Why is it so hard for small businesses to hire good people right now?
The reason small businesses struggle to hire is not skill or effort. It is time. Recruiting is a process, and a good process has to run consistently. Big Corporate, Inc. wins on hiring because they have a dedicated recruiter or a full TA team whose entire job, all day every day, is running that process for the business. Small businesses could not afford that level of dedicated recruiting function before fractional recruiting existed. That is what Metcalf Search was built for: to give small businesses the same consistent, dedicated hiring capability Big Corporate, Inc. has, at a fraction of the cost.
When does a small business need to start working with a recruiter?
As soon as they start hiring. Think of recruiting like tennis. Everyone knows the basic idea: hit the ball over the net. But ask the average person what "30 love" actually means, or whether they could score a single point against Serena Williams. Recruiting works the same way. You can play it as an amateur, and most small business owners do, but if you want to play at a professional level you need a real coach. The earlier a small business brings real recruiting expertise into the work, the less expensive every hire becomes for the life of the business.
How is fractional recruiting different from a staffing or contingency agency?
There are three buyer choices and they look nothing alike. A staffing agency charges you an hourly markup, typically 35 to 40 percent over what the candidate is actually paid. That margin is money that could have gone to paying better candidates more. Sometimes that is the right trade, the way a payday loan is the right trade when the car has to be fixed by Monday and you need to get to work. It is rarely a good long-term hiring solution. A contingency agency charges 20 to 30 percent of first-year salary when a hire is made, with a guarantee period after that of usually 30 days, maybe 90 if you negotiate well. That is a $15,000-plus invoice for one person with no support after the guarantee ends. How many of those checks can a small business afford to write in a year for a candidate the agency happened to have on hand and pushed the quickest? Fractional recruiting sits in a better place. The work is building your pipeline, your hiring process, and yes, getting people hired, the way an internal recruiter would for Big Corporate, Inc. The result is a consistent process you can run yourself over time, or keep the fractional recruiter on board to run for you while you focus on the business.
What is fractional recruiting?
Fractional recruiting is a hiring partnership where a recruiter is embedded in a small business at a flat monthly fee. It sits between agency contingency fees and a full-time internal recruiter. The recruiter functions as part of the business: building the pipeline, running searches, handling candidate experience, and improving the hiring process over time.
What is the STACK Method?
STACK is the framework Metcalf Search uses to organize hiring work and diagnose where the process is breaking down: Source (where qualified candidates come from), Tempo (the rhythm of the search), Assess (how to evaluate before offering), Close (turning offers into accepts), and Keep (how you retain people over time). Every hiring problem a small business has lives in one of those five places, which is what makes STACK useful as a diagnostic. Each letter has a dedicated page on this site.
What does it actually cost to make a hire?
The salary is the visible part. The hidden costs include sourcing time, interview hours across multiple managers, agency fees if applicable, onboarding ramp time before the new hire produces, and the cost of getting it wrong. A bad hire in a small business commonly costs 1.5 to 3 times the role's annual salary once turnover, re-recruiting, and lost momentum are added up. Recruiting is one of the highest-ROI areas a small business can invest in.