, fell across the board, with single-family pointing at a second straight year of contraction.

Builder sentiment confirms the direction. The NAHB Housing Market Index read 34 in July, below 40 for 15 consecutive months, with more builders cutting prices than in either prior month. Cost is moving the wrong way at the same time. Building material prices are up 3.5 percent year over year, the largest annual increase since early 2023, with metal molding and trim up roughly 50 percent on Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs.

+76.2%

The multifamily starts jump to 532,000 that carried the June rebound, while single-family slipped to 895,000. Volume is flat, mix is rotating toward multifamily and repair and remodel, and margin is made or lost on pricing discipline rather than on demand.

Where We Are SearchingCompanies are hiring where they intend to hold share

The hiring is not landing evenly. Across July, three regions absorbed most of our new search activity, and all three point the same direction. Companies are putting experienced customer-facing leadership into the markets where they intend to hold or take share.

Northern New Jersey & New York City 6 new searches / past month

Most are Outside Sales and Regional Sales positions. Companies here are continuing to invest in customer-facing talent to drive growth.

South Central U.S. 4 new roles / recent

New roles opened across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Hiring activity across the region is accelerating, and it is one to watch closely over the next two quarters.

Southwest 5 searches / past three months

Activity spans Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Southern California. The majority are sales-focused, as companies invest in experienced field sales talent while these markets keep expanding.

M&A ActivityConsolidation slowed at the top, not at the bottom

The Webb Analytics Deals Database tracked 61 acquisitions covering 773 locations through July 15, against 62 deals covering 1,324 locations at the same point last year. Same deal volume, roughly 40 percent fewer facilities. Four transactions carried most of the count, led by QXO acquiring TopBuild at 437 locations and Kodiak Building Partners at 114. No other first-half deal involved more than 15 locations.

Read that as a hiring signal. The platform buyers are still buying, but the mid-market transactions closing right now are small and operator-dependent. A six-location acquisition does not arrive with a bench. It arrives with one general manager who may or may not stay, and an integration that lives or dies on whoever the buyer puts over it.

40%

Fewer facilities year over year on the same deal volume. The mid-market transactions closing now are small and operator-dependent, and they arrive with a single leader rather than a bench.

The ProfileThe margin-holder clears the offer, not the growth operator

The searches moving fastest are not the ones asking for growth-market operators. They are the ones asking for leaders who have held gross margin through a flat volume year, priced through tariff-driven input swings without losing the pro account, and integrated a small acquisition without losing the branch manager who came with it. That is a narrower pool than a general operations or sales leadership search, and it is why these searches are running longer.

It is also showing up across the roles we are closing. Recently, we have closed searches for a CCO, a CEO, a VP of Sales, and HR leadership, plus a steady run of general manager roles where the mandate is to hold a branch or region through flat volume.

Private equity is a large part of that demand. When a sponsor closes on a platform or an add-on, the first calls are for leadership: the operator who will protect margin through integration, and the commercial leader who will hold the customer base while it happens.

Inside A SearchWhat this looks like in practice

Case Study

Rebuilding operations leadership at a national HVAC manufacturer

A national HVAC manufacturer running eight plants lost its VP of Operations without warning, at a company already working through a difficult operating environment. Rather than backfill the role as it had existed, the board treated the exit as an inflection point and upgraded the mandate.

Two problems had to be solved by the same hire. First, margin discipline in a flat, cost-inflationary market: revenue had been flat for two years while tariff-driven copper and steel costs, freight surcharges, and tightening labor ate into EBITDA. Second, operational modernization at national scale, including standing up a green-field plant in Arizona from a clean slate.

We screened adjacent industrials against one evidence standard. P&L ownership at comparable multi-site scale, with before-and-after margin data tied to the candidate’s own tenure. Specific, attributable margin-protection moves. Share growth without discounting. Direct green-field startup experience. Every finalist’s claimed impact was verified through reference checks built to isolate what the candidate controlled from what the market or a predecessor handed them.

Client and candidate details anonymized. A search brief template and candidate scorecard adapted from this engagement are available on request.

We evaluate against SPACE for exactly this reason. Credentials tell you someone ran a region through a growth cycle. SPACE tells you whether they held margin while volume stood still, and whether they will do it again in your seat.

