How to choose your hiring help

Hiring, especially in a startup context, is not always easy.

As a matter of fact:

• There are around 2000 international companies in Amsterdam.
• there are 69 000 jobs available in tech in Amsterdam
• 475 international headquarters are based in Amsterdam.
• Amsterdam has one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe (3.3% in March 2019).
• There is an increasing demand for highly skilled international workers

If you type "developer" and limit the search to Amsterdam, there are roughly 40 000 results....for 69 000 jobs available.

When you add the fact that a hiring manager (be it a Lead Developer, Internal Recruiter, CEO, CTO etc), is busy with her own job, and hiring comes on top of it all, its quite clear that in most cases, help is needed.

And here come the important questions:

1. What options do I have to help me with hiring?
2. How do I know what's best for me and my situation?

What options do I have to help me with hiring?

You have 4 options.

The usual first is that you think you can do the hiring yourself, and you decide to give it a try. Soon enough you realise how much work is required and how slow results come in, or how many things you need to do at the same time and you don't have enough time to focus on too many things. Of course, sometimes you are successful, and that's great because you saved a lot of resources.

The advantage of this is, of course, spending very little money, at the expense of some extra hours of work put in. But if it doesn't work, you go to the next option.

The second most common option is to hire a recruitment agency to do it for you. Here you can choose between a traditional no-cure-no-pay model (you only pay usually a 20-25% fee once the hire has been made), or a mixed model, where you pay the firm per hour worked (to set up everything and start filing the pipeline for you) and a hiring fee on top can be an option as well. An example of a great agency that has almost 100% success rate is LevelUp Ventures.

The advantage of this is that, if done well, you can focus on your own work, while only attending interviews and being involved in the later stage of the process. All this at a cost between 12-15 000 euro (if we take an average 60 000 euro/year gross salary).

The disadvantage of this is that it can get quite pricy for an early-stage startup, and it can take between 90-120 hours spread over 7-10 weeks to fill a role.

The third option is signing up on a talent platform. A good one here is talent.io, who has the biggest reach in Europe. You create a company account with standard info (team size, product description, location, tech stack, etc) and then you can browse freely through actively interested candidates. All this is done with filters based on technology, seniority, location, language. If you're lucky to find the right talent, you can make a hire in 3-4weeks at a cost of 15% hiring fee.

The advantage of this is that it speeds up the top of the funnel (you don't have to source candidates, write job descriptions or do the first screening), as well as you might have senior devs that won't work with agencies out of principle, so they would be available only here. Also, it can round up to 9 000 euro/hire, which is way less than an agency.

The disadvantage is that you might need to spend quite some time browsing through the newly added candidates every week, as well as move fast (align internally all stakeholders to be ready to interview), otherwise they will be gone in the blink of an eye to another company that moved faster.

The fourth option is to hire a freelance recruiter. It's like having a senior recruiter in-house, available on demand. They work on hourly rates, which can vary from 55 -100eur/hour, which places them as the cheapest solution on the market.

The advantage of this is that you have a dedicated expert in your team, you get exclusive support, a solid pipeline, interview guidance, offer making towards candidates and benchmarks on salary/benefits. If you make 2 hires out of this pool, that's your win, no extra fee charged.

The disadvantage of this is that if the freelancer is not good, you risk to "waste" a bit of money on this without results. With a good selection process (asking for references and having a few interviews) should be fine.

How do I know what's best for me and my situation?

Obviously, it depends on the situation. What I've noticed over the years, is that if you have a high volume of hires (5+) and an internal recruiter, it's best to make use of a talent platform, due to speed and efficiency.

If you have the same volume but no recruiter, then an agency or a freelancer can help. In both cases, you can negotiate package deals.

If you have less than 5 hires needed, and maybe also want to set up your onboarding process or interview guide, it's usually best to hire a freelancer or an agency that can dedicate a person to come to your office and help you with that.

That's it. If you need help in deciding what option works best, let me know.

Good luck with hiring!