We've been recruiting in the commercial trades for over a decade.
And we've spent that decade learning what most recruiting firms still get wrong — and building a different way to do this work.
Michael Carter
Michael Carter began his career with Abstrakt in 2012, where he developed the leadership, operational, and business-building skills that would later shape his approach to talent acquisition and workforce strategy. Throughout his tenure, Michael served in several leadership roles across the organization, gaining firsthand experience in scaling teams, building processes, and helping businesses grow. In 2014, he expanded into the recruitment industry by developing a hiring program focused on helping mortgage and real estate companies attract key talent and strengthen their organizations.
In 2021, Michael took over as VP of Recruiting for Abstrakt, leading the company's internal recruitment efforts and helping build the foundation for what would become Talent Solutions. After partnering with hundreds of companies across the skilled trades, Michael and his team recognized the growing hiring challenges facing trade organizations nationwide. That experience led to the development of innovative recruiting models designed to reduce hiring costs while consistently delivering qualified talent for long-term growth.
Backed by Abstrakt's executive team.
Talent Solutions sits inside Abstrakt — a 16-year-old growth firm based in St. Louis with decades of combined operating expertise behind it. See the full Abstrakt leadership team →
We came up in outbound sales. That's why we recruit differently.
Talent Solutions wasn't built by recruiters who decided to specialize in the trades. We came up the other direction. Our team has spent more than a decade building outbound talent pipelines — picking up the phone, working the conversations, building relationships with people who weren't actively looking for a new role.
That's a fundamentally different muscle than the one most recruiting agencies built. The traditional recruiting industry was built around inbound — post a job, wait for resumes, pass them to the client, collect a fee. That model works fine when there's a deep bench of active candidates ready to apply. It doesn't work in the commercial trades, where the best people are already employed, not on job boards, and not particularly interested in a stranger's email about a "great opportunity."
What works in this trade is what we've been doing from day one: actually calling people. Having real conversations. Building relationships over months, not minutes. Knowing the work well enough to talk to a senior project manager without sounding like we're reading from a script.
That's not a marketing claim. It's the entire reason we exist as a recruiting firm.
We build talent pipelines for commercial trades contractors.
We work with one specific kind of company: commercial trades contractors. HVAC and mechanical. Electrical. Plumbing. Roofing. Construction. Landscaping. Fire protection. Paving. Flooring. Painting. Ten verticals, and we know each of them cold.
We don't do executive search at large enterprises. We don't recruit for tech companies or hospitals or law firms. We don't do staffing for warehouses. We're not generalists who happen to fill trades roles when they come in.
We're specialists. The roles we fill are the same roles, over and over, for contractors who run firms like yours: foremen, project managers, technicians, estimators, service managers, branch leadership, outside sales reps. The credentials, the pay scales, the career paths, and the conversations that actually land with these candidates — that's the depth specialization gives us, and it compounds every year we keep doing it.
Three things we do that traditional recruiters don't.
We charge a flat monthly rate.
No percentage of salary. No surprise invoices. No penalty for hiring well. The cost is predictable from day one, and the savings get bigger the more senior the hire. Pay a $130,000 project manager and we don't charge you a dollar more than we charge for a $60,000 service technician.
We build pipelines, not placements.
The traditional recruiting model rebuilds the candidate pool from zero every time a seat opens. We don't. The day you sign on, we start building a continuous pipeline of vetted talent in your specific market — so the next time someone quits, the shortlist already exists.
We only recruit for the trades.
Specialization compounds. After a decade of doing this work, our team knows what NICET certification levels actually mean for a fire protection designer's pay tier. We know which controls platforms a senior HVAC technician should have. We know what a journeyman electrician walks away from a job for. That's not knowledge you build in a quarter.
The commercial trades are running out of people. Faster than the industry is admitting.
For commercial trades contractors, this isn't an inconvenience — it's a strategic threat to growth. The contractors who win the next decade will be the ones with the deepest bench of talent.
We're a small enough firm to actually pick up the phone. We're a deep enough firm to actually deliver.
You'll work with the same recruiting team for the duration of our partnership. We're not handing your account off to a junior associate after the discovery call. The people who learn your business, your hiring patterns, and your bench needs are the same people who pick up the phone when you call us in month nine. That continuity isn't a marketing line — it's the entire model.
Every hire from zero is a tax on your team.
Every week a seat sits open, the rest of your people are covering for it. Every contingency fee you pay is money that didn't go toward growth. There's a better model. Let's build your pipeline.