It’s late November, 2013. We were warned that the approaching holiday season was a dead period in recruitment as hiring managers (just like everyone else) tend to take elaborate vacations and leave everyone else involved in the hiring process in the dark. Nevertheless, we trudged on. Ripped through list after list, cold calling, emailing, doing whatever we could to sign a few clients. Remember, we’re a startup at this stage. There’s no reason for anyone to trust that we knew what we were doing, let alone give us a shot at helping them make crucial hires for their business. All the same, we had to trust our methods, the same methods that made us successful in the past, and hope that someone would buy-in to our fabricated brand (the website and logo were conceived the week we launched).

Needless to say, we got lucky. A couple of seed-funded startups liked that our fees were low enough, and since we worked on contingency anyways, the risk of giving us an opportunity was very little to them. We couldn’t be too picky with our clientele at the time. After all, who were we to judge? We just quit our jobs to enter a field littered with competitors – we were just happy to have some work after the endless weeks of business development.

We spent some time (more than some, quite a bit actually) working on accounts that went absolutely nowhere, trying to help these companies find anyone from a Sr. Python Developer to a QA Engineer. We continued to use the methods we thought worked, but the results weren’t coming. Were we doing something wrong? Did we misjudged the niche? Will I have to start looking for another job?

The nerves began to creep in as Christmas was came and went. We didn’t take any time off. We couldn’t afford to. We had a handful of items on the table, and we had no idea if anything would come of it. That is, until the day something did. There had been one account, let’s call them MW, who at first gave us the impression that they really needed our help in finding a CTO, but they really didn’t have much money to spend on hiring, let along to pay a recruitment fee. We offered MW our lowest rate yet: 5% of the hired candidate’s annual salary, contingency-based, of course, which is almost unheard of in professional tech recruitment nowadays (an average fee is 15-25%). We figured, “what the hell, why not, something’s gotta give eventually”. And then it did. On January 16th, after nearly 2 weeks of radio silence, MW shot over an email with a signed offer letter. He’d been dealing with the candidate behind the scenes the entire time, and the two came to an agreement, whereby he’d get paid $40k/year, plus a 17.5% equity stake in the company.

Just like that, out of the blue, it happened. The drought was over. We’d made our first placement as Synapse International. Granted it was the smallest placement fee we’d make over the life of the business – a mere $2,000 – but it was a start. We got the ball rolling, and roll it did.

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