What a Technical Recruiter Actually Does

Most recruiters who call themselves technical are not. They work technical roles, which is a different thing. The test is simple: can the person running your search assess an engineer without you in the room? If not, you are buying a sourcing service with a technical label on it. This is what the job involves when the label is earned.

Taking a brief that describes the engineering

A generalist takes a job title and a list of keywords. A technical recruiter takes the problem: what the team is building, what is slow or broken, which decisions the new hire will own, and where the current engineers run out of depth. From that they can tell you whether the role is really senior or staff level, whether the stack you have written down is the stack that matters, and whether the salary band buys the person you have described. That conversation often changes the role before the search starts, which is where most of the value sits.

Reaching people who are not applying

The strongest engineers are passive candidates. They are employed, not on job boards, and they ignore messages that read like a template. A technical recruiter can describe your work in the engineer’s own terms, which is the only approach that gets a reply from someone who has plenty of options. It also means the search covers the market, not the applicants.

The screen, which is the whole point

Technical screening is the job that separates the two kinds of recruiter. Done properly it is a conversation with someone who has done the work: the systems the candidate built and owned, the trade-offs they made and why, how they debug under pressure, how they work with product and with other engineers. The output is a written summary that arrives with the CV, so your first interview starts from evidence rather than from a keyword match. Our guide to assessing senior engineers in interviews covers what the conversation looks like from the hiring side.

At OpenSource that screen is run by a founder who was a software developer, which is the reason the business exists. It is also why we turn down roles outside technology, product and data: we cannot screen them to the same standard, and a screen we cannot stand behind is worse than none.

Reading the market for you

Because a technical recruiter speaks to engineers every day, they know what a senior backend engineer in London is accepting this month, which companies are counter-offering hard, and which stacks have a thin pool. That knowledge is what turns a salary band into an offer that lands. Our published salary benchmarks are the written-down version; the recruiter’s job is to apply them to your specific role.

Closing, which is where most searches fail

Offer accepted is not the end. The counter-offer arrives in the days after a resignation, and a candidate who has not been kept close through their notice period is lost at that point. A technical recruiter manages the offer, the resignation, the counter-offer conversation and the weeks until the start date, because they understand what the candidate is weighing and can speak to it honestly.

Five questions that show whether yours is one

1. Who interviews my candidates before I see them, and what do they ask?
2. Can I see a sample of the written screen that comes with a CV?
3. In my stack, what separates a senior engineer from a staff engineer?
4. Which three roles like mine have you filled this year, and how long did each take?
5. Which briefs have you turned down, and why?

A technical recruiter answers all five in specifics. A generalist reaches for adjectives by the second.

Agency, employment business or recruiter

The words get mixed up, and the distinction matters for your contract. Under the UK rules an employment agency introduces people for direct employment with you, while an employment business supplies contractors it employs and pays itself. A technical recruiter is the person inside either who does the work. When you are choosing a tech recruitment agency, the question is not which category it falls into but who, specifically, will run your search.

Where we fit

OpenSource is a founder-led tech recruitment agency in London. The founders take the brief, run the search and screen every candidate themselves; there is no handover to a junior consultant. If you are hiring software engineers and want the first technical judgement made before your team spends an hour on an interview, tell us the role.

The agency and employment business definitions summarise the UK government’s published guidance; they are not legal advice.