An empty seat isn't a recruiting problem. It's an execution gap.

The four or five people you would most want are not in the pile at all.

Your base time-to-fill is defined as days to a signed acceptance when the first offer is accepted, so the decline penalty is added once and never double counted. The result stands without vacancy cost.

Good. We work best alongside strong internal teams. This isn't us versus them. On difficult searches we create a parallel pipeline that gives the hiring team another view of the market.

One of two things happens. Your internal team is already surfacing the strongest available talent and our work confirms it. Or we introduce people your existing process did not reach. Both outcomes are useful.

Your internal team stays at the center of the hiring operation and owns the employer brand. We become additional search capacity when specialization, bandwidth, urgency or access to a difficult talent market becomes the constraint. Compare and contrast, not replacement.

Then you probably don't need another firm doing the same thing. The question isn't how many recruiters are on the search. It's whether each one is expanding the talent market you can see, or simply producing more names from the same visible pool.

We would rather take responsibility for one difficult search than become the fourth firm generating activity across five. Give us the role that is still open despite the existing coverage. If our shortlist looks exactly like everyone else's, you have your answer. If it doesn't, you just expanded the market.

There is usually a reason for that policy. Maybe a previous firm charged a significant fee and produced mediocre results. Maybe hiring managers were overwhelmed with résumés. Those are reasonable reasons to be skeptical.

We're not asking you to change your recruiting model. We're asking you to test the assumption on one difficult role. On a contingency search there is no fee unless you hire someone we introduce. If we don't improve the market you can see, don't continue.

Because the fee isn't the real comparison. The comparison is the fee versus another 30, 60 or 90 days of an empty seat. Another month of engineering interviews. Another finalist who declines. Another roadmap item that moves right. And another month in which your competitors keep hiring, shipping and learning.

If your internal team can produce the right hire faster, use them. But if a specialized partner changes the outcome, measure the fee against the cost of leaving the problem unresolved, not against zero. The cheapest process is the one that gets the right person productive fastest.

Sometimes. LinkedIn is useful. It just isn't the entire talent market.

We start with the companies, teams and environments where the capability actually lives, then expand the evidence surface through patents, open-source contribution, published research, conference participation and career patterns. The objective isn't obscurity for its own sake. It's a better question: who has actually done this work, whether or not they used the keywords we searched for or ever applied?

We don't know with certainty, and anyone who tells you they do is overselling. But an offer decline should rarely reveal something nobody knew.

Before we introduce someone we already understand why they would move, what they want next, compensation expectations, company stage, location, competing opportunities and the criteria that will decide it. That conversation continues throughout the process. We don't start closing when the offer arrives. The goal isn't certainty. It's very few surprises.

Then finding that out quickly is valuable. A serious search should occasionally tell you the specification is wrong: the compensation doesn't support the level, the geography removes too much of the market, or the role combines two jobs that rarely exist in one person.

If that's what the market tells us, we'll show you the evidence and help you decide which variable to change. Discovering that the role is unfillable as written in week two is useful. Discovering it in month nine is expensive.