Should a climate scale-up hire its own recruiter, keep using agencies, or bring in a recruitment partner? It mostly comes down to one thing: how many people you hire a year. One to three hires, use an agency. Sixteen or more, put a recruiter on the payroll. Most climate start-ups and scale-ups sit in between, and that is where a partner at a fixed price per vacancy makes the most sense. Here is the honest version of all three, including when we are not the right choice.
What does each option cost?
Take a scale-up that hires eight people a year at an average salary of EUR 55,000.
- Recruitment agency: at a 20% fee that is EUR 88,000 a year. At 25% it is EUR 110,000.
- In-house recruiter: around EUR 83,000 a year. That is a salary of EUR 4,200 a month, employer costs, a LinkedIn Recruiter seat, an ATS and job boards.
- Recruitment partner: EUR 60,000 with us. Eight vacancies at EUR 7,500 each, paid in monthly instalments.
Price is only part of it. Each model has a point where it works well and a point where it starts to hurt.
When is a recruitment agency the right choice?
When you hire one to three people a year. There isn't enough volume to justify anything structural. You pay per placement, you accept the fee, and you pay nothing when you are not hiring.
It stops working once the hires add up. The fee is a percentage of salary, so a senior hire costs more for the same search. Every vacancy starts from zero, because the agency doesn't really know your company. And you are one of many clients.
When should you hire an in-house recruiter?
When you hire sixteen or more people a year, steadily. Then there is enough work to fill someone's week all year, and a recruiter on the payroll starts to pay for itself. Nobody knows your culture better than someone who is part of it.
Below that volume it gets uncomfortable. The cost is the same in a quarter with no vacancies. You have to find and onboard the recruiter first, which is a search in itself. And one person rarely covers sales, finance and engineering equally well, across several countries.
When does a recruitment partner fit?
Between four and fifteen hires a year. Enough volume that agency fees hurt, not enough to fill a recruiter's week. That is where most climate start-ups and scale-ups are, especially in the first years after a funding round.
A partnership with us runs for twelve months. You agree how many vacancies you expect, at a fixed price per vacancy between EUR 7,000 and EUR 8,000. No fee per placement and no hourly rate. We work as part of your team, so we get to know the company once and build on that with every search.
It comes with three guarantees:
- Delivery: your new colleague is found within 100 days. If not, that search is free, and we keep going until someone signs.
- Replacement: every hire is covered for a full year.
- Opt-out: new clients can stop within six weeks if we haven't proposed a candidate, and get everything back.
When is a partner the wrong choice?
If you hire once a year, don't sign a partnership. Use an agency, or your own network. If you hire thirty people a year, build your own team, and perhaps bring us in for the peaks. We would rather tell you that up front than find out together halfway through the year.
How do you decide?
Start with two numbers: how many people you expect to hire in the next twelve months, and what a hire really costs you today. The first one you probably know. The second one is usually a surprise. We broke it down in what it really costs to hire in a climate tech start-up, and the cost per hire calculator works it out for your own situation.
Still not sure it is the right moment? These eight signs usually settle it. And if you want to see the tiers and terms, they are on the Partnership pricing page.
