Fractional Recruiting for Trades Companies

A flat monthly retainer that makes us your recruiting department. Instead of paying a five-figure fee each time a truck sits empty, you pay a predictable monthly amount and hiring becomes something that is always running: searches worked continuously, a bench of screened techs kept warm in your trade, and one or two placements a month included in the fee depending on plan.

This is the way companies too small for an in-house recruiter get one anyway. A trade-experienced recruiter costs $55,000 or more a year plus burden before they make a single hire. The retainer runs $3,500 to $4,500 a month depending on trade mix and hiring volume, and the lighter pipeline plan at $1,250 a month keeps sourcing warm for shops between hires, with a reduced flat fee when you do hire.

Week to week it looks like this: your open roles are worked daily by our sourcing systems and screened by a human; every Friday you get a plain-English pipeline email showing who is in motion, who interviews next week, and what the local market is paying; and each quarter we review the plan in twenty minutes. When a tech quits on a Tuesday, you are not starting a search from zero, because the bench already exists.

Terms are simple and written for small operators: three-month minimum, then month to month with 30-day notice. You can pause once every six months for up to 30 days instead of cancelling when things slow down. Any candidate we introduce stays fee-eligible for 12 months, and retainer placements carry a replacement guarantee: if a hire does not stick inside 90 days, we work the replacement search at priority, included.

Run the comparison on your own numbers. A shop that hires three techs in a year pays $22,500 to $27,000 in flat fees, or about $35,000 at 20% contingency on typical tech pay, and between those hires the pipeline goes cold. Twelve months of the $3,500 retainer is $42,000 with placements included, a bench that never goes cold, the weekly reporting, and the market data, which looks like more until you count the fourth hire, the faster fills, and the vacancy weeks that never happened.

At two hires a year the comparison gets closer and the pipeline plan often wins instead; at four or more the retainer is simply cheaper per hire. We will do this arithmetic with your real numbers on the first call and recommend the smaller product when the smaller product is right.

The retainer fits shops with 10 to 75 employees that expect to hire two or more techs over the next year, which in this trade, at normal turnover, is almost everyone that size. If you have a single urgent opening and no plans beyond it, a flat-fee search is the better buy and we will tell you so. If you are a one-truck owner-operator, neither product is right yet; take the free pay-band data and come back when truck two is real.