You pay for retained search by the seat. You pay for fractional recruiting by the month.
That one difference answers most of the question. A managed service provider (MSP) hiring two to five technical staff a year fills a queue of ordinary seats. A per-seat price re-bills you every time the queue moves. A per-month price holds.
Four Ways Fractional and Retained Search Differ
Retained search is an exclusive, funded search for one seat, billed against the search rather than against a start date. Fractional recruiting rents you a recruiter by the month, and the fee covers every role you have open at the time.
Four things separate them. Each one changes what you spend and what you have running between hires.
| Fractional recruiting | Retained search | |
|---|---|---|
| What you are buying | Recruiting capacity by the month | An exclusive, funded search for one seat |
| Unit of price | Per month | Per seat |
| What triggers the fee | The calendar | The search engagement |
| Roles covered | Every role open that month | One role at a time |
| What it costs | $1,500 a month on six months, or $2,500 month to month | Quoted per search. Ask for the range on the seat |
| Best fit | A steady run of technical seats | Leadership seats and confidential replacements |
| What is left when the role is filled | The capacity carries into the next req | The engagement closes with the seat |
The monthly fee bills on the calendar, so it reads the same in a month when nobody starts and a month when two technicians do. Our page on how the monthly fee works covers the mechanics, including the 30-day money-back guarantee on every fractional engagement. Six months at the committed rate is $9,000, and that $9,000 covers every seat you have open across those six months, one or four.
Contingency recruiting is a third model, priced as a percentage of first-year salary and owed only when someone starts. A $120,000 role at 20 percent runs $24,000 per hire. This page is about the other two.
Why Per-Seat Pricing Costs You on Ongoing MSP Hiring
You close one hire, take a breath, and the next req opens with nobody running the funnel.
Two to five technical hires a year is four or five separately priced searches. In the weeks between them you have no recruiter at all, and a per-seat fee buys nothing in those gaps. The owner, the service manager, or an HR generalist with compliance work already on the desk picks up the outreach and the follow-up.
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.”
The usual failure in ongoing technical hiring isn’t a bad final decision. Nobody answers a strong candidate for nine days, the funnel goes cold, and the service desk keeps carrying the work. A quality technical hire typically takes four to twelve weeks, and most of that window is outreach and follow-up nobody owns.
A monthly engagement keeps sourcing and follow-up running between starts, across the seats the fee already covers, from help desk and Tier 3 techs through network, cloud and security engineers to service managers and ops leaders.
When Retained Search Is Still the Right Tool
Some MSP seats are single points of failure. A service delivery leader, a vCIO, an ops leader and a confidential replacement for someone still in the chair all qualify. Get one of those wrong and you pay for it in client retention and margin, long after the recruiting invoice.
An exclusive search buys one firm on that seat and a named consultant running it. You get a defined shortlist instead of a stream of applicants, plus discretion while the current occupant is still in the chair. You’re paying for the depth of the work, so the fee follows the search.
That is the work Discovered’s executive search runs, and our guide to when retained executive search is worth the fee walks through the structure and the terms. We quote retained per search, so ask for the range on the seat you have in mind.
One pass sorts most MSPs. Count the hires you expect in the next twelve months, then ask if any single one of them could sink the year on its own. Several ordinary seats point to fractional. One decisive seat points to retained. Plenty of MSPs we work with run both in the same year, and that combination is normal rather than a contradiction.
