Tag: Networking

Market Intelligence · SnapDragon Associates

Every leader in building materials can name the competition. Knowing who else is hiring does not start a conversation. A partner they already trust does.

A Market Where Everyone Is Visible

Building materials is a relationship industry, and leadership talent moves inside it in plain sight. The sales director at a regional distributor knows the operations leader at the yard down the road. The plant manager knows which competing manufacturer runs a stronger floor and which one turns over supervisors every year. Most senior operators can list the three or four companies they would consider before a recruiter says a word.

That visibility does not make hiring easier. It makes the first move more expensive. When both sides can see each other, neither can reach out without being noticed.

The Cost of the Direct Approach

A company that calls a competitor’s leader directly carries risk from the first sentence. The call announces intent. A company reaching for a new vice president of sales has just told a competitor that it is replacing one, building a new team, or entering a new market. In an industry this connected, that information travels.

The leader on the other end carries the risk too. Taking the call means a conversation with a competitor that the current employer may hear about, so most decline. Restrictive covenants, notice periods, and unvested compensation add to the caution, and none of them can be discussed openly between two companies that compete for the same customers.

The result is a quiet loss on both sides. Leaders who would have listened never hear the opportunity, and companies conclude that talent is unavailable when it is only unreachable. In almost all of our leadership searches, the candidate who ultimately accepted was not actively looking when we made the first call.

What a Candidate Puts at Risk

Exploring a move is not a neutral act for an employed leader. If the current employer learns of it, the candidate can be reclassified overnight as a flight risk. The next promotion conversation changes tone, and the leader still has to show up on Monday whether anything comes of it. In an industry where executives know each other’s bosses, the exposure reaches past the current company and into the candidate’s reputation across the market. The more senior the candidate is, the more there is to lose by asking the question.

That risk is why strong candidates stay quiet, and why they engage only with a search partner they trust to protect them. At SnapDragon, a candidate’s name goes to a client only after the candidate agrees to it, and only after we have explained who the company is and what the seat involves. Our network then does what a submission process cannot. Because we know the hiring leaders personally, we can put a candidate in front of one decision maker, in one conversation, on the candidate’s terms. The name is not sitting in an inbox or moving through a system.

What a Recruiter Carries Into the First Call

• Confidentiality A search partner holds both names until each side chooses to share them. The candidate can explore without the current employer learning of it. The client can test the market for a seat without the market learning that the seat is open. Protection on both sides is the only condition under which a candidate says what they actually think.
• Credibility A call from a recruiter who has known the candidate for years is a different call than one from a stranger or a competitor. SnapDragon has worked exclusively in building materials since 2004, across private equity, manufacturing, distribution, and retail. We usually know the people before the search starts. That is what turns a cold approach into a real conversation.
• Context Candidates know the competitors. They rarely know the specifics of a given seat: the mandate, the reporting line, who owns the company and what they intend to do with it, how the compensation is structured. We arrive with that intelligence first. Here is what the seat is, here is what the company is building, and here is why we believe you are aligned with it. We position the opportunity. We do not pitch it.

Where the Conversation Goes From There

The first call starts the evaluation on both sides. Our SPACE framework measures candidates beyond credentials, so the conversation covers how a leader operates, not only where they have worked. Candidates also say things to a search partner that they will not say to a hiring company: the number they actually need, the hesitation about relocating a family, the concern about ownership. We carry that back to the client while there is still time to solve it.

It is also why we ask every candidate where they stand on a scale of 1 to 10, and why any answer below an 8 is an opening rather than an answer. A 6 that never gets explored is a candidate who declines at the offer stage. Asked in the first weeks of a search, the same question produces a plan.

SnapDragon works on a retained basis, which shapes how the conversation feels from the candidate’s side. The search is dedicated to one seat for one client, and the conversation is about fit rather than speed.

After the Offer

The conversation does not end when the candidate says yes. The current employer responds to the resignation, often with a counteroffer, and the candidate’s answer depends on whether the concerns raised in the first conversations were resolved or only postponed. Because we have those conversations from the start, we know how an offer will land before it goes out. Our relationship with both sides continues into the first months after the hire, where retention is won or lost.

A Network That Opens Doors Beyond the Search

The same network works when no search is open. Consider a distributor that tells us it lost a major customer years ago, a relationship that went wrong and never recovered, and that it would like the account back. Nobody at the company still has a contact there who will take the call. If SnapDragon ran the search that brought that customer’s vice president of sales into the seat, the answer is short: we know him, let us get you his name and see how we can start that conversation.

No role is attached to that introduction. It works because the person on the other end knows we do not pass names around carelessly, and because the company asking knows we will position the conversation accurately rather than pitch it. Two decades of work in a single industry produces relationships that are useful well beyond hiring: former customers, former colleagues, competitors who became peers, executives who moved and remember who handled their move well.

Recruiters have a reputation in some rooms as the people who take talent away. A search partner with this network is more often the person who brings a relationship back. That is the case for treating a recruiter as a friend, not a foe, in a market where everyone already knows who they are competing with.

A competitor’s name is public information. The conversation that leads a leader to consider that competitor’s offer is not.

It gets built through trust, confidentiality, and intelligence delivered before anyone is asked to commit. That is the work a search partner does before a slate ever reaches a client.