What It Means For HiringWhat this means for your bench

This market is not going to resolve on a predictable timeline. Single-family demand is rate-bound, multifamily is volatile month to month, input costs are moving on trade policy, and consolidation has narrowed to a handful of platform buyers. The companies that build real advantage from here will be the ones whose commercial and operations leadership were built for a flat-volume, cost-pressured market rather than the one that came before it.

That starts with an honest look at the spec. Most building materials leadership job descriptions in circulation today were written for a market that was still expanding, and quietly never updated. Hiring against that spec checks the box and misses the mandate. We rewrite the profile around what this market is actually paying for, then run the search against it, using SPACE to surface the judgment that never shows up cleanly on a resume.

If your leadership bench was built for the last building cycle and not this one, that gap is worth closing before the next one tests it. Let’s put your leadership against the profile the market is paying for today.

Tell us the seat you need to get right this year, and we will show you who clears the offer in this market.

Talk To Our Team

The SnapDragon Standard

We don’t send offers hoping they work. We send offers knowing how they will land.

Leadership Architecture · Precision Search · Since 2004

Private Equity · Manufacturing · Distribution · Retail

www.snapdragonassociates.com

Sources

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation, June 2026. Released July 2, 2026. bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, May 2026. Released June 30, 2026. bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm

U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, New Residential Construction, June 2026. Released July 17, 2026. census.gov/construction/nrc

National Association of Home Builders, Housing Market Index, July 2026, and NAHB analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics Producer Price Index data. nahb.org

Webb Analytics Deals Database, LBM Midyear M&A Report, July 2026. webb-analytics.com

Two Decades of Change in Building Materials and What It Means for Hiring

Written by Sarah Lucas on July 23, 2026. Posted in News & Insights.

July 23rd, 2026

Market Intelligence · Leadership Hiring

Two forces have reshaped building materials over the last two decades, and neither one is finished. Private equity has spent years buying small operations and folding them into larger platforms. Technology moved from optional to standard across the COVID years, and the industry is now working out where AI belongs. Both changes land in the same place, which is the leadership bench.

Mark Barnard has watched the full arc of it. What follows is his read on where the market has moved, where it is still moving, and the part of this business that no amount of consolidation or technology is going to change.

Consolidation & OwnershipThe Numbers Became the Qualification

Consolidation is the single largest structural change in the sector. Private equity has been the engine of it, and the buying has not slowed. That shift did not only change ownership. It changed the standard a leader is measured against.

Mark Barnard

Private equity does not know the difference between a 2×4 and a window. But they know their numbers, and they expect their operators and management in those businesses to understand the numbers.

Under previous ownership, deep product knowledge and a long tenure were often enough to qualify someone for the operating seat. Inside a platform structure, they are the starting point. The leader who holds the seat is the one who can speak to margin, to working capital, and to the levers behind both without translation.

This is the exact gap a resume will not show you. It is why our evaluation runs past the credential. The SPACE framework exists to measure how a leader actually operates and decides, because the platform buyer is going to test that within the first two quarters, whether the search process did or not.

Technology & AdoptionAI Is a Demand Signal, Not a Headcount Plan

This industry was not running video interviews or video meetings before 2020. Now it is the norm. The same adoption curve is happening again with AI, and Mark reads it against a pattern he has already lived through once.

Mark Barnard

We talked back in the late eighties that the dot-com world was going to change everything, that it was going to put people out of work. It did not. It created the demand for more, better, stronger people who understood how to embrace technology.

The practical read for hiring companies is straightforward. AI is not thinning the leadership requirement. It is raising it. Tools that let one person cover more ground, make faster decisions, and build their own analysis change what a strong operator looks like. The question in the interview is no longer whether a candidate is comfortable with technology. It is what they have already put to work, and what it returned.

Workforce DemographicsThe Demographic Math Is Not Reversing

The workforce in this sector is aging, and the openings that creates run in both directions, in labor and in leadership. Mark is direct about where that leaves the hiring market.

Demand is increasing, not decreasing.

Consolidation compounds it. Every platform that absorbs an operation needs someone to run the combined business, and the bench inside these companies is thinner than the org chart suggests. Companies that begin a search when the seat opens are starting from behind. Companies that keep a live read on who is available, what they are earning, and what would move them are the ones running searches on their own timeline instead of the market’s.

