How do fractional recruiters work with startups?

A fractional recruiting function works inside your company, on a flat monthly fee, running sourcing, screening, scheduling and offer support in your own ATS. It is not one person on set days: a recruiting team works your roles under your brand, a recruitment manager oversees the work, and you get a single point of contact. That is the difference that matters. An agency sends candidates to you from the outside and charges a percentage when one is hired. This model behaves like the in-house recruiting function you have not built yet, and the cost does not move when the salary does.

What does the engagement actually look like?

A typical month, in order:

1. Intake. A working session per role: what the hire owns, the two or three outcomes they are measured on, the salary band, and who sits on the interview loop. Roles that skip this step are the ones that stall at week six.
2. Market map. Before any outreach, a written view of where the people are, roughly how many exist in your geography and band, and what they are currently paid. This is often where a role gets redefined, because the brief and the budget do not meet.
3. Outbound sourcing. Direct approaches to people who are not applying anywhere. This is the bulk of the work on any competitive role.
4. Screening. First conversations, written scorecards against the agreed outcomes, and a shortlist with reasons rather than a stack of forwarded CVs.
5. Process management. Scheduling, interviewer prep, feedback chasing, and keeping the clock short enough that you are not losing people between stages.
6. Offer and close. Benchmarking, the offer conversation, counter-offer management, and staying with the candidate through to the start date.

Everything lands in your ATS as it happens. Nothing is held back as leverage, because nothing is billed per hire.

How is that different from an agency?

	Fractional or embedded	Contingency agency	In-house recruiter
Cost shape	Flat monthly, covers the roles in scope	Percentage of salary, per hire	Salary, benefits, tools, management
Cost of hire five	Unchanged	Another 20-25% of a salary	Unchanged
Works in	Your ATS, your email, your brand	Their database	Yours
Who does the work	A recruiting team, overseen by a recruitment manager, one point of contact	One consultant with a roster of other clients	One person
Incentive	Fill the roles in scope, keep the pipeline warm	Place a candidate, any candidate, first	Long-term team quality
What you keep	Pipeline, notes, market map	The one hire	Everything
Best when	Hiring is consistent and ongoing, budget certainty matters	You may not hire at all	Continuous hiring, indefinitely

The honest comparison is predictable versus variable, and on cost it is not close. One hire on contingency at 25% of a $150,000 salary is $37,500. A three month engagement with us at the one to three role tier is $15,000 and covers every hire made inside it. Contingency is more expensive from the first hire. The single exception is that you owe nothing if nobody is hired, so if you genuinely may not hire, it is the cheaper gamble.

Our own pricing is flat and set by the number of live roles: $5,000 a month for one to three, $7,500 for four to six, $10,000 for seven or more. It does not rise with the salary you offer and it is never charged per hire.

Why does the embedded part matter so much?

Because most of what slows a startup search down is not sourcing. It is latency.

Days between a candidate finishing an interview and hearing back. A hiring manager who has not written feedback. A loop that cannot be scheduled because three calendars never align. An offer waiting on a band nobody approved. None of that is fixed by more CVs arriving in an inbox, which is the main thing an external agency can send you.

A team working inside your company can chase the feedback, prep the interviewer and get the band signed off, because they can see the process rather than only its output. That is the part founders usually notice first, and it is why the model is worth more than the fee difference suggests.

When is a fractional recruiting function the wrong call?

Often, and any provider who says otherwise is selling.

• Occasional hiring, strong network. Run it yourself. Your pitch converts better than anyone else's and the cost is time you already spend. It is still worth a conversation, because the hiring infrastructure and the process can be improved before the volume arrives.
• Pre-product-market-fit. Roles change shape monthly. Sourcing against a brief that expires in six weeks builds a pipeline for a job that no longer exists.
• One senior hire and you may not proceed. Contingency costs nothing if nobody signs. If you do hire, it is the expensive route, and we run retained search work on a flat monthly fee that comes in below a percentage-based retainer.
• Continuous hiring across functions, indefinitely. At that volume the fixed cost of an in-house recruiter, roughly $110,000 to $140,000, rising to $150,000 to $200,000 for technical recruiters in the Bay Area and other major tech hubs, plus benefits and tools, starts to spread sensibly. Getting you to that point, and helping you hire that person, is the intended end of the engagement.

The threshold that usually matters is hiring that has become consistent and ongoing rather than one or two hires a year, with real growth behind it, or a founder losing more than a day a week to hiring. There is more on that line in when does a startup need a recruiter.

What should you have ready before starting?

Three things, and an engagement that starts without them spends its first fortnight getting them:

• A written role definition with the outcomes the hire owns, not a list of technologies.
• A decided interview loop with named interviewers who have agreed to the time.
• An approved salary band. Offer stage is the most expensive place to discover the number was never signed off.

How do you compare providers?

Ask four questions and the field narrows quickly.

• How many roles are in scope for the fee, and what happens when we open another one?
• Whose ATS does the work live in, and what do we keep at the end?
• Who is doing the sourcing, who is overseeing it, and who is our point of contact?
• What does the first thirty days produce, specifically, and what is the commitment? Ours is three months to start, then month to month.

The last one separates a function from activity. A month should produce a market map, a live pipeline on every role in scope, and a shortlist on at least one. If the answer is a number of CVs, that is volume, not progress.

Our own pricing and what sits inside it is on the pricing page, and the mechanics of the engagement model are on embedded recruiting.