An IT recruiting agency finds, screens and delivers the technical staff you can’t pull off a job board, from L2 and L3 help desk and Tier 3 service techs through sysadmins, network, cloud and security engineers, service managers and IT leadership. Discovered Search does that work for a flat monthly fee instead of a percentage of each salary, so your cost to hire stops climbing every time you hire someone good.
What the Monthly Fee Covers
Every open role in the engagement gets the whole process. We source, screen, run structured evaluations, coordinate the interviews and check references. We source and screen without a cap inside the engagement, so a search that needs three rounds of candidates costs you no more than one that fills on the first round.
Engagements run month to month for up to 12 months, and every one carries a 30-day money-back guarantee. Most companies pay $1,500 a month on a six-month commitment. Month to month is $2,500. Advertising usually costs nothing on top, and about $300 a month per role at the very most when a hard search needs paid reach.
Time to fill runs 4 to 12 weeks for a quality hire, depending on how difficult the role is. That matches or beats contingent search timing, and you’re not paying a placement fee to get it.
Flat Monthly Fee Against a Percentage of Salary
Two numbers decide most of these conversations. A $120,000 network engineer placed by a contingency agency at 20 percent costs you $24,000, for that one hire. Six months of fractional recruiting at $1,500 a month costs $9,000 and covers every role you open in those six months.
| Model | What you pay | Built for |
|---|---|---|
| Fractional recruiting (what we do) | $1,500 a month on a six-month commitment, or $2,500 month to month, all open roles covered | Companies making 2 to 3 technical hires a quarter with no dedicated internal recruiter |
| Contingency IT agency | 20 to 30 percent of first-year salary, per hire | A one-off hire every few years |
| Retained executive search | A retainer against one leadership seat | A single high-stakes leadership hire |
| Self-serve hiring platform | $1,400 a year | Companies under 50 employees who want to run their own hiring |
The fractional recruiting vs contingency breakdown walks that comparison in more detail, and recruitment process outsourcing covers where the enterprise version of this model starts to earn its keep instead.
The Roles We Fill
Help desk at L2 and L3, Tier 3 service techs, sysadmins, network engineers, cloud engineers, security engineers, service managers, vCIOs, operations leaders and the outside salespeople who sell technical work. The full list of what the retainer covers is on the roles page.
For managed service providers we run a dedicated MSP recruiting practice, because hiring at a 10 to 50 person MSP is its own animal. The owner does the recruiting, the service desk is already behind, and the best engineers in town already have jobs. We also recruit in construction, accounting, architecture and engineering, and home health.
How the Screening Works
Hiring here runs on the FACT Driven Hiring System, which stands for Framework, Attraction, Candidate evaluation and Training. We evaluate candidates in a fixed order, integrity first, then attitude, then cognitive ability, then personality, because personality predicts on-the-job performance least well of the four and most hiring processes weight it most heavily.
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.” That’s the gap this service fills. You can see the mechanics in how we find candidates, how we screen candidates, and how we handle salary expectations before an offer goes out.
When an IT Recruiting Agency Is Not the Right Call
If you make dozens of technical hires a year across several locations, a full enterprise RPO program with a dedicated team fits better than a fractional retainer. If you hire one engineer every three years, a single contingency fee stings but you can live with it. If you already employ a full-time recruiter who fills your roles on time, you don’t need us. And if you have fewer than 50 employees and would rather run hiring yourself, the self-serve platform at $1,400 a year is the cheaper answer.
For one senior leadership seat where the search has to stay confidential and finish, retained executive search is the right instrument, not a monthly retainer covering everything.
Everywhere in between, which is most companies making 2 to 12 technical hires a year, a flat monthly fee gets the work done for less than one placement fee. Bring your last fill and your next two open roles and we’ll price both models against your real hiring plan, and we’ll say so plainly if the answer is that you don’t need an agency at all. More background is in our guides to IT recruitment and what an IT recruiter does day to day.