Staffing Agencies Fill Seats. Managed Marketplaces Build Teams.

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Three weeks ago we ran the math. One churned SDR costs $51,400.

Two weeks ago we fixed the frame. Performance, not cost.

Last week we found the failure point. No plan, no scorecard, no check-in.

This week we name the model that keeps failing you.

It is the staffing agency.

You know the model. You have used it. You will use it again next quarter when the seat is empty.

Here is why the seat keeps emptying.

The agency gets paid when the seat is filled. Not when the hire works.

Read that twice.

A staffing agency invoices on placement. Day one. The candidate signs, the fee clears, the relationship ends.

What happens in month three is your problem, not theirs.

So the agency optimizes for speed. Fill fast, invoice fast, move to the next req. Retention is not in the contract. It is not in the incentive. It is not anywhere.

You are buying a seat-filler and calling it a hiring partner.

The unit economics are not close.

One row matters more than the rest. The first one.

When the vendor gets paid on retention, the vendor builds for retention. When the vendor gets paid on placement, the vendor builds for placement. Everything else on that table follows from the incentive.

This is where RevOps gets it wrong.

A RevOps Analyst is the easiest role to fill fast and the easiest to lose fast.

The agency screens for a resume that says HubSpot and Salesforce. They place. You inherit a person who can name the tools but cannot build the routing logic, clean the attribution, or fix the lead scoring that has been wrong for a year.

Month three, you find out. They were filling a seat. You needed someone to build the system.

A managed marketplace shows you the demo before the interview. The workflow they built. The dashboard they own. The number they moved. You are not buying a resume. You are buying receipts.

The replacement clause is the tell.

Ask any staffing agency what happens if the hire churns in 90 days.

Most will re-run the search. For a new fee.

That is the re-post loop with a vendor attached. Hire, churn, pay again. The agency wins every loop. You lose $51,400 every loop.

A managed marketplace covers the replacement because the marketplace ate the risk when it took the match. The incentive points the same direction as yours.

What to do this week.

Pull your last agency invoice. Find the placement fee.

Now find the clause that ties any part of that fee to the hire still being there in 90 days.

There is no clause. There never was.

You did not buy a team. You rented a seat and paid retail.

See how the managed marketplace model works.

Replacement guarantees. Open salary intelligence. Onboarding built in. The model agencies cannot copy because their invoice does not allow it.

Start at cloudtask.com.

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