Practices with offices in more than one country are quietly keeping the people everyone else loses.
A few years ago I was running a search for a studio leadership role, and I had a shortlist I was reasonably happy with. Then I took a call with someone who was not really a candidate. She was just curious, she said. She was not looking.
Twenty minutes in, she told me the thing she had not told anyone. She did not want a different job. She wanted to live in a different country. She had wanted it for three years, and because there was no version of that conversation she could have with her own firm, she had quietly decided she would have to leave to do it.
Her practice never knew. They would have called it a resignation about money, because that is what most firms call it.
I have thought about that call a lot since, because it changed how I look at where candidates actually are. And it is the reason I want to write to you this month about searching across more than one market, and about what it means to work for a firm that spans several.
Most searches only look in one place
That is not a criticism. It is just how search has usually worked. The role is in London, so you look in London. The role is in New York, so you look in New York. A shortlist arrives, you hire someone good from it, and you never find out who you did not see.
Twenty six years in, I have come to think that last part is the expensive bit.
When a search runs across two markets instead of one, four things change, and none of them are about reach for its own sake.
You stop being limited by geography, so a practice winning work in a market it has never delivered in can hire someone who has already done it there, rather than learning that market live on a client's project.
You see the same role priced twice. Compensation, notice periods, seniority conventions and title inflation all vary enormously between countries. Seeing two at once tells you what a role is genuinely worth, rather than what one local market has decided it is worth.
You reach people who are not looking. Designers who have worked across several countries are a small group and they are almost never on the market. They come out through relationships, not applications.
And occasionally you find what I found on that call. A reason to move that has nothing to do with the job at all.
If you are a designer reading this
This part is for you, and there are more of you reading than the firms tend to realise.
When people ask me whether it is worth joining a practice with offices in several countries, they usually mean is it more prestigious. That is the least interesting reason.
Here are the ones that actually matter.
Your career stops riding on one market's cycle. When work slows in one country and holds up in another, a practice with offices in both moves people between them. A practice with one makes redundancies in exactly the months another market is hiring. I have watched both happen, in the same quarter, to people of equal talent.
Project types travel through a firm faster than through a market. Healthcare, aviation, higher education, large scale mixed use. These are not evenly distributed geographically, and being inside a practice that has them somewhere is the quickest route to working on them.
Wanting to live somewhere else becomes a conversation instead of a resignation. This is the one I care most about, for reasons you can probably guess. An internal move protects your seniority, your relationships and your standing in a way that starting again in a new country does not.
Two regulatory systems make you genuinely rare. Planning regimes, building safety requirements, procurement conventions, consultant structures. Designers who understand more than one are unusually valuable, and they stay valuable when the market turns.
One word of caution, said with affection. Multi country does not automatically mean multi office opportunity. Some practices have offices in four countries and no real mechanism for anyone to move between them.
So ask, at interview, how many people transferred internally in the last two years. If the answer is a number, the network is real. If the answer is a story about someone in 2019, it is letterhead.
What firms are asking me for
Demand this year is narrower than most practices expect. A handful of profiles, wanted almost everywhere.
Project Architects with real delivery depth. The one I am asked for most and the one I find least easily. Design talent is visible, so firms hire it with confidence. Delivery talent is invisible right up until it is missing, and then it is missing on a live project with a client watching.
Mid level architects who are genuinely strong in Revit. Demand here is outstripping supply, particularly in London, and it has reached the point where practices are upgrading their own software environment to stay hireable at all.
Technical leadership rather than design leadership. Several firms are quietly restructuring senior roles around the person who makes the project work rather than the person who wins it.
Interior designers with technical depth. Lighting, acoustics, air quality, material sourcing. These have moved from specialist concerns to client expectations.
Sustainability and building safety competence. The clearest structural gap in the whole market, sitting across every discipline, with no quick supply of it anywhere.
How to hire them
None of this is complicated. It is mostly a matter of deciding to do it.
Work out what the role is for before you write the spec. Not fifteen responsibilities. One sentence on what will be different in your practice a year after this person starts. Senior candidates read specs to work out whether you know what you want, and most specs answer that question badly.
Put the compensation range in. Senior design talent will not engage with a process that plays games in the first five minutes.
Move faster than feels comfortable. The people you want are in two or three conversations at once. A six week process loses to a three week one, and it does not matter which firm is better.
Ask referees what the person changed. My favourite reference call is the one where everybody is warm and nobody can name a single thing the candidate altered. That silence is worth more than the praise around it.
And show them the studio rather than the org chart. People accept firms, not job titles.
Keeping the ones you already have
Hiring well is the easier half of this. Well sometimes!
Name the next step before anyone asks for it. Most senior designers leave because they cannot see what happens next, not because someone waved more money at them. A named path with a rough timeline holds people through the years when nothing is actually available.
Start the succession conversation earlier than you want to. If you are a founding Principal and you have not begun, you are late. That is genuinely fine. Start anyway. It is a five year conversation, and the successor is usually the person with the strongest relationships across the studio rather than the longest service.
Watch the quiet ones. The person who leaves is rarely the one complaining. It is the one who stopped putting themselves forward about six months ago and is still delivering perfectly well. Disengagement in a studio looks like reliability with the enthusiasm taken out.
Treat the first ninety days as retention, not admin. Name the first win before the start date. Give one relationship rather than twenty introductions. Book the month two conversation in advance.
And if your practice spans countries, tell people they can move. Nobody transfers to an office they have never been told they could work in.
That designer, by the way, did get her move eventually.
Not with the firm she was in. They never knew there was anything to keep her for.
Nancy Duvall Horne is Founder and Principal of NDH Search Worldwide, executive search for Architecture, Interior Design and Landscape Architecture firms since 1998.
If you are hiring across more than one market, or putting off the succession conversation, book a call: calendly.com/nancy-horne/ndhs-information