Most project directors can tell you what a contractor costs per day. Very few can tell you what a bad one costs per month.
The number on the purchase order is the easy part. The hard part is everything that happens after a contractor arrives on site and turns out to be wrong for the role. Not incompetent. Not dishonest. Just wrong. Their CV said five years of commissioning experience. It did not say that their experience was on a completely different DCS platform, or that their last three deployments were in construction, not commissioning.
That is not a screening failure anyone talks about openly, because nobody tracks it. But it plays out across the energy sector constantly. And the cost is real.
The direct cost is the smallest part
A mid-market EPC paying a contractor $600/day through a staffing agency has committed to a minimum billing period, typically 30 days. If the contractor is wrong for the role, that is $18,000 gone before anyone picks up the phone to the agency. Mobilisation costs add another $3,000-5,000 depending on geography.
Total direct cost of a single failed placement: $20,000 to $25,000. That number hurts. But it is recoverable. The indirect cost is where projects actually bleed.
The schedule cost is where it compounds
When a contractor fails on site, the replacement cycle starts from scratch. Best case, four weeks from failure to replacement. Typical case, six to eight.
On a substation commissioning project with a contractual completion date, six weeks of delay does not just cost six weeks of the contractor's day rate. It costs six weeks of the entire project team's overhead, potential liquidated damages, and the reputational damage of telling the client that the timeline has slipped.
The hidden cost: the interviews you should not have had
Typically four or five candidates put forward by the agency, of which maybe two were genuinely qualified. The project director spent an hour on each. That is five hours of a senior person's time spent doing quality control that should have happened before the CV reached their desk.
Why this keeps happening
Agencies are measured on speed to submit. The faster they get CVs in front of the client, the more likely they are to fill the role before a competitor does. Speed to submit and quality of submission are different metrics, and only one of them is tracked.
The result: agencies optimise for volume. Five CVs where one is genuinely qualified is not a failure from the agency's perspective. It is the model working as designed.
What would have to change
First, technical fit is verified against the actual role requirements, not the job title. "Commissioning engineer" is not a skill. "Commissioning engineer with experience on ABB's Ability Symphony Plus DCS, who has worked on substations above 132kV" is a skill set.
Second, the obvious behavioural mismatches are caught before submission. The agencies that figure out how to deliver evidence of capability, not just a formatted CV, will be the ones that survive the next decade.