Questions we hear often. Honest answers.

We're a specialized recruiting firm focused exclusively on the commercial trades. We work with HVAC, electrical, plumbing, roofing, fire protection, paving, landscaping, commercial construction, flooring, and painting contractors — recruiting foremen, project managers, technicians, estimators, service managers, sales reps, and operations leadership.

We've been recruiting in the commercial trades for over a decade. We came up in outbound sales, which is why our recruiting model is built around active outreach and pipeline-building rather than passive job board posting.

Our team is based in St. Louis, Missouri. We recruit nationally — our partners are commercial trades contractors across all 50 states.

Specialization compounds. After ten years of recruiting in these specific verticals, our team knows the certifications, the pay scales, the career paths, and the language that actually lands with experienced trades professionals. A generalist recruiter who fills a roofing role one quarter and a tech role the next doesn't build that depth. We do.

We're closest to what you might call a retained recruiting partner. We don't do temporary or contract staffing — every placement is a direct full-time hire on your payroll. We don't only recruit C-suite executives — we recruit across every level your firm hires for, from technicians through senior leadership. The model is built for ongoing partnership rather than one-off placements.

A talent pipeline is a continuously maintained pool of vetted, pre-qualified candidates in your specific market. Instead of starting from zero every time a seat opens, we maintain ongoing relationships with the kind of people you'd hire — phone calls, periodic check-ins, knowing who's happy where they are and who might be open to a conversation. When a role opens, the candidates already exist. The shortlist is already there.

Traditional contingency recruiting is reactive. A role opens, the recruiter posts the job, screens applicants, and submits resumes. The relationship is transactional, and it ends when the placement is made. Pipeline recruiting is proactive and continuous. We're working your market every month, whether you have an open role or not.

Yes, but it's a small part of what we do. Job board posts capture active candidates — people already looking for a new role. The candidates who actually move the needle are passive — already employed, not looking, but open to the right conversation. Reaching them takes direct outreach, and that's where most of our team's work happens.

We commit to 200+ candidate outreach per role across phone, email, LinkedIn, and specialty trade networks. Most contingency recruiters do 30-50.

Our internal team. We don't outsource to overseas sourcers or AI-driven screening. Every phone screen, every conversation, every relationship is handled by our recruiters in St. Louis. The person you meet on the discovery call is the same person running your engagement six months in.

Flat monthly rate, with three tiers based on the number of qualified candidates we submit each month — not the number of open roles:

• Talent Pipeline Light — $4,250+/month, 6 submittals per month, best for 1 hire per month
• Talent Pipeline Standard — $8,000+/month, 12 submittals per month, best for 2 hires per month
• Talent Pipeline Premium — $12,000+/month, 18 submittals per month, best for 3 hires per month

You can have as many open roles as you want — your monthly submittals are distributed across them. No percentage of salary, no placement fees, no surprise invoices. The cost is the same whether you hire someone at $60,000 or $200,000.

Because the percentage-of-salary model literally penalizes contractors for hiring well. Pay a project manager $130,000 instead of $100,000 because they're worth it, and you'd owe a traditional recruiter an extra $7,500-9,000. The model rewards us for talking you into cheaper hires, which is the opposite of what should happen. A flat rate inverts the incentive — we win when you hire the right person, regardless of what that costs.

Yes — every tier (Talent Pipeline Light, Standard, and Premium) carries a 6-month minimum commitment. A 12-month commitment unlocks lower monthly pricing on every tier. The minimums exist because pipeline recruiting compounds with time — most of the value lands in months 3-6 as the candidate pool deepens and the bench builds for roles you have not opened yet.

Every engagement includes a replacement guarantee. If a candidate we placed leaves within 90 days for any reason, we refill the role at no additional cost beyond the standard monthly fee. We've also had partners ask us to extend that to 6 months — we'll discuss that on a case-by-case basis.

We'll work with you. Our minimums are minimums for a reason — pipeline recruiting needs time to compound — but if your business situation changes, we'd rather pause and resume later than lock you into something that's no longer working. We're not interested in unhappy partners.

Discovery and pipeline building. We start with a kickoff call that goes deep on your firm, the roles you're prioritizing, your culture, your geography, and your hiring history. From there, our team begins active outreach to qualified candidates in your market. By week three or four, you'll see the first qualified candidates coming through phone screens.

Each client has an assigned recruiter who is the main point of contact throughout the engagement. However, you can reach our entire team at staffing@abstraktmg.com at any time.

We provide a customer portal for each search so our partners have full visibility into the work. You can see every candidate we are sourcing, every phone screen completed, every submittal made, and where each one sits in the process — always up to date, so you never have to ask where things stand.

We adjust. The roles you prioritize on day one aren't always the roles you need filled six months later. Telling us "we're shifting focus from PMs to estimators" doesn't trigger a contract change — it just changes what we're working on.

Yes, and we usually do. We're not a replacement for an HR department — we're a specialized recruiting capability that complements whatever internal team you have. The handoff after a candidate accepts an offer typically goes to your internal HR for onboarding, payroll setup, and benefits enrollment.

Every candidate we send to you has been through a full phone screen with one of our recruiters — typically 25-40 minutes. We're checking technical fit, motivational fit, and culture fit. We don't send resumes — we send qualified candidates.

Substantially higher, because the candidates we source are different. Job board applicants are self-selected — actively looking, often unhappy in their current role, and applying to dozens of jobs. The candidates we source through outbound outreach are typically employed, performing well, and not actively looking. The conversations are different, the candidates are different, and the hire rates are different.

We can include those services in an engagement, or we can hand the qualified candidate over to your internal team to handle that step. Most partners prefer to run background and drug screens themselves through their existing vendors. We'll always do informal reference checks on senior hires before submitting them.

Everything from entry-level field technicians and installers through senior project managers, branch managers, regional VPs, and operations leadership. Across our partners, the most common placements are senior project managers, service managers, estimators, foremen, and outside sales reps.

Initially, no. The first conversations with passive candidates happen under "we're working with a commercial roofing contractor in your area" framing. As candidates demonstrate interest, we name the company and walk them through next steps. This protects both your firm's confidentiality and the candidate's relationship with their current employer.

The economics are different in a few important ways:

• Pricing: Flat monthly rate vs. 20-30% of first-year salary
• Pipeline: Continuous and built ahead of demand vs. starts at zero each search
• Commitment: Recruiter is engaged whether you're hiring or not vs. engagement ends with the placement
• Specialization: Trades-only vs. generalist
• Time to fill: Often days to weeks vs. 30-90+ days

For contractors who hire 3+ roles per year, the all-in cost of a pipeline engagement is typically lower.

A dedicated in-house recruiter costs $80,000-130,000 in salary plus benefits, training, recruiting tools (LinkedIn Recruiter alone is $10,000+/year), and management time. For most contractors hiring fewer than 25-30 people per year, an external partnership is more cost-effective and produces better candidate quality.

Some of our partners do, especially for hard-to-fill executive roles. We don't object to it. We do recommend you don't engage two firms on the same role at the same time — it creates a worse experience for candidates and tends to reduce the quality of the search.

We're probably not the right fit. The pipeline-driven model is designed for contractors who hire continuously. For a single role with no expectation of future hires, a contingency recruiter or a job board is probably more efficient. We're happy to recommend a contingency recruiter we trust if that's what you need.