DirecStaff places vetted technology professionals with mid-market teams across the US and Canada. Four service models, seven industry verticals, and one decision to make first: which model actually fits the role you are trying to fill.
Pre-screened IT contractors on our payroll for project surges, migrations, and backfills. Submittals in 24 to 72 hours on clear requirements. Contract to hire runs through the same desk.
Learn morePermanent placement of engineers, architects, and technology managers on your payroll from day one. Backed by a 90-day replacement guarantee.
Learn moreRetained search for CTO, VP Engineering, CISO, and senior technical leadership, run as a mapped market study rather than a resume flow.
Learn moreML and LLM engineers, AI product managers, and automation architects. Available on contract or as a dedicated AI staffing search.
Learn moreMost hiring managers arrive here knowing the role and not the model. The model matters more than it sounds, because it decides who employs the person, who carries the risk if it does not work out, and how you get billed. Here is the short version.
| Service | Use it when | Who employs the technologist | Realistic timeline | How you pay |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Contract staffing | The work has an end date. Migrations, launches, audit remediation, parental leave backfill. | We do. We carry payroll, taxes, and insurance. | Submittals in 24 to 72 hours on clear requirements. | Hourly bill rate for the length of the engagement. |
| Contract to hire | You want the role permanent but you want to see the work before you commit. | We do, until conversion moves them to you. | Same as contract, with the conversion terms agreed up front. | Hourly bill rate, then a conversion fee set at signing. |
| Direct hire | The role is permanent, funded, and part of your headcount plan. | You do, from the first day. | One to two weeks to a first shortlist. Three to six weeks for senior or specialized roles. | One-time fee as a percentage of first-year salary, invoiced on start. |
| Retained executive search | The hire owns a function. CTO, VP Engineering, CISO, Head of Data. | You do. | Six to twelve weeks from kickoff to accepted offer. | Staged fee across the engagement, exclusive. |
| AI and automation staffing | You are building or productionizing ML, LLM, or automation systems. | Either, depending on whether you run it as contract or direct hire. | Follows the model you choose above. | Follows the model you choose above. |
Two terms trip people up. Staff augmentation is contract staffing described from the capacity angle rather than the payroll angle, and the mechanics are the same. Read the detail on IT staff augmentation services or the clause-level view in our staff augmentation contract guide. Consulting is different work entirely, since a consultancy owns the deliverable while a staffing partner supplies the person and you own the direction. That line is drawn properly in IT staffing vs IT consulting.
Still weighing contract against permanent on cost alone? The math, including the part most internal comparisons leave out, is in IT contract staffing vs direct hire. New to agency hiring in general, start with what IT staffing is.
A job title list proves nothing on its own. What decides whether an agency is useful to you is whether the recruiter reading your requisition can tell a strong candidate from a well-written resume in that discipline. These are the areas where ours can hold the technical conversation.
Full stack, backend, and mobile engineers, QA automation, tech leads, and senior software architects.
Software developer staffingDevOps and SRE, platform engineers, cloud architects across AWS, Azure, and GCP, network and systems engineers.
Technology staffingSecurity engineers, SOC analysts, IAM and GRC specialists, and CISO-level hires when the role owns the function.
Cybersecurity staffingData and analytics engineers, BI developers, data scientists, ML and LLM engineers, automation architects.
AI and ML staffingTechnical project managers, business analysts, scrum masters, and product managers on technical teams.
Contract IT positionsGame engine and multiplayer backend engineers, live-ops DevOps, player analytics, and gaming compliance technology.
Gaming and casino IT staffingHiring a single senior architect rather than a team? Start with direct hire for software engineers. For the full discipline-by-discipline breakdown, including which engagement model each one usually runs under, see how our IT staffing agency engagements work.
Placing a security analyst at an insurance carrier takes a different network than placing an engine developer at a gaming studio. Domain context is usually what separates a submittal from a hire, so we run seven verticals rather than claiming all of them.
