Why Metcalf Search exists in this form
Metcalf Search is a fractional recruiting firm founded by Jay Metcalf after twenty-five years of watching small and medium businesses lose money, lose people, and lose nerve to the same five hiring mistakes. Metcalf Search exists because the two options most SMB owners think they have for hiring help (contingency agencies and full-time recruiters) are both wrong for most companies under two hundred employees. Metcalf Search was built specifically for SMBs, in a format that works for the clients we serve and is sustainable for the team running it.
The pattern Jay kept seeing
Across hundreds of searches over twenty-five years, the pattern was almost always the same. An owner would delay a hire until something broke. They would call a contingency firm, pay roughly a quarter of the first-year salary for a candidate, and either watch that candidate quit inside a year or decide the fee was not worth repeating. They would then try to do it themselves and discover that hiring is its own job. By the third or fourth cycle of that pattern, they had concluded they were bad at hiring. They were not bad at hiring. They were trying to do it without infrastructure.
Metcalf Search exists to be that infrastructure.
Why fractional
Fractional means the recruiting function is real, continuous, and embedded, but it is sized to what an SMB actually needs and priced as a flat monthly fee instead of a per-hire bounty. The flat fee changes the incentives. A contingency recruiter gets paid more if you hire faster and at a higher salary. A fractional recruiter gets paid the same whether the hire takes six weeks or twelve, and whether the salary is $65,000 or $145,000. That difference matters more than it looks like it should.
The Book
Jay is writing a book on small business hiring. With 25 years of experience and stories and a focus on the science of selection, psychology, and how small business works, Jay is writing playbook, philosophy, and research study all in one.
What you can expect
If you call, you get Jay on the first call. If you sign on, you get an embedded recruiting function, not a vendor relationship. If the model does not fit your business, you will be told so without a soft pitch for an off-ramp service. See Contact for what the first conversation looks like and Fractional Recruiting for the model itself.