Client RelationshipsWhat Does Not Change

Clients come to us every day with questions that have nothing to do with an active search. How to build out a sales force. How to structure sales compensation. What a competitor is paying. Those conversations are the relationship, and they are the reason the search work lands when it matters.

Mark Barnard

You are never going to replace that personal connection. AI is not going to replace being able to really listen, really understand what your client is saying, and be able to coach and advise them.

You can use technology to find people, to reach people, to market to people. From idea to deliverable, there are still people involved, and the judgment about whether this leader fits this company at this stage of its ownership is made by someone who has been in the market long enough to know. That is the work. It has been the work since 2004, and it will be the work through whatever the next platform cycle brings.

Hiring StrategyWhat This Means for Your Next Hire

If your business has been acquired, is being courted, or is competing against a platform that was, the leadership profile you hired against five years ago is no longer the profile that survives. Financial fluency, technology adoption, and the ability to run a business through an ownership change are now baseline requirements rather than differentiators. Building the search around that from the intake conversation forward is the difference between a hire that holds and a search you run twice.

The SnapDragon Standard

We don’t send offers hoping they work. We send offers knowing how they will land.

If your leadership bench needs to hold through the next platform cycle, talk to SnapDragon.

Start the Conversation →

Leadership Architecture · Precision Search · Since 2004

Private Equity · Manufacturing · Distribution · Retail

Tariffs Changed What A Strong Operations Leader Looks Like

Written by Sarah Lucas on July 20, 2026. Posted in News & Insights.

July 16th, 2026

Section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper reached 50 percent this year. Construction input prices climbed at their fastest annualized pace since 2022 in early 2026. Under current policy, aggregate construction costs are estimated to rise roughly 8 percent.

50%

Section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper, as of this year

Fastest Since 2022

The pace of construction input price growth in early 2026

~8%

Estimated rise in aggregate construction costs under current policy

Every one of those numbers describes a cost environment. None of them describes the person who has to run a business inside it.

That person is who our clients are actually searching for right now, and the spec for that seat has moved more in eighteen months than in the decade before it.

The operations leader who ran a stable supply chain in 2021 is not the same candidate who can protect a P&L through 50 percent metal tariffs.

The ShiftThe Mandate Has Shifted From Managing Supply to Defending Margin

Look at where the demand is concentrating. At PE-backed platforms, the COO seat has moved away from driving volume growth toward operating discipline, acquisition integration, and margin protection without the tailwind of a rising market. The candidates closing at the top of that band are being measured on working capital efficiency and EBITDA protection, not top-line growth.

COO (PE-Backed)$200K–$285K Base

Total compensation at PE-backed platforms regularly clears $450K.

The same shift shows up one level down. Directors of Manufacturing are winning offers now on measurable output gains through automation and labor-efficient process redesign, not on the size of the crew they manage. Operators with engineered wood products experience are commanding a premium above that band, because EWP output has stayed essentially flat while sawmill employment keeps declining.

Director of Manufacturing$190K–$230K Base

EWP experience commands $15K–$25K above the standard band.

And at the general manager level, P&L ownership at scale has become the dividing line. A GM running a single yard and a GM running a multi-location distribution platform carry the same title on LinkedIn. Only one of them has proven they can hit plan in a flat, tariff-pressured market, and that is the one every client wants.

From a Recent SearchWhat This Looks Like Inside a Search

VP of Operations, Regional Building Products Distributor

We ran this search for a client that came to us for a volume-growth operator. Three weeks in, their landed steel costs moved again, and the brief changed on the call. The seat was no longer about growing the top line. It was about holding margin against a supply base that had become the largest risk on the P&L.

The candidate who closed was not the highest-volume operator in the slate. They were the one who had already rebuilt a single-source supply base across several regional suppliers during an earlier tariff cycle, and who had written price-escalation caps into supplier contracts before the cost shock landed. They had defended margin under pressure once, and they could walk the client through exactly how. That judgment was the entire search, and it was nowhere in the job description the client sent us on day one.

That is the pattern across every operations and manufacturing search we are running. The job description written eighteen months ago is not the job description that gets filled today. Cost volatility rewrote the brief, and most companies have not rewritten the spec to match it.