Specialist practices sit alongside the verticals: fintech, engineering, and accounting and finance systems.
Most of our searches run remote or hybrid, and those are not tied to a metro. When a role has to sit on site, the local page is the better starting point, because pay ranges, candidate supply, and how fast people move differ by city.
The same four steps apply whether you are filling a contract seat or a VP role. What changes is how long step two takes.
We pull apart the requisition: must-haves against nice-to-haves, the real budget, who interviews, and what decides a yes. Vague requirements are the most common reason a search stalls, so we argue about them now.
Network first, then targeted outreach to people who are not applying anywhere. Every candidate gets a technical screen before you see them, so a submittal means someone talked to them about the work.
You get a short list with notes on why each person is on it, including the reservations. We coordinate scheduling and keep candidates warm, which is where most in-house searches lose people.
We handle rate or salary negotiation, references, and background checks. Contract hires go on our payroll and we stay in touch through the engagement. Direct hires carry a 90-day replacement guarantee.
Vetting an agency, not just a candidate? Our 15-point vetting checklist is the list we would want you to hold us to, and IT staffing agency fees explains what each model actually costs.
We would rather say this here than three weeks into a search. Skip us if you need someone to own a deliverable end to end, because that is a consulting or managed services engagement and you should buy it as one. Skip us if the budget sits well under market for the skill, since no agency fixes that gap and the search will simply go quiet. Skip us if the requirement stack is unusual enough that only a handful of people on the continent match it, unless you have months and treat it as a retained search from the start.
The engagements that work are the ordinary ones: a funded role, a decision maker who can move in a week, and requirements someone will actually meet.
A general staffing agency recruits across many functions at once, so the recruiter screening your DevOps role may have screened an accounts payable clerk that morning. An IT staffing firm recruits only technology roles, which means the recruiter can read a stack, tell a Kubernetes operator from a Kubernetes user, and challenge a resume that overstates depth. The practical difference shows up in submittal quality, not in the sales pitch.
Four cover most IT hiring. Contract staffing places a technologist on the agency payroll for a defined term. Contract to hire runs as a contract with a conversion agreed up front. Direct hire places a permanent employee on your payroll from day one. Retained executive search is an exclusive, paid-in-stages engagement for leadership roles such as CTO, VP Engineering, or CISO. Staff augmentation is contract staffing described from the team-capacity angle rather than the payroll angle.
It is the agreement behind a contract engagement. The technologist stays on the staffing partner's payroll, the partner carries employment obligations and insurance, and you direct the day to day work. The document sets the bill rate, the term and how to end it, who owns the code and IP, confidentiality, and the conversion fee if you later hire the person outright. Those conversion terms are the clause worth reading closely before you sign, and we walk through them in the staff augmentation contract guide.
Direct hire, in most cases. Architects set standards other engineers live with for years, and the strongest ones are employed and not applying, so the search runs on outreach rather than job board response. Use retained executive search instead when the architect role carries formal leadership scope or reports into the executive team. Use contract only when the need is a specific migration or platform build with an end date.
Contract roles with clear requirements and a market bill rate get qualified submittals in 24 to 72 hours. Direct hire in our core verticals runs one to two weeks to a first shortlist, and three to six weeks for senior or specialized roles. Retained search takes six to twelve weeks from kickoff to accepted offer because market mapping and passive outreach take that long. Stack enough hard requirements and none of those ranges hold, which we will tell you at intake rather than at week five.
We recruit across the US and Canada and run dedicated desks for Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, New York City, and Phoenix. Remote and hybrid searches are not limited to those metros.
Contract staffing bills an hourly rate that covers the contractor's pay plus employer costs and the agency margin. Direct hire is a one-time fee calculated as a percentage of first-year salary, invoiced when the hire starts. Retained search is paid in stages across the engagement. Our IT staffing agency fees guide breaks down how each model is priced and what moves the number.
Send us the role. We will tell you which service fits, or tell you that none of them do.