Pay for hires, not recruiters: How GovCons are fixing cleared recruiting

Every cleared role a government contractor leaves open is revenue it already won and can’t invoice. On a newly awarded program with a dozen open requisitions, that adds up by the day.

Vern Saunders had done the numbers. As CEO of Freedom Technology Solutions Group, he was paying his internal recruiters hefty salaries whether they filled a seat or not. Too often, they didn't.

“Neither their effort nor results were effective which left us with unfilled vacancies and a lot of lost revenue,” he said.

In 2024, he outsourced recruiting to Procession Systems, a cleared recruiting firm that only gets paid when it delivers. Dozens of hires later, his programs run 95%-100% staffed, and most of his open roles come from growth.

“Procession’s model places the burden of performing the recruiting function squarely on its back,” Saunders said. "If they don't successfully find and close candidates, there is a significant financial downside.”

Like Saunders, Ricky Berrios, CEO and founder of Bana Solutions, had paid for recruiting that didn’t produce. He’d tried several firms on different models and never got sustained results. His roles were niche, his bar was high and his needs could change in a week. That history put him off building an internal team.

“A lack of confidence in our recruiting efforts was impacting our ability to ultimately deliver for our clients and limiting our growth,” he said.

Procession co-founder Joe Barletta had seen the problem from inside government contracting, leading talent acquisition at a $30 million GovCon firm. Procession’s other founder had spent two decades trying to fix recruiting inside his own contractor business. They formed Procession with Volition Partners around a narrow premise: cleared recruiting was expensive, very hard to manage and too often disconnected from whether the contractor made a hire.

“Most leaders in this space are worried about how reliable is my recruiting, how scalable is it, can we actually deliver what's needed,” Barletta said. “And even when they feel like they have a good solution, it's often temporary and coming with a very expensive price tag.”

An internal team means overhead, tool licenses and a management load leaders don't want. Barletta said many GovCon leaders see outside staffing agencies as costly, unreliable partners for short-term needs. Cleared recruiting is slow work that can't rely on entirely on applications. Barletta said some searches take hundreds of hours to produce one candidate.

“Unfilled or aging roles can easily snowball to millions of dollars of lost revenue,” he added.

Procession’s mission is to take the whole job off the contractor's plate. “Focus on your A-game," Barletta said. "Be the best at delivering value to the government customer. You don’t have to then run another recruiting business inside of your gov con business.”  Partner with us - you do your A game and we will do our A game.

Procession backs that with a guarantee: It will deliver cleared talent each month or the client doesn't pay. In the past three years, it has made over 500 cleared hires; 70% of the candidates it delivers have Top Secret clearance or higher. 

The firm's 30-plus recruiters speak with thousands of cleared candidates each month, which Barletta said gives clients a current read on the market.

“People rely on market data that was compiled a year ago, and especially this year, the entire industry's changed,” he explained.

Barletta talks to some of their leaders daily. His account managers sometimes know more people at a client firm than the CEO does.

Berrios' team has folded Procession in the same way. “Procession has directly been a catalyst to our growth,” he said. “They are in our leadership meetings, attend our events and viewed by our team as if they were internal staff. They are a true partner” .

Over a six-year partnership with Procession, Bana has moved from carefully weighing which opportunities it could staff to pursuing large enterprise programs with confidence. "We no longer turn away work over staffing concerns," Berrios said. "We can take on enterprise-scale efforts for our customers and know the quality of our people will hold.

Another 200-employee client that replaced six internal recruiters with Procession has since topped 300 employees, making 25 more hires a year and spending over $500,000 less annually on recruiting. Barletta noted every long-term client has seen total spend fall while hires went up.

Additionally, a private equity veteran who bought a 50-person contractor this year was paying a recruiting firm a retainer, whether it produced or not.

“Instead of improving candidate quality, they drowned us in resumes of unqualified individuals to meet our acute hiring needs,” the CEO said.

He ran Procession against the incumbent head to head. Within six months, the company had broken its yearly hiring record and went from five or 10 hires a year to a pace of 50-60. His technical team is picky, the CEO said, and Procession has built each round of feedback into its screening, so his team spends less time on resumes and unpromising first interviews.

One longtime Procession client has outsourced recruiting to the company since 2019, made more than 200 hires and grown from about 50 employees to more than 250.

“Procession is by far the best outsourced recruiting firm I have worked with in my 25 years of GovCon,” the company’s CEO said. “They produce results and they have the metrics to adapt when searching for highly sought-after talent. We also trust them as a partner”

As contractors prepare for the next wave of award-driven hiring, Barletta encourages leaders to ask a simple question to begin evaluating the path forward: Is recruiting costing you money or making you money?

Learn more about how Procession Systems helps growing GovCons build a more effective, scalable recruiting function.