Recruiting capacity you can turn on in days.
Contract recruiters, sourcers, and coordinators who work inside your ATS, on your standards, under your brand. You pay for capacity while you need it and stop when the hiring push ends. No per hire commission, no candidate hoarding.
Four kinds of contract recruiting support
Most teams ask for a recruiter when the actual bottleneck is somewhere else in the funnel. Naming it correctly is usually cheaper.
Contract Recruiters
Full cycle ownership. They run intake with your hiring managers, source, screen, manage the loop, and close offers under your brand. Best when you have open reqs nobody has time to own.
Contract Sourcers
Top of funnel only. They build and work the outbound list so your existing recruiters spend their day on interviews and closes instead of list building. Best when you have recruiters but not enough pipeline.
Contract Recruiting Coordinators
Scheduling, candidate communication, interview logistics, and ATS hygiene. Best when your recruiters are losing hours a day to calendars and your candidate experience is slipping because of it.
Interim Talent Leaders
A senior operator to hold the function together between Heads of Talent, after a reduction, or through an acquisition. Best when the gap is leadership, not throughput.
When contract recruiting is the right call
And when it is not. We will say so.
An end of year hiring push
You have reqs that have to close before the year does and no realistic path to hiring a full time recruiter in time. A contract recruiter is productive in days because there is no headcount approval, no offer cycle, and no ninety day ramp.
Ramping into next year's plan
The plan is signed, the headcount is not approved yet, and sourcing has to start now to hit Q1 start dates. Contract capacity lets you begin building pipeline before the req officially exists.
A team at its limit
Your recruiters are carrying more reqs than anyone can work well. Adding contract capacity protects the people you already have, which is cheaper than replacing a burned out recruiter.
A spike you know will end
A funding round, a new site, a single large program. You need the capacity for two quarters and you do not want permanent cost attached to a temporary problem.
If you have one senior search and no volume behind it, contingent agency search is usually the cheaper answer. We would rather tell you that than sell you a quarter of capacity you do not need.
Contract, embedded, fractional, on demand
These names mostly describe the same structure: senior recruiting people working inside your team, priced as capacity instead of commission. Buyers use different words depending on where they sit. What actually varies is how much of the function we hold, how long, and whether we own closing or only pipeline. Tell us the hiring problem and we will tell you which shape fits.
Frequently asked
- What is a contract recruiter?
- A contract recruiter is a talent acquisition professional you engage for a defined period rather than hiring as an employee. They work inside your systems, use your interview standards, and represent your company to candidates. You pay for their capacity for as long as you need it, and the engagement ends when the hiring need does. The distinction from an agency is that a contract recruiter works on your whole req load rather than presenting candidates against a per hire fee.
- How fast can a contract recruiter start?
- Days, not months. There is no internal headcount approval, no compensation benchmarking, no offer negotiation, and no notice period at a previous employer. TALNT scopes the engagement, matches a recruiter with experience in the functions you are hiring, and gets them into your ATS. Compare that to roughly ninety days to post, interview, offer, and onboard a full time recruiter, who then still needs to ramp.
- How is a contract recruiter priced compared to an agency?
- Contract recruiting is priced as capacity, either monthly or hourly depending on the engagement, rather than as a percentage of each hire's salary. Agency contingent search is charged as a share of each placement's first year base. The practical effect is that contract recruiting gets cheaper per hire as volume rises, while agency fees scale linearly with every hire you make. For one or two isolated senior searches, contingent search is often the better economic choice, and we will tell you when that is the case. We scope rates against your actual req list rather than publishing a number that will not match your roles.
- Do contract recruiters work in our ATS or their own system?
- Yours. TALNT recruiters log into your Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday, or whatever you run. Candidates apply to your company, interview with your team, and receive offers on your letterhead. Every record, note, and rejected candidate stays in your system when the engagement ends, which is the main structural difference from agency work.
- Can we hire the contract recruiter permanently later?
- Yes. A number of our engagements end with the client bringing the recruiter on directly, and we would rather convert someone who has already proven they work well with your team than watch you start a search from zero. Conversion terms are agreed at the start of the engagement so nobody is negotiating under pressure later.
- What is the minimum engagement?
- Three months is the usual floor because that is roughly how long a req takes to go from intake through a signed offer. Shorter sprints work for sourcing only engagements where the deliverable is pipeline rather than closed hires. There is no maximum, and some clients keep contract recruiters in place for well over a year as a permanent flexible layer beside their core team.
Tell us what you need to close this quarter.
48 hour scope. We will tell you what capacity the plan actually needs, including when the answer is less than you asked for.