Omar Messado sets a 90-day standard for evaluating procurement talent

New York City, New York Sep 22, 2026 (Issuewire.com) - Omar Messado has spent two decades in transportation procurement, most of it directing teams responsible for rolling stock acquisitions, operations, contract management, and design-build initiatives. Along the way he built a habit: instead of waiting for an annual review to decide if a new hire is working out, he checks in at 90 days.

He is now writing that habit down as a formal personal standard and sharing it publicly.

"I don't believe in waiting a year to find out if someone is set up to succeed," Messado said. "Ninety days is enough time to see how a person handles a real deadline, a difficult vendor, and a mistake. What I'm looking for isn't perfection. It's whether they know how to recover." 

It is also important to receive the new hire's input on the work itself and set a strong foundation to sustain employee retention. He has learned over years that the business of human resources is a very difficult field to manage and satisfy

What the 90-day check covers

The standard has three parts, each tied to a question Messado asks himself about a team member rather than a checklist he hands them.

Week one to four: does the work match the words. Messado monitors whether a new hire's actual output, contract drafts, vendor comparisons, cost analyses, lines up with how they described their own experience in an interview.

Week five to eight: how they handle a mistake. Every procurement program produces an error somewhere, a missed deadline, a bad number in a report, a vendor issue that surfaces late. Messado says the second month is when he watches how a person owns a problem rather than how they avoid one.

"Mistakes get made. That's not the issue," he said. "The issue is whether someone hides it or brings it to me early enough that we can fix it together."

Week nine to twelve: whether they can explain their own reasoning. By the third month, Messado expects a team member to walk them through why they made a sourcing recommendation or a contract call, not just what the recommendation was.

"If someone can only tell me what, they're not ready to run their own piece of a project yet," he said. "I need the why too."

Why he is publishing it now

Messado said he decided to put the standard in writing after years of using it informally with procurement staff on many capital programs and rolling stock initiatives.

"I've applied some version of this for a long time without ever calling it anything," he said. "Writing it down makes it something I can actually hand to another manager, instead of something that just lives in my head."

He said the standard is meant less as a scoring tool and more as a conversation starter between a manager and a new hire.

"A 90-day check isn't a test someone passes or fails," Messado said. "It's a conversation. I use it to figure out where I need to spend more time coaching, and where someone is already solid and just needs room to work."

Applying it beyond procurement

Messado said the same three-part structure holds up outside procurement work, in any role where someone is new to a team and learning how decisions get made.

"The details change depending on the job," he said. "But the pattern doesn't. Watch if the work matches the story. Watch how they handle the first mistake. Watch if they can explain their own thinking by month three. That tells you almost everything you need to know."

He said he plans to keep using the standard with his own teams going forward and will share more detail on how he applies it as procurement programs move through new hiring cycles.

To read more, visit the website here.

About Omar Messado

Omar Messado is a procurement professional based in New York, New York. He has spent more than 20 years in transportation procurement, including senior roles overseeing rolling stock acquisitions, operations, contract management, and design-build initiatives for major transit programs. He holds a BBA in finance from Iona College and an MS in transportation management from the Civil Engineering division of Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

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