Recruiting services in Seattle, WA

Looking for a staffing agency in Seattle?

That search usually means one of two different things, and they are not interchangeable. Temporary staffing puts someone in a seat for a while on an agency payroll. A permanent search finds a person who joins your payroll and stays. If what you need is temporary cover, a staffing agency is the right call and this is not it.

For a permanent hire the real comparison is against a contingency recruiter. Contingency bills 20 to 30% of first year salary, several firms often work the same role at once, and nobody owns the outcome. A full search is one owner, a flat fee set by seniority, and a shortlist rather than a stream of forwarded resumes.

Seattle is covered the same way every other market is. Nothing about the fee moves with the city, so the figures below are here to price the role and read the market, not to change what the search costs.

What does an employer in Seattle actually pay?

Whatever the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA area pays, because that is the level at which wages are published. The table below is place of work: it is what employers located in that metropolitan area report paying, not what anyone living in Seattle happens to take home.

Tacoma shares this wage area, so its wage figures are identical to these. What separates those pages is the residence data further down. Seattle's own figures put computer and mathematical at a median of $151,431, which is a different number from every other city in that area.

Why are the two numbers on this page so different?

They count different people. The wage figures count jobs sitting inside the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA area, whoever fills them. The earnings figures count people who live in Seattle, wherever they commute to.

The clearest case here is legal. Seattle residents in those roles report a median of $131,752, against a median of $92,900 across the published wages for that group in this metro, a difference of about $38,852. Residents out-earning the local wage usually means they are commuting out to better-paying employers, so a Seattle offer in that group is competing with a drive rather than with the firm down the road.

It runs the other way in management, where published wages in this metro run to a median of $153,450 but Seattle residents in that group report a median of $125,490. Employers here are drawing that talent from outside the city line.

Across the groups we cover, Seattle earnings run from $49,361 in office and administrative support to $151,431 in computer and mathematical, a spread of 3.1x. A band set from the wrong end of that range is the most common reason a search here stalls.

Seattle is the 1st largest of the 3 Washington cities we publish data for, at 784,777 people, in King County.

What does a search cost here?

The same as anywhere. Location does not move the fee and neither does salary. Tier is set by the seniority of the role, and across all six tiers the published range is $6,240 to $54,340 per search. For scale, the highest published median wage in this metro is $370,000 for chief executives. A contingency firm hiring at that level would bill roughly $74,000 to $111,000 on the first year salary alone.