Smart Hire Pros | Your empty seat has a daily price
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For $1M-$20M founders with one specific seat empty right now

The seat you haven't filled is billing you every single day. Most founders never see the invoice.

Tell us which seat is empty, whether that's an SDR, Executive Assistant, Project Manager, or Bookkeeper, and our headhunters put 3-4 skills-tested, video-introduced finalists in your inbox in 2-3 weeks. One flat fee, paid only when you hire. You never touch a resume.

Takes 60 seconds · No card · A dedicated headhunter assigned within 24 hours

5.0 from 150+ founders 90-day guarantee · 2 free replacements Sourcing starts in 24 hours
Vacancy cost calculator
01 · Which seat is empty?
02 · How long has it been empty?
What the empty seat has cost you so far $0

Pick a role and a timeframe to see the running total.

Stop the meter, fill this seat →

Based on the standard cost-of-vacancy formula: annual role value × impact factor ÷ 260 working days. Revenue-generating seats carry a 2× impact factor. Run your exact numbers in the salary calculator →

Read this before anything else

This only works for a specific kind of business.

We open a limited number of searches each month. Filtering hard at the top is how we keep the 90-day guarantee honest, for you and for us.

This is built for you if

  • You're doing $1M-$20M and you have one seat empty right now, not a vague plan to grow the team.
  • The empty seat is an SDR, Executive Assistant, Project Manager, or Bookkeeper. Those are the four we headhunt, and we don't pretend to fill anything else.
  • You want a full-time, dedicated professional who works your hours, not a freelancer splitting attention across six clients.
  • You've either tried hiring yourself and lost weeks to it, or you've been putting it off long enough that you've stopped counting.

This isn't for you if

  • You need someone for a two-week project. We place permanent seats, not gigs.
  • You're optimising for the lowest hourly rate. There are cheaper marketplaces and they're one search away.
  • You want someone starting Monday. Real vetting takes 2-3 weeks and we won't shorten it to win a deal.
  • You aren't ready to actually delegate. A great hire in a business that won't hand over the work fails on both sides.
Roles we fill

Which seat is empty?

Pick one and we'll show you exactly what we do for that role, the vetting, the timeline, and what it costs you to leave it open.

Your calendar shouldn't depend on whether you found time to prospect.

You close well, when there's someone to close. But prospecting is the first thing that dies when you get busy, so your pipeline swings between feast and famine, and every famine started six weeks earlier when nobody was booking.

  • Daily outbound calls and follow-up sequences
  • CRM hygiene and lead list management
  • Qualified meetings booked straight onto your closers' calendars
A full-time pro whose only job is making sure next month's revenue has somewhere to come from.
Fill my SDR seat →
Vetted for this role

Every SDR candidate passes a live mock cold call and a written outreach test before you ever see them. You hear their phone voice in their video intro, not on your dime.

You didn't build a company to spend your evenings in your inbox.

Calendar Tetris, travel bookings, follow-ups, the 200 unread emails that regenerate overnight. None of it is your job, all of it lands on you, eating the 15 hours a week you should spend on the work only you can do.

  • Inbox triage and response drafting
  • Calendar ownership and scheduling
  • Travel, research, and personal admin
  • Keeping commitments from falling through the cracks
You get back 3 hours a day, and a brain that isn't holding 40 open loops.
Fill my EA seat →
Vetted for this role

EA candidates are tested on real scenarios: inbox prioritization, calendar conflicts, tone-matched email drafting, with spoken English evaluated to native-professional level. Your EA speaks for you.

If every project needs you to push it, you don't have projects. You have hostages.

Deadlines slip the moment you stop chasing them. Your team is capable, but the follow-through lives in your head, so you've become a full-time status-checker, and everything moves at the speed of your availability.

  • Owning timelines, task boards, and accountability
  • Running standups and status reporting
  • Building SOPs so delivery stops depending on memory
  • Being the person who chases, so you aren't
Projects that finish because someone owns them, and it's finally not you.
Fill my PM seat →
Vetted for this role

PM candidates complete a role-specific assessment on prioritization, stakeholder communication, and tooling (Asana, ClickUp, Monday). Verified doers, not certificate collectors.

Running a business on numbers from two months ago isn't frugal. It's flying blind.