The Narrow PoolThe Candidates Who Fit This Profile Are Not Easy to Find

The skill set is specific: sourcing diversification, escalation protection in supplier contracts, and the operational discipline to hold margin through a policy environment that changes by the quarter. That is a narrower pool than a generic operations leader search, and it is why these searches are taking longer and paying more.

We evaluate against SPACE for exactly this reason. Credentials tell you someone managed a supply chain. SPACE tells you whether they managed one under pressure, and whether they will do it again in your seat.

The TakeawayWhat This Means for Your Operation

Cost volatility is not going to resolve on a predictable timeline, and the operations leaders who can hold margin through it are not going to get any easier to find. The companies that come through the next several quarters intact will be the ones whose operations and procurement leadership were built for this environment, not the one that existed before the tariffs landed.

That starts with an honest look at the spec. Most operations job descriptions in this sector were written for a stable supply chain and were quietly never updated. Hiring against that spec today fills the seat and misses the mandate. We help clients rewrite the profile around what the market actually demands now, then run the search against it, using SPACE to surface the margin discipline and sourcing judgment that never show up cleanly on a resume.

If your operations bench was built for the last environment and not this one, that gap is worth closing before the next cost shock tests it.

Let’s look at your leadership against the profile the market is paying for today.

Connect With SnapDragon →

The SnapDragon Standard

We don’t send offers hoping they work. We send offers knowing how they will land.

The 500,000 Hires Nobody Is Actually Planning For

Written by Sarah Lucas on July 20, 2026. Posted in News & Insights.

July 9th, 2026

Two numbers are circulating in this industry right now, and they are usually quoted in different rooms.

The first: the sector is projected to need roughly 499,000 new workers this year.

The second: in February, construction posted the slowest hiring rate on record. BLS data released on March 31 confirmed a 3.3 percent hiring rate. Job openings fell to 202,000, down from 230,000 in January and 53,000 below where they sat a year earlier.

499K

New workers the sector is projected to need this year

3.3%

February’s hiring rate, the slowest on record. BLS, released March 31.

Read those together. A sector that says it needs half a million people is hiring at the slowest pace it has ever recorded.

That is not a demand problem. That is a capacity-to-hire problem, and it does not get solved by posting more jobs.

The market is not soft. It is selective.

Where the Real Risk SitsThe Number That Gets Quoted Is Not the Seat That Stops a Company

The half-million figure is a floor-level number. It describes crews, yards, and production lines. It is real, and it is not the number that costs you a quarter.

A distribution center can run understaffed on the floor for a quarter. It cannot run without a general manager. A regional sales organization can absorb two open territories. It cannot absorb the loss of the leader who holds the top ten accounts. An operations group can backfill supervisors from within. It cannot replace a P&L owner at scale, and P&L ownership at scale is the dividing line in every general management search we are running.

Here is what that tier actually looks like in Q2 2026.

The general manager’s base compensation ranges from $165K to $340K. That is the widest band on our list and the most misread. A GM running a single yard at $30M in revenue and a GM running a multi-location distribution platform at $200M carry the same title on LinkedIn. The market is paying for the second one and competing hard for it. The candidates closing at the top of that band have full P&L authority and have hit the plan in a flat market.

General Manager$165K–$340K Base

VP of Sales is landing at $170K to $235K base, with OTE typically between $250K and $320K. The brief has changed. Two years ago, that seat was hired to grow the top line. Now it is hired to protect the customer base and build sales discipline that does not depend on a rising market.

VP of Sales$170K–$235K Base

OTE typically $250K–$320K.

At PE-backed platforms, COO base runs $200K to $285K, and total compensation regularly clears $450K. The mandate there is working capital efficiency and EBITDA protection, not volume.

COO (PE-Backed)$200K–$285K Base

Total compensation regularly clears $450K.

4–6%

Base compensation growth across building materials, year over year. In the Northeast, offers are landing 10 to 15 percent above national averages because of competition for off-market talent. Those are not projections. Those are the offers our clients are making.

Timing RiskThe Reactive Search Is Where the Cost Sits

The reactive search begins the day a general manager gives notice. Every variable is already against you. The seat is open, the team knows it, competitors know it, and the market hears urgency in every conversation you have. You are negotiating from a position you did not choose.

