IT Recruiters Who Vet the Engineer, Not Just the Resume

A specialist IT recruiter brings a pre-built network of passive engineers, technical screening from someone who has done the work, and close coaching across counter offers. Those are the three places internal teams run out of time.

Most in-house recruiting teams are great at general hiring. Sales, marketing, operations, that is their lane. Deep technical hiring is its own discipline, and the passive network gets built over years of being in the conversations. We have already talked to the staff engineer who is not on LinkedIn. We can tell in one call whether someone’s Kubernetes experience is real depth or a line on a resume. And the close, where most offers die over counters and competing ranges, is where a recruiter who has run hundreds of these earns their fee. This supplements your team. It does not replace it.

Most contingency IT recruiting runs 15% to 25% of the hire’s first-year base salary, billed only when someone actually starts. Contract placements are billed at an hourly rate with the markup built in, and senior or executive searches sometimes use a retained model.

The number that matters is not the fee. It is the cost of the seat staying empty. A senior engineer vacancy can quietly drain far more than a placement fee in slipped roadmaps, on-call burnout, and the occasional bad self-sourced hire that turns over at month four. We are happy to walk through which model fits your role and your budget before you commit to anything.

An IT recruiter is the person who runs your search. An IT staffing agency is the broader operation around them, including engagement models, compliance, payrolling, and a deeper bench. KORE1 is both, which is why the recruiter on your search is backed by 20-plus years of infrastructure.

If you want to know who picks up the phone and works your req, that is the recruiter, and that is what this page is about. If you want the full menu of how we engage, contract, contract-to-hire, direct hire, and managed teams, the IT staffing services page goes deeper on that side. Same team behind both. We just split the pages so the people do not get buried under the process.

The good ones do not start with a job posting. They start with a network of engineers they already know, built over years of staying in touch with people who are not actively looking. Boards and InMail come second, and only to widen a search that the network has already started.

Here is the part most clients do not see. By the time your req lands with us, half the sourcing is already done, because we have been talking to senior cloud, data, and security people all year, not just the week you called. That is also why we can be honest early. If a role is genuinely hard, we will tell you on day two based on real signal from our bench, not a sales script.

First shortlist in 3 to 5 business days. Average hire in 17 days across our recent placements. For genuinely urgent coverage, like a production system that just lost its only owner, we have closed same-week contract placements, though that pace is the exception.

Speed is a function of relationships, not InMail volume. We are not starting from zero when you call, so the first names usually come fast. It also means we can be straight with you when a role needs a longer runway. A rare embedded firmware lead in a small market is not a 3-day shortlist, and we would rather say so than waste a week pretending otherwise.

Yes, all three. Contract for projects, migrations, and surge work. Contract-to-hire for higher-risk roles where a trial period lowers the cost of a wrong call. Direct hire for core team members and leadership.

The model should follow the work, not the other way around. A four-month platform migration does not need a permanent hire. A founding data engineer on a growing team almost certainly does. If you ask for a structure that does not fit the work, expect us to say so. Usually we are right. That candor is part of what specialist recruiting buys you, and it is a lot cheaper than discovering the mismatch four months into a contract that should have been a direct hire from day one. For longer project pods, the project staffing model often fits better than a string of individual contracts.

Both. Mainstream engineering is our daily work, and we also run dedicated desks for specialized niches like cybersecurity and healthcare IT, where the talent pool is smaller and the screening is different.

The deeper the niche, the more the network matters, because there is no public board where certified or cleared specialists hang out waiting to be found. We staff across eight verticals, so a recruiter who hits the edge of their lane can pull in a colleague who lives in that one. You get the specialist without having to go shopping for a second agency.