A recruiter you can hire by the day.
I am Paul Meakin. Eighteen years in recruitment, from consultant through branch, regional and national operations, including turnaround and acquisition work for an investor group buying recruitment businesses. I now take that on directly, inside your business, on a day rate.
No agency agreement, no percentage of salary, no PSL. You buy days and you stop when the work is done.
Typically two to three days a week, for one to six months. Minimum ten days, so there is time to do the job properly.
You do not need an agency. You need the desk run.
Six situations that come up again and again. If one of them reads like your week, the conversation is worth having.
Roles have gone stale
They have been open for months, three agencies have had a go, and nobody inside the business actually owns them any more.
Your recruiter has left
The desk has gone cold, the pipeline went with them, and you are deciding whether to hire a replacement before you know what good looks like.
You are hiring into a market you do not know
New discipline, new region, new salary band. You need somebody who can map it properly before you commit to a hire.
The search needs running, not advertising
The person you want is not applying to adverts. They are working somewhere and not looking. That is a headhunt, and it is a different job.
You are building an in house team
You want the process, the templates and the market map in place before you put a recruiter in the seat, so they inherit something that works.
You need someone to tell you the truth
Sometimes the role is unfillable at that salary, in that location, with that job description. You are better off hearing it in week one.
Three steps, and the third one matters most.
Most interim cover leaves nothing behind. This is built so the business keeps what was made while I was there.
Brief it properly
A recruiter is only as good as the brief. If the business will not supply the detail, there is no headhunt to run. We start with the hiring manager, qualify the role, and agree what the search is actually for before anybody touches a CV.
Run the desk
Sourcing, headhunting, screening, shortlisting, managing the process through to offer. You get the work rather than a weekly update meeting, and you get told straight when the market says something you did not want to hear.
Hand it back
You keep the pipeline, the search strings, the market map and the documentation. When I finish, the desk still works, and whoever sits at it next is not starting from a blank page.
The method does not live in my head.
Every desk I run sits on the Staxxd Recruiter Coworker: a file and folder operating system holding twenty years of recruitment method. Role intake and qualification, boolean and web sourcing, candidate matching, advert writing, structured rejection with real feedback, and the market intelligence that comes out of all of it.
It is not a job board plugin and it is not a chatbot. It is why the work looks the same in week one and week twelve, and why it keeps working after I hand it over.
The brief comes first
The role gets qualified with the hiring manager before sourcing starts. Thin brief, failed search. Every time, in every market.
Sourcing that leaves a trail
Boolean, job boards, web search and crawling, all documented as it happens. The market map survives after the role closes instead of leaving with the recruiter.
Market intelligence as output
Job, client, prospect and candidate leads build into a live picture of your market. You get the picture, not just the placement.
What this is not.
Worth saying up front, because half the enquiries I get are looking for something else and both of us would rather find that out on the first call.
- ✓Not an agency. I am not asking for a slot on your PSL.
- ✓Not temp or contract. Permanent hiring only.
- ✓Not coaching. I run the desk, I do not sit beside it commenting on it.
- ✓Not a headcount. You buy days, and you stop buying them when the work is done.
Got a desk that needs running?
Tell me the roles, the market and the deadline. Fifteen minutes is usually enough for me to tell you straight whether I am the right person for it, and what it would take.
Time to talk yet?