Some tech companies still assume that the more you pay upfront, the better the search. And for teams that haven’t worked with a recruiter who’s actually owned delivery, that belief is widespread. That’s where success-based recruiting flips the equation.
STACK IT’s Permanent IT Recruiting model flips that thinking. It’s a permanent tech recruiting approach in Canada that’s built for results, not volume of resumes. And when the hire is critical and time’s tight, the cracks in the old model show fast. We hear it from founders and HR leads constantly: “We want solid hires, but we’re tired of paying before we’ve seen anything of substance.”
Upfront recruiter models—retained search, in most cases—lock you into a payment schedule before a single qualified candidate is submitted. For urgent or high-ownership roles, that’s a delay no one can afford.
Why Retained Models Are Inferior
Retained firms often charge a third of the fee just to start. But paying early doesn’t guarantee you’ll see qualified, vetted candidates, or that the recruiter will follow through. We’ve seen retained agencies vanish after intake or deliver profiles without understanding team dynamics or needs.
Here’s the fundamental issue: when you pay for effort, not outcomes, there’s no pressure to pivot when things go sideways. No urgency. No accountability.
One startup founder told us: “We paid 50% upfront before even seeing a résumé. Two months in, we were still waiting for someone who could do the job to our satisfaction.”
How STACK IT’s Permanent Model Works
We don’t bill until a hire is made. That means there are no upfront retainers or surprise fees. It’s a competitive success-based percentage due when the new employee starts.
Everything before that is on us.
We handle the intake, run every screen, coordinate interviews, and stay involved through onboarding. If the search has some challenges (and some do) or the approach needs adjusting, we stop and fix it because, until the hire starts, we haven’t earned anything.
That’s what makes it work. We don’t need a contract to keep us engaged. The payment model already holds us accountable. That’s the difference with success-based recruiting, we only win when you do.
What We Look for in Technical Hires
For technical roles, we get deep into the details and look at the decisions they made. We’ve flagged candidates with perfect credentials who, when asked about a production outage they listed, couldn’t explain how they contributed to the fix, or even what triggered it. That’s why our recruiters lead the process. We don’t trust resumes alone. We only get paid when a hire is made. It forces us to work differently and be more direct, more accountable, and fully invested in getting the hire right.
We lead every intake ourselves. We screen candidates directly. We stay with the process through onboarding. And if some early candidates miss the mark, we don’t double down and send more. We stop, reassess, and course-correct before sending anyone else.
For permanent roles, that looks like:
- Screening for real contributions: what they built, shipped, led, or fixed
- Vetting for how candidates navigate team dynamics, and whether they’ve stuck around long enough to see through what they started
- Holding candidates (and ourselves) to the same bar your internal team would
Where This Pay-Per-Hire Recruiting Model Performs Best
What happens when a hire doesn’t work out:
- Projects come to a halt while teams wait for rehire
- Hiring managers lose confidence in the process
- Internal teams pick up the slack and, sometimes, burn out
- The same search gets reopened six months later
In Q3 2024, over 572,000 positions remained unfilled across Canada, and 30% of permanent roles stayed open for more than 90 days, according to the CD Howe Institute. That’s not only a pipeline problem we’re seeing, it’s also a hiring model problem.
Success-based recruiting makes the biggest difference when:
- The role drives delivery: Think DevOps engineers, product managers, or technical leads. These aren’t fill-the-gap roles. They anchor delivery and carry accountability.
- You’re recovering from a bad search: If a firm has already missed after dozens of submissions, you don’t need more resumes, you need the right one.
- You lack internal vetting muscle: No in-house recruiter? No technical screener? We act like the embedded partner that should already be in place.
You probably can’t afford to rely on hope or candidate volume. The wrong fit sets everything back.
Fixing What Retained Firms Leave Behind
A financial SaaS company went with a retained firm for a tech lead role. The hire made it to day one, but fizzled fast. They couldn’t keep up with sprint planning, struggled to delegate, and never earned the trust of the dev team. The recruiter disappeared after the first week.
We stepped in, ran a new intake with the engineering manager, and prioritized candidates with scale experience. The next hire rebuilt the CI pipeline, mentored junior engineers, and was promoted fourteen months in.
Another SaaS company hired a retained agency to find a DevOps Engineer. They paid a third upfront. Two months later, one candidate had only worked on support tickets; the other couldn’t explain the basics of Terraform.
And when those hires don’t work out, the cost is steep. Turnover can cost between 30% and 200% of a role’s annual salary when factoring in team impact and lost delivery time.
They brought us in next.
We ran a fresh intake with engineering, clarified role expectations, and submitted two aligned candidates within two weeks. One’s now leading incident response across three teams. It’s what success-based recruiting should look like: fast course-correction, results-driven, zero resume spamming.
When Volume-Based Contingency Breaks Down
We saw this with a finance company that spent three months trying to fill a QA / SDET role. Their last recruiter sent surface-matching profiles, but none could speak to test automation or delivery pipelines. The problem wasn’t the candidate résumé’s. It was vetting. We reframed the search and placed someone who rebuilt their regression suite.
Need another example? We have dozens.
An e-commerce company had hired a dashboard-savvy analyst who couldn’t write SQL without some serious hand-holding. The recruiter never checked. After weeks of delayed reporting, leadership brought us in. The new hire rewrote their attribution model and identified a six-figure revenue issue in their first week.
We’ve also seen recruiting firms bury teams in resumes.
One product org received 47 submissions from two vendors. None were hired. We sent three program managers for hire, fully vetted. One was hired and now owns sprint planning and roadmap execution.
That’s what it means to vet like the hire matters. Because it does.
What to Ask Before You Commit
Plenty of firms say they’re success-based but don’t perform detailed vetting or just keep hitting “send.” That’s not a partnership.
Before signing on, ask:
- Who’s running your intake?
- Are you doing the screening or outsourcing it?
- What happens if no one fits with our expectations?
- Do you pause and ask for our opinion if we’re not satisfied?
STACK IT builds around recruiter involvement because the work happens between the intake and the hire, and staying accountable the whole way.
Success-Based Recruiting Vs. Other Models
| Model | Pay Timing | Accountability | Risk to Client |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retained Search | Upfront | Low | You pay before proof |
| Resume-Flood Contingency | After Hire | Low | You get buried in bad fits |
| STACK IT Success-Based | After Hire | High | You only pay when we deliver |
Billing model aside, what separates firms is who actually drives the search, who screens, adjusts, and stays in it if the first few candidates don’t match well enough.
Hiring for a Critical Role with a Contingency Tech Recruiter?
Let’s keep this simple: If your hire is mission critical (like most are), choose a model that ensures your recruiter is accountable.
We’ve worked across SaaS, product, and enterprise teams, placing long-term hires in roles that can’t be contracted. No retainers or resume spamming. Only searches led by people who’ve sat in these conversations before. It’s how we operate as a contingency tech recruiter: hands-on, embedded, and present from intake to onboarding. That’s the backbone of success-based recruiting: deep context, full ownership, and no shortcuts.
Need market data to support compensation strategy or hiring timelines? Grab our salary guide. It’s what we use to guide our candidate conversations every day. Want to understand what an unfilled role is really costing you? Use our cost of delayed hiring calculator.
