A software engineer recruiter finds and screens the developers who don’t answer job posts. Discovered Search runs that search for product teams, IT companies and managed service providers (MSPs), on a flat monthly fee rather than a percentage of the hire. The fee is $1,500 a month on a six-month commitment, or $2,500 a month with no commitment, and it covers every seat you have open in that window. Typical time to fill is 4 to 12 weeks for a quality hire, and every engagement carries a 30-day money-back guarantee.
The Engineering Seats a Flat Fee Covers
Back end, front end and full stack developers. Mobile engineers. DevOps and platform engineers who own the pipeline and the cloud bill. Data engineers. QA and test automation. The engineering manager or team lead who runs standup and owns the delivery date.
One flat monthly fee covers all of them at once, along with whatever else you have open. Hire a full stack developer and a service desk tech in the same quarter and the pair costs what either one costs alone. The roles a flat monthly fee covers lists the rest, and IT recruiting covers the infrastructure side of the bench.
A VP of engineering or a CTO is a different search, usually retained and usually confidential. That one runs as an executive search, and we’ll say so up front rather than putting it on the monthly fee.
Why 400 Applicants Makes the Seat Harder
Post a remote developer role and several hundred applications arrive inside a week. Almost none of them fit, and sorting them is a full week of somebody’s attention.
The applications also read better than they used to. A resume and a cover letter now cost a candidate about a minute to produce, so polish stopped carrying information. Volume went up and signal went down.
The one person who can tell a working engineer from a convincing resume is your senior engineer or your CTO. That is the calendar you can’t spend on screening, because every hour there comes out of shipping. 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.”
So stop trying to produce more applicants. Reach the engineers who never applied, and cut what gets to your team down to a short list worth their afternoon. How we find candidates covers the sourcing side.
Who Judges the Code
You do. We build the process so that judging it costs your team as little time as possible.
Our side is the scorecard, the sourcing, the structured interview, the reference checks and the order those happen in. We screen integrity first, then attitude, then cognitive ability, and we weigh personality last, because personality predicts on-the-job performance least well. How we screen candidates has the detail.
Your side is the technical bar: the code review, the system design conversation, whatever pairing exercise your team trusts. We schedule it, we prepare the candidate for it, and we keep the number of candidates who reach it small. A recruiter who offers to grade your architecture decisions is selling you something.
The search itself runs on the FACT Driven Hiring System, which is Framework, Attraction, Candidate evaluation and Training. Framework is the scorecard, written before we contact anyone. Training is the first 90 days, so you measure a new engineer against that scorecard in the first quarter instead of at a review a year later.
Direct Hire, Not Contract Staffing
We fill permanent seats. If what you need is three contractors for a six-month build, or an offshore team working to a written spec, a staffing firm is the right call and we’re not.
The distinction is worth making here, because a lot of firms sell bench rental by the hour and call it software engineering recruiting. A flat monthly fee buys a search for somebody who stays.
What a Software Engineer Recruiter Costs
Three models, and the right one depends on how many seats you open a year.
| Model | What you pay | Right when |
|---|---|---|
| Fractional recruiting (our flat monthly fee) | $1,500 a month on a six-month commitment, or $2,500 month to month, covering every open role | You open 2 to 3 seats a quarter, or a developer alongside other technical hires |
| Contingency agency | 20 to 30 percent of first-year salary, per hire. A $120,000 developer at 20 percent is $24,000 | One opportunistic hire every few years |
| Retained executive search | A retainer against one leadership seat, quoted on the search | A VP of engineering or CTO, where the search has to stay confidential |
The percentage model prices by salary. It does not price by difficulty. A $120,000 developer at 20 percent is $24,000, and the same agency bills a fraction of that for a help desk seat the recruiter spent the same hours filling. Software pays well, so the percentage model costs the most exactly where you hire most often.
Six months at $1,500 a month is $9,000, and it covers every role you open in that window. One contingency placement on that developer is $24,000 and covers one. Advertising usually costs nothing on top, about $300 a month per role at the very most. How the monthly fee works sets out what the fee includes.
When You Should Not Hire Us
If you hire one engineer every three years, a contingency agency is the cheaper bet and we’ll tell you so. If a recruiter on your staff fills your seats on time, you don’t need a second one. If you’re under 50 employees and you want to run hiring yourself, the self-serve platform is $1,400 a year and that’s the better answer. If you need contractors, see above.
A flat monthly fee earns its keep at the company with a developer seat open now, two or three more hires coming, and nobody whose actual job is filling them. Bring us the seat, whatever scorecard exists, and what the last person in it shipped or failed to ship. We’ll price it against your hiring plan and say which model fits, including the case where it isn’t us. Fractional recruiting has the full service, and our guide to vetting an engineering recruiter covers what to ask before you sign anyone.