They’ve never made a sales call and nobody leaves
In this issue
- A 16 person integrator that keeps winning engineers from firms thirty times its size
- What end users are paying for the engineer you want, and the SI Giants that haven’t moved bands since Covid
- Why engineers on $180k and stock options still leave them
- What the smaller firms winning these people actually say in the interview
- Why hiring a niche specialist into a remote site usually comes back round
- The five questions I ask engineers at big firms on a first call
What I’m seeing this month
Engineers are off the market fast. Almost every controls engineer the team has spoken to in the last few weeks who’s open to a move is already talking to two or three companies, and a few have had offers inside a week of their first interview.
And more often than not one of those two or three companies is a lot bigger than the one I’m representing. A national integrator with 500+ engineers, or a manufacturer with a pension, a stock plan and five weeks off. So most of my month I spent looking at one question, which is how a firm of 15 or 50 or 150 people wins that engineer.
The 16 person integrator that keeps beating the giants
There’s an integrator in the Carolinas with about sixteen people. The two founders came out of a much bigger integrator after noticing that the engineers in their own teams almost never left, so they started a firm built around keeping them. They’ve never made a sales call, all of their work comes through referrals and repeat clients, and retention sits at around 95%.
I’ve placed several engineers with them and every one of them is still there.
They’re competing for the same people as firms thirty times their size and they win far more often than they lose. They don’t pay more either. Their lead controls ceiling is around $145k plus a profit share that hasn’t missed a year, against end users who can go well past that on base. So I’ve spent a lot of this year working out what they do that a firm of 500+ can’t, and what the firms that don’t lose to the giants are doing differently.
What the end users are offering
The number a small integrator is up against is usually bigger than people think.
I spoke to a lead controls engineer at a large manufacturer in the Carolinas this year who was in the $180ks all in. He loved the small integrator’s role, liked the founders and could see exactly what he’d be doing. He turned it down, and his line was “two years ago I would have jumped at that.” Nothing was wrong with the offer. He’d just moved further up the end user pay scale than a firm of sixteen could follow.
That gap is common. Integrators regularly tell me end users pay something like 20 to 25% more for the same engineer, and on MES the team has seen end user roles at $140k to $160k against integrator roles for the same seniority topping out nearer $130k. The benefits widen it again. One end user engineer I spoke to had five weeks of vacation, two weeks of floating days and ten public holidays. Another had a 6% immediately vested 401k match where most integrator offers he’d seen sat nearer 3%.
And the end user engineer usually has one more objection, which a senior engineer on over $200k put to me plainly in April. Integrators are up and down, he said, very market driven, sometimes you’ve got work and sometimes you haven’t, and some of them would do anything for a dollar. He’d target a manufacturer first. Every firm under 200 people is fighting that perception before the interview starts.
Some of the biggest names haven’t moved since Covid
The big integrators are a different story on pay. I know of integrators on the SI Giants list who haven’t moved their salary bands since Covid.
Prices are up around 30% since 2020 on the BLS index. So an engineer at the top of a band set in 2020 is earning nearly a quarter less in real terms than that number was worth when it was written, while the mid level market around them has moved to $130k to $160k for GMP work in the Midwest.
The people furthest behind are usually the ones who’ve been there longest. New joiners come in at whatever the market is now, and the engineer who’s carried the team for six years sits capped at the top of a 2020 band. Those are the easiest calls I make all week.
That’s the gap I see smaller integrators with a current band walk straight into. They can’t outbid a manufacturer at $180k all in, but they can often outbid a firm of 500+ whose bands are five years old, and the candidate can see exactly why the number is higher.
Why they leave anyway
But the big package doesn’t hold people as well as it looks, and the reasons are remarkably consistent.
A DeltaV engineer at a high profile manufacturer with a big salary and a lot of stock was looking this year because the core engineering team had gone and the manager he joined for had gone with them. An engineer at a large end user had spent three and a half years without a pay correction while training a newer hire who was earning more than him. Another, on $90k at a pharma site with 23 days of PTO, was on call 24/7 one week in every month and had been moved off project work onto operations and paperwork. “If I can go to work and turn around and build things, that’s what makes me happiest.”
A controls engineer who’d gone from an integrator to the client side told me what he missed. On the customer side there’s a lot more drama and politics, he said, where at an integrator the customer wants to write you a check and have you make the problem go away.
The big integrators lose people for their own reasons. A former engineer from one of the larger integrators described it as a college hire model where experienced hires couldn’t grow and there wasn’t much senior mentoring. Travel is the other one. A mid level engineer at a regional integrator was traveling a week and a half to two weeks every month, and another had joined on 10% travel that had become anything from 30 to 75%, often with a couple of days’ notice.
Control Engineering’s 2026 salary survey backs up what I hear. Work life balance was the top factor in job satisfaction at 43%, ahead of pay at 36% and technical challenge at 28%, and a quarter of respondents were working 50 hours a week or more.
So the people with the biggest packages are often leaving over work they can’t finish, managers who’ve moved on, hours and travel that have crept, and the feeling that nobody senior notices them. Every one of those is something a smaller firm can fix in a way a firm of 500+ mostly can’t.
What the smaller firms that win are doing
The firm of sixteen and the handful of others I see winning these people do a few things the same way.
They put the travel in writing, with a number and a map. The Carolinas firm pitches 25% travel to sites within driving distance of the office and 75% remote, and another small integrator I work with caps it at 25% within four hours of the office. Against “some travel required” on a big firm’s advert, a number and a radius wins the conversation before it gets to money.
