Last spring my CTO and I made a list of forty engineers we wanted to hire. All of them were employed. Most didn't want to move. We texted and called every one of them ourselves.
That's not how staffing is supposed to work. But after twelve years placing senior engineers with a16z-backed startups and Fortune 500s like LabCorp, I've watched two things break about how engineering talent gets hired, and both are bad for you.
The middleman's claim — "We hire the top 2%!"
When you hire an engineer through a staffing agency or outsourcing firm, say hypothetically you're billed $100 an hour. The engineer sees about $40. The other $60 stays with the agency, and this is not a greedy outlier. It is the industry's standard margin.
Now look at it from the engineer's side. A senior machine-learning engineer with production systems on her résumé gets recruiter messages every week. Why would she let a third party keep sixty cents of every dollar a client pays for her work? She won't. In more than a decade of negotiating with exactly these people, the ceiling has been consistent: the best engineers tolerate a middleman taking about 30 percent.
So the 60 percent margin doesn't just make the service expensive. It filters out the people you were trying to hire, and the seat goes to whoever will work for 40 cents on the dollar (often the bottom 50% from an emerging economy whose best technical skill is English).
The engineer sees about $40 of every $100 you're billed. Our engineers keep about $70 in this scenario — which is the only reason our recruiting calls move forward with true elite engineers.
The great staying put
The second problem is newer. The story goes that layoffs are up and openings are down, so hiring should be easy. The talent is out there. So why is it not moving?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' quits rate, the share of workers who voluntarily leave their jobs each month, peaked at 3.0 percent in April 2022. Economists call it "job hugging."
Ask engineers why and you hear the same two things: the pace of change from A.I. is unnerving even to the people building it, and nobody wants to be the newest hire when the reorganization comes.
The best engineers are not on job boards or answering LinkedIn messages. An engineer frightened to leave a stable job will not respond to an automated sequence. But he will take a call from a founder or a CTO. And our engineers keep about 70 percent of what a client pays, which is the only reason the call goes anywhere.
The test the machines already passed
Every firm says it hires the top 2 percent. Then it screens with a take-home coding assignment, which in the age of Claude Code and Cursor tests one thing: whether the candidate can open an A.I. tool. Firms that rely on it are hiring the middle of the distribution on a good day and the bottom half on a bad one.
The only method that still works is to build something together, live, for two hours. Our interviewers are senior technical leads who have run engineering teams at billion-dollar companies, and they watch how a candidate thinks, debugs, and uses A.I. as leverage rather than a crutch. It is one of the largest costs in our business, which is why almost nobody else does it. It is also why our clients almost never leave.
Transparent pricing
Every incentive points away from the one thing you want, which is the best engineer you can hire actually staying on your team.
So we changed the incentive. Under transparent pricing, the developer and the client both know exactly how much reaches the engineer and how much the middleman keeps for the expensive technical recruiting and live pair-programming. Nothing is hidden in the rate.
The engineer keeps 70 percent. The remaining 30 percent covers the work almost nobody else pays for — sourcing employed engineers by hand, and putting every candidate through a two-hour live screen with a senior lead. When the split is on the table, the elite engineer takes the offer and you can see precisely what you're paying for.
I think this is where software services are headed. Opaque markups made sense when nobody could compare rates. A firm confident in its engineers should be willing to show the buyer exactly where the money goes.
If you're hiring
Ask any agency what share of your fee reaches the engineer, who sat with the candidate and for how long, and whether they'll show you the split or hide it in the rate.
At JetBridge the answers are 70 percent, two hours with a senior lead, and a split you can see. Engineers placed on your team have all passed the live screen, with no fee if we don't fill the role. Under transparent pricing, both you and the engineer know exactly where every dollar of the rate goes.
Book a call and you'll get me or my C.T.O., not a sales rep, and we'll tell you plainly whether we can staff it and how fast.
of your fee reaches the engineer
live pair-programming with a senior lead
you see exactly how the rate splits
John Sung Kim is the founder and chief executive of JetBridge, based in Tampa, Fla. He previously founded Five9 and DoctorBase. Quits-rate figures are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' JOLTS survey through July 2026.