FOR EMPLOYERS
What Big Firm Fees Actually Buy You
Big firms lean on their name to justify premium rates — rates built to cover the overhead of running a large operation and to protect the margins their investors expect.
Their real objective is volume: fill as many roles as possible to keep the machine growing.
In practice, that usually means an overworked account rep runs your intake call, then hands the actual work of building your candidate slate to junior staff who were never in the room.
Twenty Years on the Other Side of the Desk
After twenty-plus years managing third-party agency relationships from the client side, it still surprises me how little you get back for what you pay.
Three patterns show up again and again.
A Portal With No Discovery Behind It
A slick platform with weighted-criteria scoring looks impressive, but if no one spent the time upfront understanding your business, your culture, and what actually makes the role hard to fill, the technology has nothing good to work with. Great tools can't produce results a broken process never earned.
A Recycled Bench
A "deep pipeline" that's really the same names on rotation — candidates who've already been placed elsewhere, passed on by other clients, and are now being presented to you.
The Hard Sell
When the real pipeline comes up short, the hard sell kicks in — pushing a mediocre candidate hard enough to make a thin slate look like a strong one.
mastercraft is built to break the patterns & deliver more
What You Get Instead...
Each of these patterns is a choice a firm makes about where to cut corners.
Mastercraft Search is built to make the opposite choice, on all three.
Discovery First, Every Time
Before any sourcing starts, I sit with you and your team until I understand what's actually driving the hire — the culture, the politics, the reason the last person didn't work out. The technology comes after the understanding, not instead of it.
Built Fresh for Your Search
No recycled bench. I engage people specifically for your role — many of them not actively job hunting — instead of running the same names through client after client.
Honesty Over Closing the File
If the fit isn't right, I'll tell you, even if it means the search runs longer. You'll never get a hard sell on a candidate I wouldn't hire myself.
READY WHEN YOU ARE
Ready for a better outcome?
No account rep, no hand-off, no recycled bench — just one person accountable for getting this hire right.
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