Team members, not freelancers

People looking for hourly or project-based work are different people, or people at different stages in their lives, than people who want to join a company as a team member. 

The most obvious way to spot the difference is time preferences. People in consulting firms or talent marketplaces want to jump from one project to the next. Even if some of these engagements are deemed as “long-term’ placements, long-term gets defined as six months or a year. But for anyone building a company, that’s not how we define long-term; that's a “getting started” at most. 

The second difference is the business economics: consulting firms and most talent marketplaces placing engineers on a per project, hourly, or weekly basis charge around 50% margins. The model makes sense: they get you someone in under 48 hours, ideally really good, to solve something critical, and once done, they are ready to move on. Companies can manage the high cost for a short period of time, and after the engagement is done the firm can move that engineer to another client with a similar profile. As far as band-aids go, these solutions are great, but they are only built for short-term relationships.

If you like the talent placed by the consulting firm, odds are you won’t be able to have her as a team member. The economics in the consulting business and most talent marketplaces is such that if you were to offer a position to one of these contractors, you would have the pay a hefty breakup fee (up to 50%) to have the right to offer this person employment. Again, for that business model, these restrictions are reasonable. 

Matilda is fundamentally different from those firms. We look for team members, not consultants or freelancers. The talent in our community is looking to join companies, ideally for the long term. They don’t want to jump from one project to another. They only want to join companies where their mission resonates, the quality of the work inspires them, and the team is people they want to work with.  Matilda serves a different pool of people, and we love working with them.

Usually, recruiting agencies specialize in finding full-time team members. We share some commonalities with them, but also we have learned from some of the most valuable services talent marketplaces provide. Here is a comparison:

- Like Recruiting firms, we find, source, and recruit talent for you. Also, like them, we charge a success fee for placement
- Unlike recruiting firms, we do not charge retainer fees, and we have a 10-month at-risk pricing model.
- Like many of the best talent marketplaces, we do technical evaluations on our engineers.
- But, unlike those talent marketplaces, we DO share details of our interviews. We do want you to interview them as well and get conviction that these people are a good match for your company. And we found them specifically to work for you and stay with you. 

If you are interested in learning more about Matilda, feel free to reach out: https://www.matildaexp.com/companies/get-in-touch