Fractional technical recruiting
A Fractional Recruiter for your technical hiring.
A decade of in-house technical recruiting at AWS, Rivian, and Rocket Mortgage — delivered to tech-driven companies of 2–200 people, without the cost and commitment of a full-time recruiting hire.
The situation
Recruiting breaks the same three ways at companies your size.
Each of these is a Client-side structure problem, not a talent-supply problem — which is why another job posting rarely fixes it.
You can’t justify a full-time recruiter.
The hiring load is constant enough to hurt, but not enough to defend the headcount — so interviews land on top of hiring managers’ own jobs, and the pipeline moves whenever someone has a free week.
Your recruiting function is drowning in open roles.
One recruiter covering every team means triage, not search: whichever role is loudest this week moves first, and strong Candidates go cold while the rest queue behind it.
Agencies fill your inbox, not your roles.
Profiles from agencies that never took a real briefing land in the hiring manager’s inbox — keyword matches, forwarded in volume, screened by no one. Sorting them becomes someone’s part-time job.
How the work gets done
Five stages, one owner — full-cycle.
Full-cycle means one person owns the whole Engagement. That’s the line between a Fractional Recruiter and a submission shop: a submission shop stops when profiles reach the Client’s inbox; full-cycle work ends at a Placement.
01
Scope
Every Engagement opens with a working session on the Technical Role: the team, the stack, the real constraints, and a written picture of what good looks like before any outreach begins.
02
Source
Direct outreach to Candidates in your market — people already building what you need built — rather than a posting and a hope.
03
Screen
Structured screening on what the role actually demands: depth in the stack, judgment, communication, and the Candidate’s own reasons for moving. Only real fits continue.
04
Slate
You see a small, curated slate — each Candidate with a written point of view on fit: strengths, gaps, comp context — instead of a stream of forwarded profiles.
05
Close
Interview logistics, offer negotiation, and the week-to-week follow-through that turns a signed offer into a Placement that actually starts.
Ways to work together
Two Engagement models. Choose where to start.
Both are full-cycle — the same five stages, the same owner. The difference is what you take on first: one hire, or a defined body of hiring work.
Per-Placement
The low-commitment way to start.
One Technical Role at a time. The fee is earned when a Candidate is hired, so what you take on is a search rather than a block of months. This is the model to open with when a single role is the bottleneck and you would rather see full-cycle work first.
Scope a Per-Placement rolePer-Project
For hiring work with a defined finish.
Several Technical Roles at once, a hiring push behind a deadline, or pipeline work that has to exist before anyone can be hired. The Engagement is scoped and priced as a defined project: the deliverable, the window, and one agreed figure are settled before outreach starts.
Scope a Per-Project EngagementWhy there is no price list. A fee depends on how many Technical Roles are open, how senior they are, and how thin the Candidate market runs behind them — any figure quoted before that conversation is a guess. Engagement pricing is scoped on a call, against the roles it has to cover.
Who you would be working with
Roughly a decade of this, done in-house.
I’m Sydney Bloss. For roughly a decade I ran technical recruiting in-house at AWS, Rivian, and Rocket Mortgage — sourcing and screening engineers directly, putting a short slate in front of the hiring manager with a written point of view on each one, and staying through offer negotiation until the hire actually started.
The scope has stayed narrow on purpose: backend, frontend, and fullstack roles at mid-to-senior individual-contributor level, with US-based tech teams, remote and hybrid. Not data or ML roles, not product or design, and not executive search.
Those are the credentials the whole page rests on, and they are the part you can verify yourself before we speak: Sydney Bloss on LinkedIn.
Before you book
The questions that decide whether to book.
The three that decide it, plus the two that come right after. Open any of them — no email thread required.
How is this different from an agency?
Two structural differences, and both are worth asking any party you engage — including me.
First, which stages of the search they own. A Fractional Recruiter runs the full-cycle process on your Technical Roles — Scope, Source, Screen, Slate, Close — with one person from the briefing through to the Candidate’s first week. A submission shop stops when profiles reach your inbox. That is the line between the two arrangements, and it is a difference of structure rather than of effort.
Second, what is still there when a search ends. Full-cycle work leaves a pipeline, a screening judgement, and a written process behind it, so the capability keeps working between hires. A search run to a single brief ends with that brief.
Neither arrangement is wrong for every role. For some hires an agency is the right call, and I would say so. Which stages they own is the question that tells you which is which.
What does it cost?
There is no price list on this page, and there is no figure I could put here honestly. What a search costs turns on how many Technical Roles are open at once, how senior they are, and how rare that stack is in the market.
Engagement pricing is scoped on a call instead — the same 30 minutes that answers the rest of these questions. You will know roughly what a search of your shape costs before you commit to anything.
What happens if the hire doesn’t stick?
The honest answer is that this risk belongs to hiring itself, and nothing written on a page takes it off you. What I can tell you is how the process is built to reduce it.
Screen is where most of that reduction happens. Screening tests the things that actually make a hire fail: a Candidate’s own reasons for moving, the shape of the team they would be joining, and compensation expectations raised early instead of at offer stage.
The Slate is small on purpose, because everyone on it has been screened against your constraints rather than a keyword list. Close covers the week-to-week follow-through between a signed offer and a Placement that actually starts, which is where hires most often come unstuck.
If a hire does go wrong, the person who ran the search is still the person you are talking to, and the conversation is about what happened and what to do next. That is the accountability on offer here: a process you can see, and a named person who stays with it.
What roles and what geography do you cover?
Technical Role means a software engineering role at mid to senior individual-contributor level: backend, frontend, or fullstack. It stops there on purpose — not data or ML, not product or design, and not executive search.
Search Scope means US-based tech teams, remote and hybrid. The narrower constraints that come up — clearance, relocation, a visa case — are settled per Engagement on the call rather than advertised on a page.
How do we start?
Book a 30-minute strategy call. It is a scoping conversation rather than a pitch: bring the open Technical Roles, the team behind them, and the timeline you are working to.
You come away with a straight read on whether a Fractional Recruiter is the right shape of help and, if it is, which Engagement model to open with.
Book a 30-minute strategy callStart here
Book the call. That is where every Engagement starts.
Thirty minutes, and nothing to prepare. Bring the open Technical Roles, the team behind them, and the timeline you are working to, and you leave with a straight read on whether a Fractional Recruiter is the right shape of help — and which Engagement model to open with.
The email is the lower-commitment path for a Client who is not ready to fill a calendar slot yet. It prefills with what a scoping conversation needs and it reaches the same person the call would.
The credentials the rest of this page rests on are checkable before we speak: Sydney Bloss on LinkedIn.