Why Metcalf Search exists in this form
Jay spent twenty-seven years watching small and medium businesses lose money, lose people, and lose nerve to the same five hiring mistakes. The two options most owners think they have for hiring help, contingency agencies and full-time recruiters, are both wrong for most companies under two hundred employees. One charges a bounty per hire and disappears between them. The other is a salaried job most companies cannot keep busy. This firm was built for the middle, in a format that works for the clients we serve and is sustainable for Jay and the team running it. We are based in Grove City, Ohio, and we work across Columbus and Central Ohio.
The pattern Jay kept seeing
Across twenty-seven years, hundreds of searches, and more than $100 million in salary placed, 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 27 years of experience, a lot of stories, and a focus on the science of selection, psychology, and how small business works, Jay is writing a playbook, a philosophy, and a 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 run by Jay and the team, 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.
If any of that sounds like the company you are running, start with a thirty-minute fit call. Start a conversation and we will tell you straight whether this model fits. If you want the model on paper first, here is what fractional recruiting is, and what it costs.