All of them. Help desk, sysadmin, project tech, service coordinator, engineer, service manager, outside sales, and every other seat you open while the engagement runs.
Fractional recruiting buys a recruiter’s time and process for a flat monthly fee, sometimes called a retainer. That fee covers every open role at your managed service provider (MSP), on a six-month commitment or month to month. The one exception is a true executive or a one-off specialist, and we run those searches separately.
Every Open Role, One Monthly Fee
Most MSPs hire in bursts. An L1 leaves in the same month a client contract adds enough ticket volume that you need an L3 to stop the repeat issues.
The monthly fee moves with you. When a new seat opens, the recruiting work shifts to it without a new contract, a new fee, or a reset in scope. When three seats are open at once, the searches run in parallel and the focus follows your priorities.
For each role, the fee covers sourcing, screening, structured assessments, interview coordination, and reference checks. We don’t cap sourcing or screening inside the engagement. The same process runs for a help desk hire and a service manager hire, and we’ve written up how we screen candidates for readers who want the detail.
The price is $1,500 a month on a six-month commitment, or $2,500 month to month, and it stays the same whichever seat is open. A recruiter’s hours cost the same on an L2 search as on a cloud engineer search.
A placement fee runs 20 to 30 percent of first-year salary, so a $120,000 engineer at 20 percent costs $24,000 for that one seat. The next seat is a new fee. The full mechanics are in how our monthly fee works.
The Roles We Fill for MSPs
When we’re recruiting for MSPs, these are the seats we fill most often.
| Part of the MSP | Seats we fill |
|---|---|
| Service desk | L1, L2 and L3 help desk, Tier 3 service techs, escalation roles |
| Engineering | Sysadmins, network engineers, cloud engineers, security engineers |
| Projects and delivery | Project techs, service coordinators, dispatch |
| Management | Service managers, help desk managers, operations leaders |
| Client-facing and growth | vCIOs, outside salespeople |
The table runs from frontline to management on purpose. Owners sometimes hand help desk hiring to whoever is available, usually HR or a hiring manager who already has a full job. As Fletcher Wimbush puts it: “HR people are not recruiters. Making a compliance admin focused HR person do recruiting is like making an accountant do sales.”
Frontline hires set your service quality. An L2 and an L3 are different searches, and so are a project tech and a service coordinator. A recruiter who knows the difference fills those seats faster and misses less often. For the longer version of how the model fits an MSP’s hiring pattern, read how fractional recruiting works for MSPs.
Where the Monthly Fee Stops, and What Else to Expect
The monthly fee doesn’t cover a true executive hire or a one-off specialist. When you need a president, a CEO, or the one person in the region who has run a security practice at scale, the search changes. Candidates are fewer, outreach is higher touch, and the process needs tighter confidentiality. We run those as retained search, a separate engagement with its own structure.
One question tells the two apart. Would you expect to fill this role more than once over a few years? A yes puts the role on the monthly fee. A one-time leadership search belongs in retained search.
For every role on the monthly fee, plan on a typical fill of 4 to 12 weeks for a quality hire. The range depends on how hard the role is to fill. In our experience, that timing is as good as or better than contingent search.
We bill almost nothing on top. Ad spend on a search is typically $0. When a role needs paid ads, the spend is about $300 a month per role at the most.
The model fits best at two to three hires a quarter. It works at lower volume too, because one month costs less than one placement fee. Every fractional engagement comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
