Contingent Agency or Embedded Recruiting – What's The Best Hiring Solution For Your Startup?

In many early-stage startups, recruiting doesn't get as much attention as it needs, and hiring an in-house recruiter usually doesn’t make much sense since hiring needs can change quickly. Thus, many startups decide to hire a recruiting agency to support them with hiring.

In this article, we want to help you decide between a traditional contingent recruiting model and ACELR8’s Embedded Recruiting.

1. Close collaboration with the client

Contingent Agency

Recruiters who work for contingent recruiting agencies usually work on multiple clients at the same time, therefore it’s much harder for them to engage in a more spontaneous communication with stakeholders at your company. They also don’t actively participate in your company’s life and don’t join your communication channels like Slack, which doesn’t give them the opportunity to get to know your team and the culture of your organisation.

ACELR8 Embedded Recruiting

ACELR8's Talent Partners work virtual-shoulder-to-virtual-shoulder with you and become part of your team during the whole collaboration. We join your Slack or Microsoft Teams, take part in all-hands meetings, and get to know people in your company. This results in a constant feedback loop on matching the candidates to your needs and culture; it speeds up the hiring process and provides a great candidate experience.

2. Subscription-based pricing that fits your hiring needs

Contingent Agency

Contingent recruiting agencies are known for their simple and transparent fees: roughly 25% of the yearly salary of a hired candidate. It’s a fair model, but if you’re hiring for Senior- of Executive-level roles, then the costs can get high.

ACELR8 Embedded Recruiting

ACELR8's Embedded Recruiting model works differently. Firstly, we provide different, subscription-based pricing options based on the size and hiring needs of your company. It is hard to build a business from scratch, and your access to resources matter in the early stages. Secondly, for our recruiters working onsite full time, you pay a monthly retainer fee, and we charge you a set fee only when we make a hire. Alternatively, depending on your hiring needs, we can also offer you a flat fee.

3. All-round recruiting toolset included

Contingent Agency

One of the best benefits of hiring a recruiting agency is access to its recruiting tools. Costs of your agency recruiter using tools like LinkedIn Recruiter accounts, posting offers on job listing platforms, and licenses for Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) are included in the pricing. But as the agency owns the license, your company doesn’t have access to the candidates stored in these tools. Thus you won't be able to browse through all the candidates sourced by the company, and you will have to rely just on the summary that the agency sends you.

ACELR8 Embedded Recruiting

ACELR8 offers you a lot of flexibility when it comes to the recruiting toolset. Every Talent Partner at our company has a LinkedIn Recruiter account, which is an essential part of our sourcing process. And when we integrate an ATS, we onboard your team in using it, so everybody has access, even after our collaboration. We will help you pick one based on our experience with all the popular ATS’ on the market. We partnered with companies such as Greenhouse and Lever to offer you discounts on their software. 

On top of that, we have our internal and house-made tool called ACELR8 Compass to our disposal, that gives you access to active candidates. We are using an unbiased approach to process our candidates based on their skills and motivation. Our recruiters can’t see the candidate’s name nor their picture, just their work experience. This allows us to match amazing talent with equally amazing job opportunities without any bias.

4. Great candidate experience

Contingent Agency

A great benefit of working with contingent recruiting agencies is that they have access to expensive networks of candidates. Unfortunately, there are also negative sides to that. First, a candidate who doesn't match the company’s profile may enter the hiring process. Second, it makes the experience for candidates much worse, as they don’t get as much attention than they would  from an in-house recruiter. Very often they don’t even mention the company that they’re representing.

ACELR8 Embedded Recruiting

At ACELR8, we always put people before numbers. We don't want just to close a role – we want to find A-players who will allow you to grow and take your company to the next stage. By becoming part of your team, we reach out on your company’s behalf; this makes our messaging and pitching of the company on point. We own the process working closely with you, which makes us guide the candidates through the interview process with clear feedback and speed. Delivering a great candidate experience is ACELR8’s top priority.

5. Taking on the whole recruiting process

Contingent Agency

A common practice among contingent recruiting agencies is to focus just on sourcing and screening the candidates and leaving the rest of the process to you. This gives you access to a talent pool but means that the screening, scheduling, and interviewing are still on you and your company.  

ACELR8 Embedded Recruiting

That's why ACELR8 takes care of your full-cycle recruiting process, allowing you to focus on your business while we are working on improving your recruiting efforts. Our recruiters take care of everything from running the role kick-off meeting with relevant stakeholders from your company, interviewing candidates, scheduling calls with hiring managers, up to closing the candidate and welcoming them on their first day. This constant feedback loop makes sure you bring talent on board that fits your teams!

6. Access to recruiting knowledge to build your company

Contingent Agency

Since contingent agencies and their recruiters are not as attached to their client as an in-house recruiter would be, they can’t collect hiring practices that can help the company in their hiring process in the long-term. Once they hire the person that matches the profile, they off-board without useful feedback on building your own recruiting function. 

ACELR8 Embedded Recruiting

At ACELR8, we offer our aggregated learning from top startups as a crucial part of a collaboration. Thus we give you access to our knowledge resources. First, every recruiter joining ACELR8 has to go through ACELR8 Academy, which gives a consistent performance for all Talent Partners – so it does not matter who from ACELR8 you bring on board. This knowledge is transferred to your team, through interview training we provide - free of charge. And second, you get access to our Hiring Playbooks even after our work is done. The Playbooks contain everything that you need to build up a talent function: all the steps of the hiring process, sourcing methods, challenges for candidates, scorecards, and more. 

What’s the best recruiting solution for me?

There are many other benefits of ACELR8's Embedded Recruiting that we didn't cover here, such as employer branding support, internal referral programmes, and more. Contingent recruiting agencies can be a great fit if you want to get a bit of support for your own hiring efforts and on short notice. It will save you some time on things like sourcing. If you are looking to grow your company, with a scalable and repeatable recruiting function, our embedded model is the solution. ACELR8 brings recruiting insights from dozens of startups and tech companies that we worked with in the past. We take care of the whole recruiting process and allow you to focus on getting your product or service out. If you want to learn more, feel free to drop us a message here – we are going to get back to you within 24 hours.