Yes, partly. Most early exits start before the new person’s first day. Someone writes the job description in a spare half hour, the fee model pays out on a fast close, and nobody owns the first 90 days. We can work on the first two with you. The third one is yours.
A replacement guarantee is not a retention plan. It refills the seat and returns none of the months you already paid for. So two parts of early turnover belong to the hiring process, and one belongs to what happens after the offer.
Early Exits Usually Start in the Job Description
Someone who leaves in month five usually took a job that didn’t exist as described. That looks like a candidate problem. More often the seat was wrong before anyone applied.
At a managed service provider (MSP), an HR generalist or the service manager usually writes the posting, in whatever hour they can find. 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 you advertise an L2 service desk tech, and the real seat is queue coverage plus project work plus client reporting when the vCIO is slammed. Or on-call never comes up until week two, when the rotation adds them and their evenings change. Or the pay band is the number the last person accepted, for a job that has grown since.
None of that is a screening failure. A structured interview can only measure the job you describe to it.
Four Things to Write Down Before You Post
Framing is the F in the FACT Driven Hiring System, ahead of Attraction, Candidate evaluation and Training. What it produces is short and dull, and it’s the highest-value hour of the search:
- One scope, written the way the job runs
- Real hours, including on-call and after-hours change windows
- A pay range that matches that scope, not the last person’s number
- Reporting and decision rights, including what gets overridden when pressure hits
A posting that says all of that loses some candidates. That’s the point. The ones who opt out would have left in month five anyway, and a salary and a manager’s attention would have gone with them. On a fractional engagement the framing step runs on every open role rather than on the one you’re most worried about.
What the Fee Model Does to the Second Hire
Even a good search leaves you exposed if the hire doesn’t stay. What that costs depends on how you paid for the first one.
On contingency the fee pays out at the close, and no part of it reaches month seven. At 20 to 30 percent of first-year salary, a $120,000 role at 20 percent costs $24,000 at signature. If that person leaves in five months, you’re back in a typical 4 to 12 week fill with the seat open and the queue still moving.
A replacement guarantee covers the fee and not the months. You already paid five months of salary, and your service manager already spent the interview hours twice. A credit against the next placement returns neither one. That difference between a credit and a cost drives the argument between the two fee models.
A flat monthly fee changes what a second search costs. It doesn’t lower the odds you need one. Fractional recruiting puts an outside recruiter on your whole hiring plan for a monthly rate, at $1,500 a month on a six-month commitment or $2,500 month to month, with a 30-day money-back guarantee on the engagement. Re-running a search costs no new placement fee, and the fee covers every open role you have. That removes the pressure to call a weak close good enough. It’s the closest a fee model gets to affecting retention, and it still makes nobody stay.
The Part We Can’t Do for You
Training is the T in FACT, and it’s the step that stays with you. We can describe the job to a candidate down to the on-call rotation. We can’t be there on their second Tuesday.
Three questions decide most of the first 90 days, and none of them cost anything:
- Who owns the new tech’s first week, by name? “The team” means nobody.
- Are your standard builds and client quirks documented anywhere, or is every answer in one senior person’s head?
- Is the mentor you chose your busiest tech? If so, the mentoring won’t happen.
A new hire who can’t get an answer by Thursday has formed an opinion about the place by Friday. No interview catches that, because it hasn’t happened yet. Fix those three and you’ll keep techs that a better search alone would have lost.
Candidate evaluation is the middle step and a separate question with its own answer, which is how we test for MSP pace and client-facing judgment. We evaluate integrity first, then attitude, then cognitive ability, then personality, because personality predicts least.
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.