The profit share has a track record. “10 to 25% profit share” on its own is a promise. “10 to 25% and it’s paid out every year since we started” is a fact, and engineers typically trust evidence. It works best at the mid level, though. Around $95k to $110k people were happy to take a meaningful share on top of base this year, while above roughly $130k nobody wanted it instead of base without being clear what the impact would be.
Ensure the candidate meets the people they’d work with. Three firms I know do a technical interview and then take the candidate out for a meal with owners and a couple of the engineers, and I don’t think I’ve had anyone come away from that without wanting those roles. A firm of 500+ can’t give a candidate an evening with the owners.
They tell candidates what’s coming next. A life sciences integrator I work with holds a weekly staffing conversation so engineers know which project they’re going to after this one, which answers the “up and down” objection better than any reassurance does.
And they sell the whole job. At a small integrator a four year engineer can be running projects from the customer’s requirements through to commissioning, where at a large one twelve years can mean twelve years on one slice of the work. The engineer who wanted to “turn around and build things” is exactly who that pitch is for.
Where small firms lose to the giants is almost always the opposite of that list. A vague line about culture and family against a big firm’s clear package, travel left undefined, or profit share offered in place of base to someone already on $150k.
The niche skill in the middle of nowhere
The pattern I’m seeing most this fall starts with an end client. They want a niche skill on site, the local market for it is tapped out, so the integrator ends up trying to hire a specialist into a town nobody’s lining up to move to.
The data centers going up in the middle of farm fields are the obvious version of it, but I see the same thing on pharma and chemical sites. A controls manager in Louisiana had the same role open for almost a year earlier this year, and a CEO who’s run an integrator in that market for 30 years told me why. “This is not a place people gravitate toward naturally. We find it hard to keep people and their families happy long term if they don’t have some tie to the area.”
The usual answer is to pay up for someone who already has the skill and get them there. And it often works for a while. They do a good job right up until something comes up somewhere they’d actually like to live, and then the integrator is back where it started, with a client who’s now used to having that skill on site.
The integrators I see making this work start by asking the client why. Does it have to be that exact platform on day one, or is it something a good engineer could pick up in six months with support behind them? More often than you’d think it’s the second. Then they hire the person who wants to be in that town, someone local or with family nearby or who’s been trying to get back there for years, and they train them.
Van Iddekinge’s review of 81 studies on hiring found the experience someone arrives with had no link at all to whether they stayed. In my experience the thing that keeps them is whether they want the life that comes with the location.
What I notice from here
I’m not inside your business and won’t pretend to know how you should run it. But I’m on the phone to both sides most of the week and here’s what I notice.
- The big package is easier to beat than it looks once you know why they’re leaving it. Most of the people I speak to at large firms aren’t leaving over money, they’re leaving over the manager, the hours or the work. And at the integrators still on 2020 bands, money is on your side too.
- Smaller firms tend to undersell the things they’re best at. Founder access, whole projects and a known travel number rarely make it onto the advert, and they’re the three things the giants can’t copy.
- Stability is the first objection I hear. Engineers at manufacturers raise it before anything else, and the firms that answer it with their retention, how long their clients have stayed and what’s booked for next year settle it faster than anything said about culture.
- The remote niche brief is where I see the most money go out the door. The local engineer trained into the skill is usually still there in three years, and the imported specialist often isn’t.
- Some engineers can’t be won at the moment and that’s fine. An engineer in the $180ks all in at a manufacturer is often a two year conversation, and the firms that stay in touch tend to get the call when that manager leaves.
What’s the last engineer you lost to a bigger firm actually leaving for?
What I ask an engineer at a big firm
Nobody in controls is passively looking. If an engineer’s on the phone with me there’s a reason, there always is, and most of my first calls with engineers at large integrators and manufacturers come back to the same handful of questions to find it. They work just as well in an interview or over a coffee with someone you’d like to hire.
“Give me three reasons you’d leave.” The first answer is nearly always “money”. I ask a little more and then it comes out, the manager they joined for has gone, the travel has crept or they haven’t been near a new project in two years, and suddenly it’s not that passive. That reason is what a smaller firm is actually selling against.
“When you joined, what were you told the travel would be, and what’s it been this year?” The gap between those two numbers tells me more than almost anything else on the call.
“When did your pay last move, and was it a raise or a correction?” This is where the 2020 bands come out, and the engineers training people who earn more than them.
“Who’s left your team in the last year?” If the people they joined for have gone, they’re usually closer to moving than they’ll admit.
“What would you want a normal week to look like?” The answer is the pitch. If a smaller firm can offer that week, it can usually compete with a bigger salary.
On my desk
I’ve got an Ignition role open at one of the best integrators I know (almost every engineer I’ve placed with them is still there), remote with a decent amount of travel. They want two years plus configuring Ignition and SQL including stored procedures, and you’d take projects from the customer’s requirements through to commissioning on site. They’re hiring to start mid November.
There’s also a six to twelve month automation engineer contract (but will also hire perm) in Wilmington, North Carolina, Rockwell with drives and design work, where the PO is signed and they can hire straight away.
And if you’re a smaller integrator going up against bigger names for mid level Rockwell or Ignition engineers and want to know who’s moving right now, let me know.
I’m out in Louisiana and California in early November seeing a couple of client teams in person, so if you’re nearby and fancy a coffee, reply and we’ll get something in.
Jon
Sources
- Mark T. Hoske, Control Engineering, 8 June 2026. Results are in: Control Engineering Career and Salary Survey, 2026
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U, via US Inflation Calculator, September 2026. Consumer Price Index data from 1913 to 2026
- Van Iddekinge, Arnold, Frieder and Roth, Personnel Psychology, 2019. A meta-analysis of the criterion-related validity of prehire work experience
