You pay a monthly fee on the calendar. You pay a placement fee when a hire starts. The monthly fee doesn’t move when the salary does.
If you run a managed service provider (MSP) and hire two to five technicians a year, that one difference decides your cash flow and what your second open role costs. A monthly fee covers every role you have open at once. A placement fee buys one seat.
What Our Monthly Fee Buys and When It’s Due
Our fractional recruiting engagements bill monthly, on the calendar, not on a hire. The rate is $1,500 a month on a six-month commitment, or $2,500 month to month. You pay it in a month when nobody starts, and you pay the same amount in a month when two technicians do.
The fee covers every role open in the engagement. Sourcing, screening, structured assessments, interview coordination and reference checks are all included. Sourcing and screening run unlimited for as long as the engagement does. The screen runs in a fixed order before anyone reaches your calendar. Every engagement carries a 30-day money-back guarantee. Ad spend is typically $0, and about $300 a month per role at the most when a role needs it.
So the monthly fee buys a recruiter’s working week rather than an introduction. Fletcher puts it plainly. “HR people are not recruiters. Making a compliance admin focused HR person do recruiting is like making an accountant do sales.”
What a Placement Fee Attaches To
A placement fee attaches to the hire. You pay it when the person starts, and it’s usually 20 to 30 percent of first-year salary.
A $120,000 systems engineer at 20 percent is a $24,000 fee, for that one seat. Open a second role in the same quarter and you owe a second fee. Raise the band from $110,000 to $120,000 to win the candidate, and at 20 percent the fee rises by $2,000 with it.
That last point is the one operators notice late. The recruiter’s pay scales with the salary you approve, so the model rewards a close at a higher number. We work the same comparison out at more length on our fractional recruiting cost page.
Which One Costs Less at Your Volume
At two to three hires a quarter, the monthly fee is cheaper by a wide margin. Even at one hire, a month of it costs less than one placement fee. Typical fill runs 4 to 12 weeks for a quality hire, so a six-month engagement covers a normal search with room to spare.
The shapes differ as much as the totals. A monthly fee is a steady line item while the search runs. A placement fee is one large charge on the start date, and you don’t control its size without changing the salary.
| Flat Monthly Fee | Placement Fee | |
|---|---|---|
| What triggers the charge | Each month of the engagement | A hire’s start date |
| What the price is tied to | Time, not salary | Percent of first-year salary |
| How many open roles it covers | All open roles in scope | One role per fee |
| What a second hire in the same quarter costs | $0 beyond the monthly fee | Another full placement fee |
| What you pay in a month with no hire | The monthly fee | $0 |
A placement fee is still the reasonable buy when you hire once every few years with no second role waiting behind it. Nothing else would be there for a monthly engagement to absorb. Our fractional recruiting vs contingency comparison covers the cases in between.
Most of the MSPs we work with have two to five technical hires a year, no internal recruiter, and a second role open before the first one closes. That is the shape the monthly fee is priced for.
