The position you can’t fill.
Five months open. Two finalists who took another offer. A roadmap item that’s moved three times. If that’s where you are, this page is for you.
First: it’s probably not your process
When a search runs long, the instinct is to look inward. Rewrite the description. Add a channel. Loosen a requirement. Run a referral push.
Sometimes that’s the answer. More often, the search is long because the profile is scarce — and scarcity is a property of the profile, not a failure of your process. No description rewrite creates an engineer who has spent two years learning what breaks when a model meets real traffic.
The months spent finding that out are the expensive part.
What it has already cost you
An open role doesn’t cost nothing while it’s open.
It costs the roadmap items that keep sliding. The two people covering the gap who are now doing their job and half of another. The recruiting hours already spent on a search that hasn’t closed.
Most teams track the salary they haven’t paid yet. Very few track the delivery they’ve already lost.
If that number is still going up, this stopped being a hiring problem. It’s a delivery problem.
Four ways to fill an engineering position
Including the two that don’t get sold to you, and the situations where ours is the wrong answer.
Most teams consider two: keep searching locally, or give the project to an agency. There are two more in between, and they’re usually the ones that fit.
1 · Hire directly, in your own market
- When it’s right: the profile exists near you at a price you can pay. For most roles, most of the time, this is still the correct answer and nobody should talk you out of it.
- When it stops working: when the search has been open long enough that the delay costs more than the alternative. That threshold is different for every team, and it’s worth calculating rather than feeling.
2 · Set up your own entity where the talent is
- What you get: full control of the employment relationship, no third party, and a permanent presence in that market.
- What it costs: registration, local filings, statutory reporting, and someone who understands the labour law of a country you don’t operate in. That’s a permanent cost, not a one-time one.
- When it’s right: several people, one country, for years. The overhead amortizes. For one engineer, it rarely does.
3 · Employer of record
- What it does: a third party becomes the legal employer of someone you already chose.
- What it doesn’t do: find them. An EOR engagement starts from «we know who we want.»
- When it’s right: you sourced the candidate yourself — a referral, someone in your network, a rehire — and you need them employed legally without building an entity.
- And a note on PEOs, because the terms get mixed: a PEO is co-employment for a company that already has employees. It administers people you have. It doesn’t find you people you don’t.
4 · Staffing with employment included
- What it does: the partner finds the person and employs them.
- When it’s right: when the profile is the hard part. For AI, security and data engineering right now, it usually is.
- This is what we do. The difference from an employer of record is worth being precise about: an EOR starts from «we already found them.» We start from «we can’t find them.» Same legal machinery underneath, different problem being solved.
How to choose, in one question
Is the hard part finding the person, or employing them?
If it’s employing them, you want route 2 or 3. If it’s finding them, routes 2 and 3 don’t help — they solve the problem you’ll have after the one you have now.
Tell us which position you can’t fill
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