Like many other entrepreneurs, I was resistant at working with recruiters on two basis: First, the most obvious one being their high price tag. Second, I thought that whatever the recruiter does we can do better.
Well, turns out that I had a change of heart. Recruiting is a very (did I say *very*?) time consuming task. Just to enumerate a few things that you need to do to recruit the right person:
- Write a job description
- Publicize that job in job boards & website
- Ping friends and former co-workers
- Filter through a gazillion resumes
- Schedule interviews
- Do "informational interviews" (your first talk)
- Do formal interviews w/ multiple people on the team
- Send yay/nay responses to candidates
- Negotiate comp
If you add it all up, it's pretty intensive when you hiring even just one person.
A lot of people will tell you that Hiring the right people is the best thing you can do for your startup, and they are probably right. The disconnect comes that you don't have to do all the 9 things above to hire the best people. In fact, most of those things on the list are tasks that you are probably not good at or doesn't add the value for the cost of having you (the CEO, CTO, VPE) not working on something else.
Just the filter that recruiters do on top of resumes they receive is already a huge gain for you. They will probably eliminate several candidates based on their resume or a phone screen, which is a wonderful thing. You can easily spend 16-24 hours per week just managing your recruiting efforts and that can't be good for your startup. Now consider this for 3-4 months. How much time you "wasted" that could have been canalized to other efforts?
The other aspect that I really liked working with recruiters is that they will poach people at other companies that are not actively looking, so these candidates would never find your job post and they could be a perfect fit.
The bottom line is that instead of discarding recruiters as an option to hire team members you should seriously consider a cost-benefit analysis.
I suggest you engage recruiters from the day one, work with 3-4 recruiters and make the price a 20-25% of the first year salary of the person. Finding the right person faster will certainly pay off over the long time.
Oh, wait! You are an entrepreneur and you think you can do all by yourself and save $20K...
I'm the Co-founder & CTO of 