Meanwhile, the candidates you want are not waiting. Leaders with multi-state P&L experience and acquisition integration on their record are taking two and three offers in parallel, and we are watching decision windows close in 10 to 15 days. A search that starts cold does not survive that clock.

2x Salary

The approximate cost of losing a top performer, once you count lost revenue, ramp-up, and the hit to the people who stayed. And the cost of getting it wrong is not the fee.

Building the BenchThe Planned Search Begins Before the Seat Opens

The planned search begins before the seat opens. It is a map of who exists in your market, at what level, in what geography, at what number, and who would take a call. That map does not expire.

~45

Strategic leadership roles placed across VP, GM, and sales leadership in the first half of 2026, most of them before the seat became an emergency.

Our ProcessHow We Run It

We do not send a slate of resumes and wait for feedback. We evaluate against SPACE because credentials tell you what someone has done, and SPACE tells you how they will perform in the seat you are actually filling. Then we walk you through our thinking on each person and why we believe they fit what you are building.

We do not stop at the acceptance either. A leadership hire that leaves within the first year is not a placement. It is a search you get to run twice. The retention architecture starts before the offer letter and continues well past the start date, because we do not send offers hoping they work. We send offers knowing how they will land.

The TakeawayWhat This Means for Your Bench

The half-million number will keep running through every outlook this year, and it will keep pointing at the wrong tier. The seat that actually decides your next four quarters is not the one the headlines describe. It is the general manager, the regional sales leader, the operations head whose absence a business feels immediately and cannot backfill from within.

Protecting against that is not a search you run when the seat opens. It is intelligence you build before it does: a live map of who leads in your market, at what level, in what geography, at what number, and who would take a call. That is the work we do ahead of an opening, so that when one arrives, you are choosing from a bench instead of starting from zero against a 10- to 15-day decision window.

When we do run the search, we evaluate against SPACE rather than credentials alone, and we hold the relationship past the acceptance, because a leadership hire that leaves inside a year is a cost, not a placement.

That is the difference between filling a seat and protecting a business.

If a single unplanned departure would expose your operations or commercial bench, that is the conversation worth having now, while it is still a plan and not an emergency. Reach out, and we will start there.

Connect With SnapDragon →

The SnapDragon Standard

We don’t send offers hoping they work. We send offers knowing how they will land.

It’s America’s Birthday: A Special Independence Day Edition From SnapDragon Associates

Written by Sarah Lucas on July 20, 2026. Posted in News & Insights.

July 2nd, 2026

A Special Independence Day Edition

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a small group of colonies decided they had had enough of being told what to do from across an ocean. They put it in writing, they meant it, and they built something that is still standing a quarter of a millennium later. That is worth stopping for.

This week, instead of our usual market updates and hiring trends, we wanted to take a moment to mark the occasion properly.

A Bit of HistoryFrom Sea to Shining Sea

Katharine Lee Bates wrote “America the Beautiful” after climbing Pikes Peak and looking out over the country in 1893. She saw spacious skies. Amber waves of grain. Purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain. It is easy to forget how big and how varied this country actually is until someone puts it into four lines you cannot get out of your head.

Spacious skies. Amber waves of grain. Purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain.

That variety is something we see every day in our work. Building materials, manufacturing, distribution, retail: these are the industries that turn raw ambition into actual structures. Lumber yards in Maine. Fabrication shops in the Midwest. Distribution centers everywhere in between. Someone has to build the amber waves into barns, and the purple mountains into roads that get you there. That has been true for 250 years and it is still true today.

GratitudeWhat We’re Grateful For

At SnapDragon Associates, we get a front row seat to this industry’s people. The plant managers who have been at it for thirty years. The young operations leaders stepping into roles their parents never had access to. The family businesses now hiring their fourth generation. It is a very American story, told over and over, in every state we work in.

We are grateful for the clients who trust us with something as important as their next hire. We are grateful for the candidates who take a leap on a new opportunity. And this year especially, we are grateful to be doing that work in a country that has made it to 250.

From Our Team to YoursHave a Safe and Happy Fourth

However you are celebrating: grilling in the backyard, watching fireworks with the kids, or just enjoying a long weekend, we hope it is a good one. Take a minute to look up at the sky tonight. It will be worth it.

From all of us at SnapDragon Associates, happy birthday, America. Here’s to the next 250.

The SnapDragon Associates Team