You just raised. Now what?
The round closes and the hiring plan stops being a spreadsheet. Your board expects the team to grow, your roadmap depends on it, and every open seat is work someone else is covering.
Most founders reach the same fork. You can hire a full-time recruiting team, which is a search of its own and takes time before it produces hires. You can hand roles to agencies, which works for one or two searches and gets expensive across a plan. Or you can add experienced recruiters who work inside your company from the start.
That third option is what Mavericks does. An experienced embedded recruiter - a Maverick - joins your team, learns the business and owns searches from the intake meeting to the signed offer. You get recruiting capacity now and keep the freedom to decide later what your permanent recruiting function should look like. If you already know you want to build that function, our guide on building a recruiting function covers the sequence.
Why recruiting becomes the bottleneck
Before the round, hiring is occasional. A founder runs the process, a few referrals come through, and it works. After the round, a founder or a first People leader can suddenly own 15-30 openings at the same time, across functions they have never hired for.
Recruiting at that volume is a full-time job, and usually several. Each search needs a clear brief, a sourcing plan, outbound messages, screens, interview loops, debriefs, references and an offer. When one person holds all of it, searches stall in the gaps: candidates wait for feedback, interviewers lose context and strong people accept other offers.
The cost shows up elsewhere too. Founders spend evenings on scheduling instead of customers or product. Hiring managers write their own job descriptions and screen their own applicants. The plan slips a quarter, and nobody can say exactly where the time went.
The fix is dedicated recruiting capacity that owns the work end to end, with someone accountable for every open role.
How Mavericks plugs in
Your Mavericks work as part of your team, not as an outside vendor sending résumés. They join your systems, follow your process and partner directly with your hiring managers.
- Your tools. Recruiters work in your applicant tracking system, your calendar and your Slack, so candidate history stays with you.
- Your process. We align on roles, interview stages and decision rights before the first search starts, and adjust as you learn.
- Your team. Recruiters attend the meetings that matter, represent your company to candidates and give hiring managers direct feedback.
Every Maverick works with Mav, the AI companion that helps with research and preparation, and behind the scenes with MavsHQ, our recruiting operations and analytics platform. You do not log in to anything new. You get a weekly recruiting update and weekly or bi-weekly syncs, so you always know where each search stands. See Embedded Recruiting for the full scope.
When embedded recruiting beats agency recruiting
Agencies are paid per hire, often 20-30% of first-year compensation. For a single specialized role, that can be the right trade: you pay only on success, and a good agency brings a network you do not have. If you are making one highly specialized hire, contingency search may be the better option.
The economics change with volume. If you are hiring across 15 roles over six months, a fee on every hire adds up quickly, and each agency works the roles it can fill fastest. Embedded recruiting is a monthly, predictable cost for dedicated capacity. The same recruiter works your whole plan, learns what good looks like on your team and gets sharper with every search.
There is also the candidate experience. Candidates meet someone who speaks for your company, not a third party pitching several clients. That matters when you are competing for people with better-known employers.
Our recruiting agency alternative guide compares the two models in more detail.
What roles we can support
Post-funding plans rarely sit in one function, so neither do we. Mavericks recruiters have helped make more than 1,600 hires across 150+ companies, in roles that include:
- Engineering: backend, frontend, infrastructure, security and engineering managers.
- Product and design: product managers, designers and researchers.
- AI and data: machine learning engineers, applied researchers and data scientists. See our AI recruiting guide.
- Go-to-market: account executives, sales leaders, marketing and customer success.
- G&A: finance, people and operations.
- Leadership: first functional leaders and executives, through Executive Search.
Your recruiter does not need to be a specialist in every function on day one. We match Mavericks to the roles that dominate your plan, and we can add a second recruiter when the mix spans very different markets, such as senior engineering and enterprise sales. Teams we have supported include Vanta, ClickHouse and SeatGeek. For pure pipeline needs, Embedded Sourcing adds sourcers who feed your recruiters qualified candidates.