Most commercial roles in utilities hand you a pile of other people's contracts. This one starts earlier, at the contract, and stays with the job until the final account.

Why this one is different

• The company: a business inside a larger regulated utilities group, growing steadily, with the backing of a bigger parent but its own team and its own way of working.
• The team: a senior QS, a QS and a commercial administrator. They talk to each other every day, and problems get solved between them, not passed upstairs.
• The ownership: you would take a job from contract negotiation through to final account. You would not be handed one small package.
• The portfolio: a dozen or so live projects at once, mostly orders in the hundreds of thousands, usually finished within about six months of the order.
• The pattern: mostly office based, three days in with the rest remote, and site visits only when the work needs it.

What you'd own

Right now, contracts run through one person, and that has become a bottleneck. The senior QS is excellent on extensions of time and claims, but he is post-contract only. What is missing is the link at the front. You would pick up the contract review and negotiation once the estimating team has won the work, and run the job from there. That means the monthly CVRs, applications and payments, variations, and closing it out. The contracts are a real mix: JCT, bespoke short form orders, purchase orders on terms, some FIDIC and the odd NEC. You would need to be comfortable reading whatever lands on your desk.

It suits more backgrounds than you'd think

Power and rail have both worked in this team. The company says a contract is a contract, and no particular field is a barrier. The one background that tends not to fit is housebuilding, because the work and the measurement are very different.

What you need

• Strong contract knowledge, and the confidence to own a job from start to finish.
• Willingness to challenge in the right way. The business is growing quickly, and operations will sometimes want to move faster than the paperwork. You need to push back constructively without rolling over or causing a fight.
• The kind of personality that fits a close team.

This suits you if you have worked with HV, LV or power equipment before. It is a bonus, not a requirement.

The package

The base sits in a clear band that we'll talk through on a call, and we'll go through the rest of the package with you in the same conversation. Rather than a headline figure on a page, we'd rather you hear the whole picture at once.

How it's being run

You deal directly with us and the client moves quickly. They have agreed to give feedback on a CV within 24 hours and on an interview within 24 hours. The process is a 30 minute chat with the team to see if you click, then a more formal face to face meeting. No long chain of rounds.

About us

We're clearnorth. We work with quantity surveyors and commercial people in construction, infrastructure and regulated utilities, perm and contract, and that's all we do. People call us the QS People. It started as a nickname and stuck because it's accurate. It's a small world, and we'll cross paths with most people reading this several times over a career, so a move that goes wrong costs us far more than it ever earns. That's why we've taken the time to understand this role properly before putting it in front of you.

The way in

We know what sending a CV out means when you're settled. Your name in the wrong inbox, your employer hearing about it second hand, your details sat in a database you don't control. So your CV goes nowhere until we've spoken and you've said yes, and your name reaches the client only once we've agreed how. That's not us being saintly. In a world this size, one careless send and we've lost you for good, and you're worth more to us over the next twenty years than any single fee.

If the timing's not right but the role has landed, get in touch anyway. We'd rather be the people you've already met for whenever something shifts, six weeks or six years from now.

Danielle Pears

07367 437969

[email protected]

Same conversation, same handling, just a different way in.