Senior recruiting capacity, without the 20% placement fee.
Cardinal Consulting Group is a fractional recruiting practice. You get a senior talent acquisition leader embedded in your team — sourcing, screening, and closing hard-to-fill roles — for a flat hourly or retained rate. No percentage-of-salary fees. No paying for a placement instead of the work.
Why fractional
Pay for the recruiting, not a percentage of the salary
Most of what I do is fractional recruiting — senior capacity embedded in your team for a set number of hours a week. Here's why companies choose it over a placement fee.
The fee model is broken
A 20% placement fee on a $150K hire is $30,000 — paid even if the hire churns in a year. The incentive is to close fast, not to hire right. Run the same search fractionally and it typically lands between $10,000 and $15,000.
Embedded, not transactional
Fractional means I work inside your process — your ATS, your hiring managers, your scorecards — a set number of hours each week, scaled to the search load. The pipeline and market data built along the way stay with you.
Senior only
Nearly 20 years of recruiting, including leading a 25-person global TA function. The person you hire is the person who does the work — no handoff to a junior researcher.
What I do
Four ways to engage
Whether you need ongoing recruiting capacity, one critical hire, a full talent strategy, or a rapid sourcing push, the work is structured, transparent, and built on evidence.
Fractional Recruiting
Senior recruiting capacity embedded in your team for a set number of hours a week — sourcing, screening, and closing — at a flat hourly or monthly retainer rate. Never a percentage of salary.
Retained Search
A dedicated search for roles where the hire matters most. Scorecard-built before sourcing starts, market-mapped, and presented with evidence — not resumes.
Talent Strategy Consulting
Org design, hiring process, compensation calibration, and interview infrastructure — plus the systems underneath: ATS and HRIS selection, implementation, and administration, and recruiting dashboards that give leadership a live read on the pipeline. The setup that makes every hire after the first one easier.
Sourcing Sprints
A focused, time-boxed sourcing push against a defined profile. Named targets, documented outreach, and a market read you can act on — in days, not months.
How I work
Evidence over instinct
Every engagement runs on the same operating system: define the win, map the market, score the evidence.
Scorecard first
We define what "great" looks like before anyone is sourced — outcomes, attributes, and deal-breakers in writing.
Map the market
Every reachable candidate in the target pool is identified and approached. No cherry-picking, no hidden shortlists.
Score the evidence
Candidates are evaluated against the scorecard with documented proof — so the decision is defensible, not just comfortable.
Track record
Nearly two decades of hiring that worked
Craig Chung has led talent acquisition at scale — from 1,700 hires a year as a Director of TA to retained C-level searches as a founder. The pattern is the same: define the outcome, find the proof, make the hire.
1,700+
Hires per year led as Director of Talent Acquisition — while cutting vacancy from 16% to 2%.
$2M
In insourcing cost savings delivered by rebuilding recruiting operations from the inside.
C-level
Retained executive searches completed as a founder — CCO, CIO, CFO and operators.
Case studies
Work that moved the number
A few engagements, stated plainly — the problem, what was built, and what changed.
87.5% reduction in staff vacancies
Rebuilt the TA function for a 100-site education network: new intake, scorecard-led screening, and a sourcing operation to match. Vacancy fell from 16% to 2% while the team delivered ~1,700 hires a year.
Strategic clinical staff insourcing
Brought allied-health hiring in-house for a school network instead of renting it from agencies — about $2M saved through insourcing, with a repeatable clinical vetting process left behind.
Accelerating sales growth through strategic recruitment
Built the talent roadmap that took a luxury streetwear brand from $12M to $30M — key commercial hires sequenced against the growth plan, not filled as tickets.
Client words
Top Rated Plus on Upwork
5.0 across 8 reviews · 100% Job Success · 18 contracts, 388 hours. A few verbatim notes below — full history on the Upwork profile.
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