Recruitment Agency

A recruitment agency specializes in filling open job positions for companies that don’t have the time or capacity to manage their vacancies.

Whether it’s bespoke services from a talent acquisition partner or a global recruitment agency, an agency's main goal is to manage part or all of the hiring process and find candidates for full-time, part-time, or temp roles.

Different recruitment agencies offer different services and use various methods to fill open positions. At TalentHub, we specialize in helping startups and scale-ups find executives and specialists across Europe.

There’s some slight overlap between the two, but the main difference comes from the services provided by staffing agencies.

While a recruitment agency can handle the entire recruitment process, full-time, part-time, and temp jobs for its clients, a staffing agency supplies workers only for temp and contract roles and remains the employer, paying them and managing all other legal responsibilities of employment.

TalentHub is an international recruitment agency that headhunts and searches for the best candidates, mainly for permanent positions.

How a recruitment agency charges its employers or clients differs from business to business.

But typically, payment methods are based on one of three methods:

• Contingency — Recruitment agencies looking for permanent hires tend to price their services only when someone is hired for the position, and the fee they charge is a percentage of the candidate's first-year gross salary, which can be anywhere up to 30%.
• Retainer — For those harder-to-fill positions, like finding a C-suite executive, a global recruitment agency could ask for payment in installments, getting some upfront, another for presenting a shortlist, and the rest once a candidate is successfully hired.
• Markup — Temp or contract placements can be billed as a markup of up to 50% or even more based on the worker's rate of pay.

TalentHub’s standard fee is a percentage of the candidate’s annual gross salary, paid across three stages, and pricing flexes with the scope and type of service.

Recruitment agencies maintain broad networks of qualified candidates, including passive candidates who are not actively searching for jobs or browsing public listings. This gives employers access to talent that is hard to reach through standard job boards. Agencies also write job postings, screen resumes, conduct initial interviews, and coordinate interview schedules, saving internal teams considerable time.

Specialized agencies understand industry salary ranges, skill requirements, and local market trends. Many agencies pre-vet candidates and offer replacement guarantees if a hire doesn't work out. Agencies can also run confidential searches, such as replacing an underperforming executive, without alerting competitors or current staff.

In-house hiring avoids placement fees and gives internal teams full control of the process, which suits entry-level or high-volume roles.

Define the role type, hiring volume, timeline, and budget first, then look for an agency that understands your sector, and ask what share of its candidates come from a vetted network of passive candidates.

Request case studies or references from similar companies and ask how the agency sources and screens candidates, its average time-to-fill for your role, and its policy if a placed candidate leaves early.

TalentHub helps startups, scale-ups, and VC-backed businesses hire C-suite, leadership, and hard-to-fill roles. It offers all-inclusive recruitment, sourcing-only, and RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) services, with a 4-month replacement guarantee, a month longer than the 3 months most agencies offer.