How to evaluate a startup recruiting partner: the questions that actually matter

An agency fee only makes sense against a baseline. SHRM’s 2025 Benchmarking Survey, which drew on 2,371 HR professionals, put the average cost per hire at $5,475 for non-executive roles and $35,879 for executive roles, with a median time to fill of roughly a month and a half for both. Those are averages across every kind of employer, so read them as a reference point rather than a forecast for a specialist startup role.

The cost of getting a hire wrong is larger. Gallup estimates that replacing an individual employee can cost anywhere from one-half to two times their annual salary. Speed matters as well: in a Robert Half survey of more than 1,000 US office workers, 23 percent said they lose interest in a firm if they do not hear back within a week of the first interview, and 46 percent lose interest after one to two weeks without an update. That survey is from 2016, so treat the exact percentages as directional.

Pure contingency recruiting, no placement and no fee, sounds low-risk on paper. In practice a contingency recruiter is often working your exact role for several other clients at once, racing to submit candidates before a competing agency does. Speed and volume win the fee, not fit. That is how you end up with a resume flood instead of a curated shortlist, and with a recruiter who has limited incentive to flag a candidate’s real weaknesses, since a placed-then-departed hire still generated a payout.

This is not an argument against contingency itself. It is an argument for checking whether a specific partner has built in the safeguards that fix the problem, because the fee model alone does not tell you.

Contingency fees are usually quoted as a percentage of the hire’s first-year salary, and 15 to 25 percent is a commonly quoted range for professional roles. Your quote may differ, so use the arithmetic below as a template, not a benchmark.

That is far above the SHRM average cost per hire, and that is the point to understand: an agency fee is not buying what a job post buys. You are paying for a specific outcome, a vetted person in a role your own team could not fill quickly. So compare the fee against the cost of leaving the role open and the cost of a mis-hire, not against the average hire. Just as important is when you pay. A fee due on signing is a different risk from a fee that is invoiced after the hire starts and spread across the guarantee period.

A handful of structural terms separate a well-run search from a resume-flood mill. Ask about each one directly and write down the answers.

Score each agency from 1 to 5 on the criteria below after the first call, before you look at price. The weights are a starting point, not a standard, so adjust them to what matters most for your search.

Any one of these can be explained. Several together usually cannot.

Agree the cadence up front so you can compare what was promised with what happens. A reasonable pattern is calibration in the first week, covering scope, level, scorecard and comp range. By the end of week two or three you should see a first set of vetted profiles, each with written reasoning rather than just a resume. By the end of the month you should be interviewing, with feedback flowing both ways.

If a partner cannot show meaningful pipeline progress by the end of the first few weeks, treat that as a signal to act on early rather than waiting it out.

You should hold us to the same checklist. We do not charge anything to start a search: we invoice only once your hire has started, then across the 90-day guarantee period. If the hire does not work out inside the guarantee, we run the search again at no additional fee. You get a market read within 48 hours of the brief, with first vetted profiles typically around day 14. Scorecards, feedback and scheduling live in one portal your whole hiring team can use, so the search never goes quiet. We cover the US, Canada and Europe, including remote-first searches across all three.