What is fractional recruiting?

Fractional recruiting is renting an outsourced recruiting function, on a recurring fee, embedded in your team and your 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 deal with a single point of contact. It sits between the two options most growing companies are stuck choosing from: doing hiring yourself, or paying an agency a percentage of salary every time someone signs. You get the expertise and the process of an in-house recruiting function without carrying the salary through the months when you are not hiring.

The model is the same one behind a fractional CFO or a fractional CMO. Senior capability, bought in the fraction you actually need.

How does it work in practice?

• You engage on a defined scope, a set number of concurrent roles rather than a set number of hours.
• The team embeds in your process: your ATS, company email addresses, your interview loop. To candidates they read as part of your company.
• They run the full cycle. Intake, market mapping, outbound sourcing, screening, scheduling, offer support, close.
• The fee is flat and recurring, so it does not move when a hire lands and does not rise with the salary you offer.
• The first engagement runs three months, then month to month. When the hiring plan pauses, the engagement pauses. That optionality is the point.

Which model fits which situation?

Situation	Best fit	Why
Occasional hiring, strong network	Founder-led hiring	Your pitch converts better than anything external, and the cost is time you already spend
One hire and you may not proceed at all	Contingency	You pay only on a hire, so nothing if nobody signs. If you do hire it is the expensive route: 25% of a $150,000 salary is $37,500, where our three month engagement is $15,000 at the one to three role tier and covers every hire made in it
Hiring that has become consistent and ongoing, across several functions	Embedded or fractional	A recruiting team works your roles inside your company on a flat fee, with a recruitment manager overseeing the work and a single point of contact, so cost does not scale with the hire or the salary
One senior or confidential hire	Retained search	The problem is mapping a small market and approaching passive people, not processing volume. We run this on a flat monthly fee, which comes in below a percentage-based retainer
Continuous hiring across functions, indefinitely	In-house recruiter	At $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, the fixed cost only spreads sensibly at steady volume

The common mistake is choosing by company size. Choose by whether hiring is consistent and ongoing, how hard the roles are, and how long the need lasts.

Who actually uses it?

Three patterns come up repeatedly.

Funded startups after a raise, or as soon as headcount is approved. The hiring plan jumps from two roles to a dozen and the founder's calendar is the bottleneck within a month. Approved headcount is a real trigger here even before the round closes. This is the most common entry point.

Small businesses hiring in bursts. Two or three roles this quarter, none next quarter. A permanent recruiter is idle half the year, and an agency fee per hire is hard to plan around. There is more on this shape in fractional recruiting for small businesses.

Companies with an in-house team at capacity. One recruiter covering fifteen open roles is not covering fifteen open roles. An outsourced team absorbs the overflow without a permanent headcount decision.

What do you actually get for the fee?

This is the question worth pressing any provider on, because the answers vary more than the pricing does. Ours 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.

• A market map per role. How many people exist in your band and geography, where they work now, what they are paid. Often this changes the role before sourcing starts.
• Outbound sourcing. Direct approaches to people not applying anywhere. On competitive roles this is most of the work.
• Screening with written reasoning. A shortlist with scorecards against agreed outcomes, not a stack of forwarded CVs.
• Process ownership. Scheduling, interviewer prep, feedback chasing, and replying to the people who are not a fit before the silence turns into a Glassdoor review.
• Offer and close support. Benchmarking, the offer conversation, counter-offer management.
• Everything in your system. When the engagement ends you keep the pipeline, the notes and the map.

That last point is the structural difference from contingency. On an agency placement you keep the one hire. On an embedded engagement you keep the whole market you paid to have mapped.

What are the honest limitations?

• If you may not hire at all, contingency costs nothing. That is the one case it wins. Once you actually hire, contingency is more expensive from the first placement, not just at volume.
• It needs a real hiring plan. A function with one vague role spends the engagement waiting. If hiring is still one or two people a year, founder-led is normally the better answer for now.
• It cannot fix an undefined role. If the team disagrees about what the hire owns, no external person can settle that from the outside. That argument has to finish internally first.
• It does not remove you from the process. Founders still take final interviews and close candidates, because at early stage the founder is the strongest pitch the company has. The caveat is that founders are busy, and the thing that slips first is replying to candidates who are not a fit, which damages the employer brand over time. Founder-led is not automatically a better candidate experience.

How do you decide?

Look at whether hiring has become consistent and ongoing rather than one or two hires a year, and count the roles that are genuinely approved and open right now. Add up the hours the founding team spent on hiring last week from the calendar rather than from memory. Then look at the plan for the next two quarters.

Consistent ongoing hiring, more than a day a week gone, and real growth behind the plan: get help. Less than that: running it yourself is reasonable, and it is still worth a conversation, because even at low volume there is work worth doing on the hiring infrastructure, the interview process and the time it takes to fill a role, so you are not starting from zero when the plan does go up.

What an engagement costs and what sits inside it is on the pricing page.