If you already use an agency sometimes, fractional recruiting can run alongside it. Fractional recruiting is a flat monthly fee that covers sourcing and screening for every role you have open. You make it work by assigning exclusive role ownership in writing. You route every candidate through one tracked submission path.
Put recurring roles on the flat monthly fee, and reserve the agency for true one-off searches. Then add two guardrails. Don’t let both channels cover the same role family, because candidate ownership clauses typically run 6 to 12 months. And run one evaluation standard and one scorecard, so the same hiring bar applies no matter who sourced the candidate.
Split the Work by Role Before Either Starts
You greenlight an agency search and a fractional recruiter at the same time, and by week two they’re both chasing the same sysadmin. Now you’re arbitrating who owns the candidate instead of running interviews.
Ownership goes by role family, in writing, before either side starts submitting candidates. Leave it vague and you spend your week reconciling duplicate submissions and shutting down overlapping outreach.
Keep the monthly fee on the roles you hire repeatedly, and use the agency only for a named, rare search. That division matches incentives.
Which Roles Go Where
Recurring delivery roles do better as a steady monthly engagement than as a string of one-off contingency placements, and price is part of why. One month at $1,500 on a six-month commitment is a fraction of a $24,000 placement fee on a $120,000 role. Contingency also pays recruiters to close placements, not to improve your hiring process, so it makes an expensive default for seats you refill every year.
A practical way to draw the line for an MSP (managed service provider):
| Role Type (MSP Examples) | Primary Owner | Why the Split Holds Up |
|---|---|---|
| Recurring delivery hires you staff every year (Tier 3 service techs, L2/L3 help desk, sysadmins, network, cloud and security engineers, service coordinators, service managers) | Fractional recruiting on a flat monthly fee | You want a repeatable funnel across several open roles at once, not a one-off placement win. |
| One-off hard searches with unusually tight requirements (senior leadership, niche architecture, a seat you have never hired before) | Agency, for a named role and defined window | You’re buying reach for one specific search, then turning it off. The agency never drifts into roles your monthly engagement already covers. |
If you’re unsure where a role belongs, ask if you’ll hire it again within 12 months. If you will, build it into the monthly engagement so your process gets better each time you run it.
Exclusivity by Role and One Shared Scorecard
Skip these two guardrails and the cheapest hire on paper becomes the most expensive later, when someone claims they introduced the candidate first. Worse, your two channels end up hiring to different standards.
First, make each search exclusive to one owner, in writing, for a defined window. Don’t let both parties help on the same Tier 3 service tech or senior architect. Require every submission to arrive in one inbox or ATS, dated, so you always know who sent whom first. That record is what keeps a 6 to 12 month candidate-ownership clause from turning into a surprise fee.
Second, run one evaluation standard and one scorecard for every source, through the same interview process. We screen for integrity first, then attitude, then cognitive ability, then personality, and an agency candidate gets the same screen as one we sourced. If the agency can fast-track candidates around your screen, you’ll blame the channel for a bad hire the process let through.
Run both channels for a quarter under that one scorecard and the comparison becomes yours. You get cost per hire and time to fill for each, measured on your own roles, against a typical 4 to 12 weeks for a quality technical hire. Tracking the same pipeline numbers every week on both sides is what lets you compare them at all.
If fractional looks right on paper and you want to test it against your own hiring plan, schedule a 30-minute call with Discovered and we’ll run the numbers with you.
