Should You Use a Recruitment Agency for Your First Hire, or Do It Yourself?

What You Are Actually Paying an Agency to Do

Strip away the pitch and an agency sells you three jobs. Reach: access to candidates who are not scrolling job boards, through a network the agency has already built. Filtering: turning a pile of applicants into a short, ordered list you can actually meet. And coordination: chasing people, booking calls, and keeping the process moving while you run the company. Everything else, the polish and the reassurance, hangs off those three. Seen plainly, the question stops being agency or no agency and becomes a sharper one: do you need all three, and can you get them another way?

The Fee, and What It Means on a First Hire

The fee is the visible cost, and on a single hire it can look worth it against the evenings you would otherwise spend. Two things are easy to miss. First, it recurs. An agency placement teaches the agency about your business, not you, so hire number two starts the meter over. Second, a fee buys a shortlist, not an outcome. You still run the interviews, still make the call, and the usual guarantee, a free replacement if the person leaves within a few months, does nothing about the slower and far more expensive failure of a hire who stays and underperforms. We put real numbers on that in what a bad hire actually costs a small team. The fee also scales with the salary, which is worth remembering while you are still deciding how much to pay a first hire in the first place.

It also helps to know you are not the odd one out if you skip the agency. In the APEC’s study of how French companies recruit managers, fewer than half use a recruitment intermediary at all, and the share has been drifting down rather than up. Most roles are filled directly, through a job post and a network. The agency is one option among several, not the default path a serious hire has to take.

When an Agency Is Genuinely Worth It

None of this makes agencies a bad deal. There are hires where the fee is the cheapest part of the decision, and it pays to recognise them honestly:

• A rare or senior role where the right person is not looking and you have no credible way to reach them.
• A confidential search you cannot run in the open, for example replacing someone still in the seat.
• A real time crunch, where you genuinely cannot give the search the hours it needs and the cost of the seat staying empty outweighs the fee.

The pattern is simple. An agency earns its fee when the reach is truly out of your grasp, or when your own time is worth more elsewhere than the money it saves. For a first generalist hire, a role that people do apply to and that you understand well enough to judge, that case is weaker than it used to be.

What Doing It Yourself Actually Takes

If you keep the search in-house, you have to cover the same three jobs an agency would. The good news is that none of them requires a network you spent a decade building.

• Reach. You go to candidates instead of waiting for them. Posting alone only reaches people actively looking, which is why founders so often end up with barely anyone qualified applying. Outbound sourcing is the part founders assume only an agency can do, and it is the part that has changed most.
• Filtering. Write down what good looks like once, then apply it to every applicant the same way, so the pile becomes a shortlist without you reading two hundred CVs at midnight.
• Coordination. The unglamorous chasing and scheduling that eats a search is also the easiest part to take off your own plate.

Founders talk themselves out of running the search because they picture the whole thing landing on their desk. It does not have to. Avoiding the most expensive founder hiring mistakes has far more to do with structure than with raw hours.

This is the ground Kynto is built on: the three jobs you would otherwise rent from an agency, run in-house and kept under your control. It sources candidates across a large talent pool so your reach is not limited to whoever applies, scores each one against the criteria you set so the shortlist builds itself, and handles the scheduling so the process keeps moving. You keep the context an agency never fully has, the judgment stays yours, and the fee stays in the business.

Key Takeaways

• A recruitment agency sells you three things: reach, filtering, and coordination. Everything else in the pitch hangs off those. Decide whether you need all three before you weigh the fee.
• The fee, commonly 15% to 25% of gross annual salary, recurs on every hire and buys a shortlist, not an outcome. You still make the call, and it does not protect you from a hire who stays and underperforms.
• Agencies earn their fee on rare, senior, or confidential searches, or under a real time crunch. For a first generalist hire you understand, the reach, filtering, and coordination are now yours to run in-house.

FAQ

Is a recruitment agency ever the right call for a first hire?

Yes, in specific cases. If the role is senior or rare and the right person is not looking, if the search has to stay confidential, or if you genuinely have no hours to give it and the seat staying empty costs more than the fee, an agency can be the cheaper choice. The weaker case is a first generalist hire that people apply to and that you can judge yourself.

How much does a recruitment agency actually cost?

In France, most firms charge a percentage of the new employee’s gross annual salary, commonly between 15% and 25%, with 20% a frequent midpoint. Some offer a fixed fee instead. On a 45,000 euro hire that is roughly 6,750 to 11,250 euros, and it repeats on the next hire, since the fee scales with each salary rather than being a one-time setup.

Can I really reach good candidates without an agency’s network?

Increasingly, yes. The reach an agency sells is access to people who are not actively applying, and outbound sourcing now puts that within a founder’s grasp directly. You contact profiles that fit rather than waiting on inbound, then apply consistent criteria to whoever responds. The network is no longer the moat it once was.