Glossary
What is founder-led recruitment agency?
A founder-led recruitment agency is one in which the people who own the business personally run the searches, rather than selling the work and handing it to junior consultants.
The model trades scale for quality. A founder-led agency cannot run hundreds of roles at once, so it works with fewer clients and knows each one well. The person who took the brief is the person who screens the candidates and manages the offer.
For clients the practical differences are accountability and judgement: there is no handover, the people on the phone have placed hundreds of engineers themselves, and they turn down roles they cannot fill well.
Why choose a founder-led agency over a large recruitment firm?
For roles where judgement matters more than volume, which is most engineering, product and data hiring at startups. A large firm offers reach and process; a founder-led agency offers the senior people doing the work themselves, from brief to start date.