Stop paying an agency fee
on every hire.

Explain the math

When you’re hiring one person, contingency search can make sense. When you’re hiring 10, 20, or 50 people, paying 20-30% of compensation on every placement gets expensive quickly. Mavericks gives you dedicated recruiting capacity for a predictable monthly cost.

Here is a hypothetical example. At a 25% fee, ten hires at $180,000 would cost $450,000 in fees. Twenty hires at the same salary would cost $900,000. The fee grows with every hire, and it grows again when salaries rise.

With embedded recruiting, you pay for recruiting capacity, not for each placement. The cost stays the same whether your recruiter closes three roles that month or six. That makes the budget easier to plan, and it removes the incentive to push a candidate over the line to earn a fee.

Agencies often charge 20-30% of first-year compensation per hire. Mavericks has supported 150+ companies and saved clients $59M.

When contingency search is the better choice

An agency is not the wrong answer in every case. If you’re making one highly specialized hire, contingency search may be the better option.

Contingency makes sense when:

• You have one or two open roles and no plan to hire more this year.
• The role sits in a niche market where a specialist agency already knows every likely candidate.
• You want to pay only if someone is hired, and you accept the higher price per hire for that.
• Your internal team can run the rest of the process without help.

In those cases, a monthly engagement can cost more than a single fee. We would rather tell you that than sell you capacity you will not use.

For a senior leadership role, a retained executive search is often the right model, whether you work with us or another firm.

When embedded recruiting is more economical

If you’re hiring across 15 roles over six months, embedded recruiting may be considerably more economical. The more hires you make, the larger the gap between a per-hire fee and a fixed monthly cost.

Embedded recruiting fits when:

• You have a hiring plan, not a single open role.
• Roles span several teams, such as engineering, product, GTM and finance.
• You want one recruiter to learn your business and carry that knowledge across every search.
• You need to scale support up or down as the plan changes.

An experienced embedded recruiter - a Maverick - joins your team, works in your applicant tracking system and partners with your hiring managers. If your recruiters need more candidates rather than more recruiters, embedded sourcing adds pipeline at the top of the funnel. See also adding recruiting capacity.

What changes when the recruiter sits inside your team

The cost is only part of the difference, and for many teams it is not the biggest part.

An agency recruiter often works several clients at once and sends you résumés from outside your process. An embedded recruiter works for you, in your tools, every day.

That changes how the search runs:

• Candidates meet your company, not an agency. Your Maverick represents your company in every conversation, with your messaging and your brand.
• Hiring managers get a partner. Your recruiter joins intake meetings, debriefs and weekly or bi-weekly syncs, and adjusts the search as feedback comes in.
• The data stays with you. Candidate notes, pipeline and interview feedback live in your systems.
• You see the work. A weekly recruiting update shows where every search stands. It draws on MavsHQ, our recruiting operations and analytics platform, which your recruiter uses on your behalf.

How to decide

Start with your hiring plan for the next six months. Count the roles, the teams they sit in and how many you expect to be hard to fill.

Then ask a few direct questions:

• How many hires will we make, and what would the agency fees add up to at often 20-30% each?
• Do our hiring managers have time to brief several agencies and review their candidates?
• Do we want recruiting knowledge to stay inside the company when the search ends?
• Will the plan change? If so, can our recruiting cost change with it?

Also count the hidden work. Each agency needs a briefing, feedback on every candidate and a contract to manage. With several agencies on several roles, that time comes out of your hiring managers’ week.

If you have one or two specialized roles, an agency may be the simplest path. If you have a steady stream of hires across functions, compare that agency total with a monthly cost for dedicated recruiters. For a broader view of the options, read embedded vs in-house recruiting and embedded recruiting vs RPO.