The books get done "when things calm down," which is never. So AP/AR drifts, tax season is an annual emergency, and every real decision gets made on gut feel because the dashboard is 60 days stale.

  • Weekly reconciliation in QuickBooks Online
  • AP/AR and payroll processing
  • Month-end close and clean reporting
  • A number you can trust, every Monday
Current books, calm tax seasons, decisions made with numbers instead of nerve.
Fill my bookkeeper seat →
Vetted for this role

Finance candidates pass a hands-on QBO skills test plus full background and reference verification, because this seat touches your money, and "looked good on paper" isn't a control.

Why the seat is still empty

There are only three reasons a seat stays open. We fill all three.

You're in one of these right now. Find yours.

MOMENT 01

The Sudden Vacancy

Someone left. Maybe they resigned, maybe you had to let them go, maybe they've been checked out for a month and you finally called it. Either way the work didn't leave with them, it landed on your desk, and you're now doing a job you already paid someone to do.

You don't have three weekends to run a search on top of that. So don't. Tell us the role on a 30-minute call and we run the entire search while you cover the gap. Sourcing starts within 24 hours.

MOMENT 02

The Deferred Hire

Nothing broke. That's the problem. The role has been "next month" since spring, and every month you absorb the work personally it gets slightly more normal. There's no crisis forcing the decision, so the decision never gets made.

A $70,000 seat left open six months has already cost roughly $35,000 in output you never got, and that number never appears on a statement. The hire was never the expensive option. Waiting was.

MOMENT 03

The Hire That Didn't Stick

You already tried. Upwork, a referral, a job post that returned 200 applications and one usable candidate. Someone came on, and within six weeks the English wasn't what the resume implied, or the follow-through wasn't there, or they simply stopped answering.

So the real question isn't whether you need the hire, it's why this time is different. Four vetting gates, a video introduction before any call, and 90 days with two free replacements.

Sound familiar?

You've priced the salary. You've never priced the vacancy.

Every founder can tell you what the hire will cost. Almost none can tell you what not hiring is costing, because that number never arrives as an invoice.

The founder tax

Your hours, wasted

10-20 hours a week of admin and status-chasing, done by the person whose hour is worth the most in the company.

The pipeline gap

Meetings not booked

Nobody prospecting in August is revenue you don't close in October. That gap never refunds.

The blindfold

Books 60 days behind

That isn't a bookkeeping problem. It's every decision this quarter made without numbers.

The bottleneck

Projects at your speed

If everything waits on you to chase it, your company runs at the speed of your calendar. That's a ceiling, not a workflow.

And the reason you haven't fixed it isn't laziness. Hiring the fix is its own full-time job, 40+ hours of resume roulette, interviews that lie, and the very real fear of paying twice for one bad hire. So the seat stays empty, and the meter keeps running.
The vetting process

The meter stops in about three weeks. Here's the entire process on your side of it.

On a job board, you are the vetting process. Here, by the time a candidate reaches your inbox, they've already survived four gates, and your total time invested is roughly three hours.

GATE 01

Prove the skill

A hands-on assessment built for your exact role: mock cold calls for SDRs, live inbox scenarios for EAs, tooling tests for PMs, QBO exercises for bookkeepers. Claims don't pass. Work does.

GATE 02

Prove the English

Written and spoken evaluation to native-professional fluency. This person will talk to your clients, your team, and your vendors.

GATE 03

Prove the history

Background checks, reference verification, and work history validation. You get the full file before the first conversation.

GATE 04

Prove the person

Every finalist records a custom video introduction. You see their energy and professionalism before a single Zoom minute. No more blind-date interviews.

✓ Smart Hire Pros ✕ Job boards, DIY & retainer agencies
Your hours invested: ~3. One brief call plus finalist interviews.Your hours invested: 40+. Screening, scheduling, interviewing, before the first bad hire.
One flat fee. Pay once, keep your hire forever.Monthly retainers. A markup on salary every month, whether they perform or not.
Curated shortlist. 3-4 perfect-match candidates.Resume flood. You sift through 100+ unqualified applications.
Video introductions. See and hear every candidate first.Blind dates. Hoping the English matches the resume.
90-day guarantee. Up to 2 free replacements.You're on your own. If they quit, you start over.
14 days to shortlist. Actively headhunted.44 days industry average. Your post sits and waits.
Client stories

Founders who stopped screening and started delegating.

