Permanent placements are charged a fee agreed in writing before the search starts. Contract is an hourly bill rate that covers the engineer’s pay, employment costs and our margin. Embedded hiring is priced per program. You get the number on the first call.
A contingency fee is only paid if you hire someone we introduced. A retained fee is paid a third at the start and two thirds on acceptance, which is why we commit to a fill, why you get a detailed market map and salary guidance, and why the search gets worked every day with a weekly calibration meeting to keep it on track.
Contract rates are quoted as a single hourly bill rate. Inside that number is the engineer’s pay rate, the employer costs for W2 engineers, and our margin. You see the bill rate and the overtime rate on the schedule of work. We don’t put margin on time the engineer isn’t working.
What the fee buys is the part most people don’t price. On a typical search we review 150 or more profiles, have 50 or more conversations, interview around 30 engineers ourselves and send you three to five. We send 1.2 resumes for every first interview you run, against an industry norm of around 2:1. If your hiring manager’s time is worth anything, that gap is most of the fee.
The other cost is the empty desk. A controls role open for five months on a plant with a go live date costs more in delayed commissioning and overtime than any fee, and that’s before the engineer you did have leaves because they’re covering two jobs.
The replacement period is in the terms, in writing, before anything starts. If an engineer leaves inside it, we replace them.
