Entrepreneur, recruiter and former Rethink CEO Mark Lee (pictured) has launched Fractal, a new business that will rely on a global network of fractional, freelance and virtual in-house recruiters to take on transactional recruiting assignments, potentially receiving fees that would typically go to recruitment agencies.

“I’m particularly interested in people who are employed by other companies but only work, say, three or four days a week; recruiters that are unemployed – and unfortunately there are quite a lot of those at the moment; and recruiters that are fully employed, who have an employment contract that enables them to work on side hustles and gigs,” Lee told Recruiter.

An example would be the assignment Lee has to find recruiters to recruit inside sales staff for a US software company. He identifies some skilled, high-calibre in-house recruiters to do the job. “Moving forward, hopefully, I won’t need to find them because I’ll have attracted them to the brand, and I look into our database of recruiters. I find two who can do the job,” he says of the recruiters, “and they go off and do the work – the client gets a discount versus their agency costs, and I give the two recruiters half the money I make.

“What I want to be able to do,” he says, is “really incentivise the recruiters in a way that you fill a role for me and that will probably be a month’s salary or more that I’m going to send to you.

“Inside recruiting agencies right now, there’s a lot of inefficiency. You hire a load of people that you think are going to be able to sell; you’re not really hiring them for their recruiting skills. They fail a lot. Some agencies are really good at [providing] learning and development, but most of them just are not. So, there’s a lot of failure and because of that failure, prices are probably higher for customers.”

The “in-house quality” recruiters will be engaged when matched by skills, domain expertise, market knowledge and language capabilities to a client role. “Companies get a fully flexible ‘add-on’ to their in-house team through deployment of in-house quality resources on demand,” Lee said. “The Fractal team manages recruiter onboarding and role delivery for our customers, meaning clients get not only the benefit of higher quality and lower-cost delivery, but a concierge service in delivery of often highly specialised, business critical roles.”

Lee left recruiter Rethink in January this year.

Image credit | Supplied