★★★★★

"The video introductions changed everything. I already knew who I wanted before we even got on a call. My new EA is exactly what I needed."

J
Jessica ✓ VerifiedConstruction & Roofing · CEO, Hired: EA & Finance Admin
★★★★★

"Now I can't see my business running without them. They're spot on with the qualifications we gave them and what we needed. Highly recommend."

G
Gonzalo ✓ VerifiedReal Estate · Founder, Hired: Executive Assistant
★★★★★

"Nothing like a typical staffing agency. Straightforward, fast, professional. Shortlist in under three weeks and I hired someone I'm genuinely thrilled with."

Jo
Jonathan ✓ VerifiedNotarization · Founder, Placed in under 3 weeks
Pricing

One flat fee, and it's smaller than what the empty seat costs you while you decide.

Traditional agencies take a markup on your hire's salary every month, forever. We take a single placement fee, once, and only when you actually hire someone.

You pay once, when you hire. Never monthly.

No retainer. No percentage of salary billed in perpetuity. No fee at all if you don't hire one of our finalists.

Not sure what an A-player costs in your role? The salary calculator shows real ranges for all four seats, by hub.

Reserve my search →
How the commitment fee works
Commitment fee to open your search$1,000
Credited toward your placement fee100%
Refundable if you don't move forward50%
Owed if you don't hire anyone$0

Why charge it at all? Because our headhunters commit real hours to your role from day one. The commitment fee is what lets us promise sourcing within 24 hours instead of putting you in a queue behind everyone who was "just exploring."

90
Day guarantee

We stand behind every placement.

If your hire isn't the right fit within the first 90 days, our headhunters restart the search and replace them at zero additional cost, up to twice per placement. Most agencies give you 30 days and one shot. We give you 90 and two, because a flat fee only makes sense for us when the hire actually sticks.

FAQ

Questions we get asked most.

Three things, in order. You see a skills-test result before you see a resume, so the assessment happens before you invest any time. You watch a video introduction before any call, so spoken English and professionalism are verified by you, not promised by us. And if it still doesn't work inside 90 days, we restart the search twice at no charge. We only get paid once per placement, a hire that leaves in month two costs us far more than it costs you.

One flat placement fee, paid only when you hire, never a monthly retainer. A $1,000 commitment fee opens your dedicated search; it's fully credited toward your placement fee, and 50% is refundable if you decide not to proceed.

Yes. We source across five hubs specifically to match your time zone. LATAM candidates work US hours natively; the Philippines and Egypt cover early, late, and follow-the-sun shifts.

Typically 40-70% below an equivalent US hire at the same skill level, full-time and dedicated, not a shared freelancer. The salary calculator shows real ranges per role.

Training and testing. Our SDR candidates are recruited from sales backgrounds and pass live mock-call assessments. A generalist VA reads a script; an SDR runs a pipeline.

The 90-Day Perfect Hire Guarantee covers you: if your hire isn't the right fit within 90 days, we find a replacement at no additional charge, up to twice per placement.

Reserve your search

Tell us which seat is empty. We'll fill it.

Drop your details and we'll reach out within 24 hours to book your 30-minute discovery call. From there, sourcing starts within a day.

  • A dedicated headhunter assigned to your role within 24 hours
  • 3-4 fully vetted candidates in your inbox in 2-3 weeks
  • Custom video intros so you never interview blind
  • One flat fee, paid only when you hire
  • 90-day guarantee with 2 free replacements

We open a limited number of searches each month.

This form is for business owners looking to hire through Smart Hire Pros. Tell us about the seat you need filled and we'll confirm your dedicated search within 24 hours.

Please enter your name, a valid email, and a valid phone number.

🔒 100% confidential · No spam · No commitment required

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Redirecting you to schedule your discovery call now…

The meter's been running long enough.

Tell us which seat is empty, whether that's an SDR, Executive Assistant, Project Manager, or Bookkeeper. We call within 24 hours, brief in 30 minutes, and put vetted finalists in your inbox in 2-3 weeks. The only thing you'll wonder is what six more months of waiting would have cost.

Fill my open seat →

60 seconds · No card · 90-day guarantee · 2 free replacements