Expertise · Data center recruiting
Power and Project Controls Recruiting
Critical Path Hiring recruits the power and program roles that decide whether a site arrives on schedule: substation, interconnect and utility engineering, electrical design leadership, energy management, and the project controls discipline of scheduling, cost control, estimating and PMO reporting. These roles are often filled last even though their decisions constrain everything downstream.
Who this is for
Developers and operators, EPCs and general contractors, engineering firms, utilities-facing teams and infrastructure programs with multi-site portfolios.
The hiring problems it addresses
- The interconnect schedule has no internal owner and slips quietly.
- Cost and schedule reporting arrives too late to change a decision.
- Estimating and scheduling seats stay open while construction accelerates.
- Energy strategy and capacity planning sit with people who have no time for it.
Role families
What we recruit, and how each pool is screened.
Power and utilities engineering
Substation engineer, interconnect lead, electrical design lead, power systems engineer
Screened on utility coordination, study work, equipment lead-time reality and the schedule they actually owned.
Energy and capacity
Energy manager, capacity planning lead
Assessed on load forecasting, utility rate and tariff literacy, and the tradeoffs behind on-site generation.
Project controls
Project controls manager, scheduler, cost controller, estimator
Evaluated on schedule integrity, earned value practice, change management and reporting that leadership can act on.
PMO and program delivery
Program manager, PMO lead, project manager, document control
Assessed on multi-stakeholder delivery, governance cadence and portfolio reporting across sites.
Environments
Technologies and environments.
- Utility interconnect and substation delivery
- Primavera P6 and CPM scheduling practice
- Earned value, change orders and cost reporting
- Long-lead equipment procurement and expediting
- Multi-site program governance and PMO reporting
Calibration
Common role-calibration mistakes.
Each of these costs a hiring cycle, and each is fixable before outreach starts.
- Hiring project controls after the schedule is already unreliable.
- Treating a scheduler and a cost controller as one seat on a large program.
- Screening power engineers on software familiarity instead of utility coordination evidence.
- Leaving interconnect ownership with a consultant and no internal counterpart.
How we work
Founder-led search, written research, client-owned pipeline.
Czarina Tabayoyong calibrates the scorecard with the people who will run the panel, maps the named market, runs direct outreach, reports in writing every week, and transfers the research and pipeline to your team. AI assists. People decide.
FAQ
Buyer questions.
- Why hire project controls early?
- Because the value is preventive. A credible schedule and cost baseline changes decisions while they can still be changed, and a controls hire made after slippage spends months rebuilding trust in the numbers.
- Do you recruit utility-side power engineers?
- Yes, including candidates from utilities, transmission and distribution engineering firms and industrial power markets who transfer into data center interconnect work.
- Can you cover PMO and document control seats?
- Yes. Program delivery and document control roles are part of the same hiring plan, and they are frequently the difference between reporting that helps and reporting that does not.
- How do you assess schedulers?
- On the schedule they owned: logic quality, float discipline, how change was absorbed, and whether the schedule was used for decisions or produced for a report.
Have a role that keeps returning the wrong candidates?
Bring the scorecard and the deadline. You get a market read and a recommended engagement, even if the answer is to solve it internally.