All of them. Help desk, sysadmin, project tech, service coordinator, and every other seat you open while the engagement runs.
A fractional recruiting retainer buys a recruiter’s time and process for a flat monthly fee. That fee covers every open role at your company, whether you commit for six months or go month to month. The one exception is a true executive or a rare specialist, and we’ll get to that below.
Every Open Role, One Monthly Fee
Most managed service providers (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. A retainer built around one search would leave you paying twice.
The flat fee works the other way. When a new seat opens, the recruiting work moves 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 shifts as your priorities do.
Here’s what “covers” means in practice for each role: sourcing candidates who aren’t applying anywhere, screening against the actual job rather than the job title, structured evaluation, interview coordination, and reference checks. The same process runs for a help desk hire and a service manager hire. That consistency matters, because a recruiter’s time costs the same whichever seat is open.
It also means the pricing question is simpler than it looks. You’re paying $1,500 a month on a six-month commitment or $2,500 month to month, and the number doesn’t change when your second or third role opens. The sweet spot is two to three hires a quarter, though the model works at lower volume too, because one month costs less than one contingency fee.
The Roles an MSP Retainer Usually Covers
On a retainer built for recruiting for MSPs, the roles we fill most often are:
- L1, L2 and L3 help desk
- Tier 3 service techs and escalation roles
- Sysadmins and senior support engineers
- Project techs for implementation and delivery
- Network engineers, cloud engineers and security engineers
- Service coordinators and dispatch
- Service managers and help desk managers
- vCIOs and other client-facing technical leads
- Outside sales roles tied to growth
- Operations leaders who keep the engine running
The list runs from frontline to mid-level leadership on purpose. Owners sometimes treat help desk hiring as beneath real recruiting and patch the gap with whoever is available. Those are the hires that set your service quality, and a recruiter who knows the difference between L2 and L3 fills them faster and misses less. If you want the longer version of how the model fits an MSP’s hiring pattern, read how fractional recruiting works for MSPs.
Where the Retainer Stops
The retainer doesn’t cover a true executive hire or a rare 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 shape. Candidates are fewer, outreach is higher touch, the process needs tighter confidentiality, and the stakes of a miss are different. Discovered runs those as retained search, a separate engagement with its own structure, rather than folding them into the monthly flow.
The test is simple. If the role is one you’d expect to fill more than once over a few years, it belongs on the retainer. If it’s a one-time leadership search, it belongs in retained search. Either way, the 30-day money-back guarantee applies to the first month of a fractional engagement, so trying the retainer on your open seats carries no risk.
If you want to know whether your open roles fit the retainer, schedule a 30-minute call with Discovered and we’ll walk through them with you.
