Per-MW pricing, regional variance, and cost drivers for owners scoping hyperscale & AI builds.
Salary benchmarks across the 14 mission-critical disciplines.
Confidential retained search for plant and operations leadership, with our edge where mandates are hardest: aerospace and defense manufacturing — the executives who take new factories from groundbreaking to first-article production and rate. The leadership tier of a practice that spans manufacturing engineer to plant executive.
iRecruit.co runs manufacturing executive search as the industrial arm of its executive search practice: confidential retained mandates at 30% of first-year compensation, every candidate assessed on plants started up and rates achieved, not title history.
Typical VP and director cadence; C-suite and cleared-program mandates scoped individually.
Manufacturing C-suite and VP searches land here — with the center of gravity in aerospace manufacturing and defense production, where the operators who can start up a factory or triple a rate number in the hundreds:
Multi-site P&L, rate ramps, lean and cost accountability — the operator your plant network rolls up to.
Single-site ownership of safety, quality, delivery, and cost — and the greenfield startups that add capacity.
Quality systems for regulated production: AS9100 registration, NADCAP special processes, escape containment, customer and DCMA audits.
Industrialization from design to rate: process planning, tooling, automation, and the capex cases behind them.
Long-lead buys, supplier development and dual-sourcing, DFARS flow-downs, inventory discipline through a ramp.
Integration, qualification and acceptance test, range and launch cadence — where hardware meets the manifest.
Program-of-record execution: EVM baselines, milestone reviews, customer cadence — cleared leadership for classified scope.
The same practice staffs the whole plant — manufacturing engineer to plant executive — one practice, the full span.
Four stages, principal-led, disclosure rules set before anyone is approached — most mandates are incumbent replacements, pre-announcement expansions, or cleared programs the market cannot hear about first.
A working session with the hiring executive or board: success profile, compensation architecture, and the disclosure rules — who can know, and when. Signed off before any approach.
We name the operators who have delivered comparable scope — rate ramps at primes, greenfield startups, program-of-record transitions — and approach blind until mutual interest is real.
A calibrated slate in 2–3 weeks, scored against the success profile, clearance and compensation verified. We run scheduling, briefings, and structured debriefs — confidentiality held on both sides.
Offer structuring against live market data, references above and beside the finalist, resignation and counteroffer handling through the notice period, a transition plan to day one.
Generalist manufacturing recruiters read titles; industrial mandates speak rate readiness, first-article, and flow-down. We recruit the teams that build the plants — factory construction through first-article production — and searches run beside the live build mandates on our defense manufacturing construction tracker:
Because we staff the builds themselves, executives get assessed on the factory: schedule held through construction, equipment installed and qualified, first-article accepted on time, ramp governed to rate.
Screening runs in the regime’s own language — AS9100 nonconformance history, NADCAP special-process scope, DFARS clauses and CMMC posture — so a plausible resume and a deliverable operator separate in one call.
Cleared mandates fail late when eligibility is assumed. We verify clearance level and currency, ITAR U.S.-person status, and facility-clearance context early — before a finalist ever meets your board.
Reshoring and defense industrial base expansion have new plants chasing a fixed pool of plant leadership. The operators who can run them are employed and off-market — reached by research and approach, not job posts.
Industry-wide, retained search runs 25–35% of first-year compensation. iRecruit.co retained search is 30% of first-year compensation, scoped and confirmed in writing before the search launches, with milestones and guarantee terms set in the engagement letter. Where a contingent engagement fits better, recruiting services runs on a 20% success fee with no upfront fee on single roles, and RPO runs from a $15k service fee plus volume pricing.
Broadly: the industrial C-suite and VP tier — COO, VP of Manufacturing, VP of Operations, and site leadership. iRecruit.co’s center of gravity is the leadership that builds and runs capacity: VP of Manufacturing / Operations, Plant Manager / Site Director, VP of Quality (AS9100/NADCAP), Director of Manufacturing Engineering, VP of Supply Chain, Director of Test & Launch Operations, and cleared Program Director mandates on classified scope.
General manufacturing search assesses operators on cost, delivery, and lean pedigree — portable across almost any plant. Aerospace and defense manufacturing adds regimes that decide careers: ITAR and export control, personnel clearances, AS9100 registration and NADCAP special processes, DFARS-CMMC flow-downs — and a program-of-record cadence where rate commitments are contractual and the customer sits in your factory. The talent pools barely overlap, so the search has to start from the programs, not the titles.
A 30-minute conversation about the mandate — role, plant, compensation architecture, timeline. Scope and pricing in writing; discretion from the first call.
iRecruit.co places manufacturing engineers through plant executives across aerospace, defense, and every mission-critical sector. Executive conversations are handled confidentially — nothing moves without your say-so.
