Agency recruiters typically charge 15% to 25% of first-year salary. On a $150,000 engineering role that is $22,500 to $37,500 for one hire. Whether that is expensive depends entirely on what it replaces, and the answer is genuinely not always "do it yourself".
This guide covers when an agency earns the fee, when it does not, and what running the process yourself actually involves.
When a headhunter is worth it
You are hiring one senior person and have no time. Founders hiring a first engineering lead while also running the company are the clearest case. The fee buys back weeks you do not have, on a role where a bad hire is catastrophic.
The role is genuinely rare. Specific compiler, embedded, or niche domain expertise where the qualified pool is in the hundreds globally. A good specialist recruiter already knows those people personally, and that network is not something you can build in a quarter.
You need discretion. Replacing someone who is still in the seat, or hiring against a confidential product line. You cannot run that search yourself without it becoming visible.
You are hiring in an unfamiliar market. Opening in a country you have never hired in, where you do not know the salary norms, notice periods or which companies are shedding people. Local knowledge is worth paying for.
When it is not
You are hiring several engineers into similar roles. Three backend hires at $150,000 each is $67,500 to $112,500 in fees. That is more than a year of a full-time internal recruiter, who will also build a pipeline you keep.
The role is well-supplied. For common stacks the pool is large and the constraint is filtering, not finding. A JavaScript search returns more qualified people than you can process; you are paying an agency to do work a tool does faster.
You want to build hiring capability. Every agency hire teaches you nothing about your own market. Six months in you are exactly as dependent as when you started.
Your budget is tight and your time is not. If you have hours available and $30,000 you do not, the arithmetic is straightforward.
What agencies actually do for the fee
Worth understanding, because it clarifies what you are replicating:
- Search their existing database plus LinkedIn and public sources.
- Screen by phone against your requirements.
- Sell the role, which is the part most companies underrate. A good recruiter changes minds about opportunities candidates would otherwise dismiss.
- Coordinate scheduling, feedback and the process generally.
- Negotiate the offer, and handle the counter-offer conversation.
Steps 3 and 5 are where the value concentrates. Search is the commoditised part, and it is the part software has largely absorbed.
Running it yourself: what it takes
Time. Realistically 15 to 25 hours per role: sourcing, writing outreach, screening calls, coordination. Concentrated in the first two weeks.
A written role definition. Not a job description — an honest list of what the person will do in their first six months and what they must already know. Most failed searches trace back to never having done this.
A salary range you will actually publish. Refusing to state one costs you replies and wastes everyone's time on candidates you cannot afford.
A process you have agreed in advance. How many interviews, who runs them, what each is testing, and how fast you commit to moving. Deciding this while candidates are in flight is how you lose them.
A sourcing method. Either free searching, covered in our free sourcing guide, or a self-serve tool. For engineering roles the skill pages show what the pool looks like by technology and country before you commit.
The realistic hybrid
Most teams that get this right do not choose one or the other.
Source yourself, hire an agency for the hard roles. Run your own process for common positions where the pool is large, and pay for the one genuinely rare search a year.
Negotiate the fee. Agency fees are more negotiable than advertised, particularly for multiple roles or exclusivity. 15% for a committed set of three hires is a very different number from 25% for one speculative search.
Ask for a contingency structure you can live with. Contingent search costs nothing up front but gets deprioritised against retained work. Retained gets attention but you pay regardless of outcome. For a role you must fill, retained usually wins; for a nice-to-have, contingent.
Keep the candidates. Whatever you pay for, ensure you retain the pipeline. The people who were interesting but not right this time are the cheapest source of your next hire, and that asset should not live in an agency's database.
A rough decision rule
Multiply your fully-loaded hourly cost by 20 hours. If that number is comfortably below the agency fee, and you have the 20 hours available in the next fortnight, run it yourself.
If you do not have the hours, or the role is rare enough that you would not know where to start, the fee is buying something real.
For engineering roles specifically, the search half of the work has got considerably cheaper. Browse the market by skill and country for free before deciding — knowing whether your pool is 500 people or 50,000 changes the answer.