Tag: July 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.