Direct hire and direct placement.
One search, one fee, one employee on your payroll, the standard model for roadmap-critical engineering headcount.
Direct hire, also called direct placement, is when a recruitment agency sources a candidate who is then hired straight onto the employer's payroll as a permanent employee. The agency is paid a one-time fee and never becomes the employer. Mindpool India runs direct-hire searches across AI Infrastructure, energy, and semiconductor roles in India.
What direct hire means in practice
The employer interviews, decides, and employs. The recruiter finds, qualifies, and closes. There is no intermediary employment relationship, no hourly bill rate, and no conversion fee later, because there is nothing to convert, the candidate starts as a permanent employee.
- Candidate joins the employer's payroll and benefits on day one
- Single placement fee tied to first-year base salary
- No conversion or buyout charges
- 90-day replacement guarantee
When direct hire is the right model
Direct hire suits roles that carry long-term ownership: architecture, silicon, safety-critical systems, security clearance work, people leadership, and anything where losing the individual means losing the context. If the work outlives a project window, the hire should too.
How our direct-hire searches run
Every search starts with a brief intake call that establishes the outcome, the must-have competencies, and a realistic compensation band. From there we map the market, run targeted and specialised outreach, screen with a sector specialist, and return a shortlist you can interview immediately.
- Shortlists typically delivered within days of the brief
- Average of roughly 21 days from brief to signed offer
- Compensation benchmarking against live Indian offer data
- Reference checks and structured offer close
Frequently asked
What is direct hire?
Direct hire is a permanent placement where the candidate is employed directly by the hiring company from their first day, with the recruitment agency paid a one-time fee.
What is the difference between direct hire and temp-to-hire?
Temp-to-hire starts as an agency-employed assignment and converts later, usually with a conversion fee. Direct hire skips that entirely, the candidate is a permanent employee immediately. Mindpool India does direct hire only.
Is direct hire more expensive than staffing?
Direct hire is a single fee rather than an ongoing hourly margin, so it is usually cheaper than agency staffing once an assignment runs past a few months.
Does Mindpool India place direct-hire engineers?
Yes, direct-hire engineering and leadership roles across AI infrastructure, energy, and semiconductors, throughout India.
How a Mindpool India search runs
Every engagement starts with a briefing call in which we pull apart the role rather than the job title: the problems the hire owns in their first two quarters, the systems and tooling they inherit, who they work alongside, and which parts of the specification are genuinely non-negotiable. That brief becomes the scorecard we screen against for this search, so shortlists are argued for on evidence instead of keyword overlap.
Sourcing is deliberately two-track. We approach specialists already known to our sector recruiters, and we run targeted, specialised outreach into the specific teams, programmes, and technologies where the relevant experience actually sits, including people who are not searching. Candidates are then interviewed by a recruiter who understands the domain, reference-checked on the claims that matter, and presented with a written rationale, compensation expectations, notice period, and location constraints already confirmed.
Permanent hiring only, what that means
Mindpool India is a permanent recruitment and executive search firm. Every placement is a full-time, direct-hire employee on your payroll, on your benefits, and inside your engineering culture. We do not provide contract, temporary, temp-to-hire, or contingent staffing, and we do not act as an employer of record. That single focus is why our process optimises for retention rather than time-to-fill alone.
- • Contingent permanent search, retained executive search, embedded RPO, or research-led talent mapping
- • Sector-specialist recruiters in AI infrastructure and ML platform, energy, and semiconductors
- • Roughly 21 days from brief to a signed offer on a typical search
- • 90-day retention guarantee on every permanent placement
- • India-wide coverage
Hiring managers can book a call or email a hiring brief and receive a calibrated shortlist with market context on availability and compensation before committing to a full search.