Recruiting in house is the cheapest route as long as candidates respond to your posting. The moment that dries up, you’re not paying less, you’re paying differently: in time to hire, in your engineers’ hours, and in a role that stays open for months. An agency pays for itself on senior and scarce profiles, and for teams without a recruiter of their own.
So the question isn’t “agency or in house.” It’s whether enough good candidates reach you for this specific profile. The answer differs per role, and often within the same company.
What does recruiting in house actually cost?
The direct costs aren’t the problem. A posting on the usual channels runs a few hundred to a few thousand euros, an applicant tracking system for a small team a few hundred a month. Rarely more than a couple of thousand euros per role.
The real cost is hours and elapsed time.
Hours from expensive people. A serious process for one senior role costs your hiring manager twenty to thirty hours: writing the posting, screening, interviewing, aligning, rejecting. On top of that, technical assessment by two or three engineers, a few hours each per candidate. Those are exactly the people you can’t redeploy.
Sourcing, once applications aren’t enough. For scarce profiles the supply doesn’t come to you. Active outreach means dozens of messages for a handful of conversations, week after week. It’s a craft, and mostly it’s persistence. Most teams start strong and slide back into waiting for applications by week three.
Time to hire. Six to twelve weeks is normal for specialized IT roles, and senior or rare profiles run longer. Those figures come largely from recruitment firms themselves, so take them with margin, but anyone who has done it recognizes the order of magnitude.
The open role itself. There’s no honest euro figure here, and anyone who quotes one is making it up. What can be said: an unfilled senior role means a delayed roadmap and more pressure on the team you already have. That’s the cost you feel in Q2.
When should you recruit in house?
In four situations an agency is simply a waste of your money.
You get enough good applications. It sounds obvious, but it’s the only test that counts. If your posting produces three people worth talking to inside two weeks, your own channel works.
The profile isn’t scarce. For mid-level generalists on a common stack, the market is far more open than for a platform engineer with deep Kubernetes experience. Supply at the entry end has grown, too: entry-level vacancies in the Netherlands dropped by nearly thirty percent since early 2024, and somewhat more in tech. For junior and entry level, you rarely need to pay an agency.
You have a recruiter or a strong network. An in-house recruiter pays for themselves from roughly eight to ten hires a year. Below that, it’s an expensive fixed cost. Above it, the agency is the expensive option.
Your team brings the candidate. Referrals out of an engineering team are still the best channel there is, provided you ask for them structurally and put something behind the ask. That costs you attention, not budget.
When do you bring in an agency?
The profile is scarce and senior. From around 80,000 euros up, and for specializations where people don’t apply, searching becomes actual searching. What you’re buying is access to people who aren’t looking.
You have no recruitment function. At 15 to 75 people that’s the normal state of affairs: recruitment sits with a founder or an engineering lead, alongside everything else. Outsourcing then isn’t a luxury, it’s the only way the process keeps a pace.
It’s your first hire in a new discipline. Your first security engineer, your first data engineer. You don’t yet know what good looks like, and you have nobody who can assess the candidate on substance. An agency that knows that market sells you a frame of reference.
The search is confidential. A replacement the incumbent doesn’t know about yet. You can’t run that in house.
You’re hiring outside your own market. If you want to recruit nearshore or across the Poland-Netherlands corridor, the barrier isn’t money, it’s access and language. What that costs is in what a nearshore developer costs.
How do you spot an agency worth its fee?
By one thing: whether they qualify your search before accepting it.
An agency that sends five CVs within twenty-four hours hasn’t searched, it has emptied its database. An agency that spends an hour probing your salary range, your decision process, your onboarding, and your competition for talent, and then tells you the role isn’t fillable on these terms, has given you something more valuable than a candidate: an honest read on your position.
That’s exactly what we built MATCHED for, our own qualification framework, modeled on MEDDPICC from enterprise sales. We score both the search and the candidate across seven dimensions. A declined search is a good outcome for us, not lost revenue. What we charge and how to compare fees is in what a recruitment agency costs.
Is there a middle path?
Yes, and for most scale-ups it’s the sensible one.
Do in house what you’re good at: your own network, referrals, and the roles that actually attract applications. Bring in an agency for the one or two roles a year where you get stuck. That way you pay for scarcity only, and not for work you’d do just as well yourself.
A second variant: have an agency run the first hire in a new discipline, and agree that you get the role profile, the assessment questions, and the market read along with it. Then you’re buying a candidate and the ability to find the next one yourself. Just ask for it. An agency that gets awkward about that is counting on your dependence.
What’s the decision rule?
Ask yourself two questions. For this profile, do I get three people worth interviewing within two weeks? And do I have someone who genuinely gives this process time, week after week?
Two yeses: do it in house. One no: revisit the posting, the range, and your channels before you hire anyone. Two nos: what an agency buys you isn’t a candidate, it’s time to hire, and on a senior role that’s where the money is.
Want to run that out loud for a specific role, including the answer that you don’t need us? Take a look at our page for employers and book an intake.
More from this cluster: what a recruitment agency costs, and contract staffing or permanent placement.
