How Startups Should Hire their First Recruiter
Dover
July 28, 2025
•
6 mins
As a founder, you probably started handling all the hiring yourself. You posted jobs, screened resumes and conducted interviews between product meetings and investor calls, but this eventually breaks down.
The breaking point typically arrives around 15 employees when you're planning to hire 8-10 more people in the coming months. Recruiting suddenly demands 30-40% of your time, pulling you away from product development and business strategy in ways that hurt company growth.
Here's what changes at this scale:
Volume: You shift from hiring one person every few months to needing multiple hires across different roles simultaneously. Just the administrative work becomes overwhelming.
Quality Standards: Early hires can learn on the job, but now you need specialists who perform immediately. This requires deeper sourcing and more sophisticated evaluation.
Bad Hire Costs: A wrong hire at 5 people is manageable. At 20+ people, it disrupts team dynamics, slows projects and becomes more expensive to fix.
Research shows that startups spending over 20 hours weekly on recruiting see their product development timelines slip by 3-4 weeks per quarter. Recognizing you need help is just the first step. The real challenge is determining what type of recruiting support fits your stage and budget.
When you're ready for recruiting help, you have four main options. Each has different costs, time commitments and speed of results.
In-house Recruiting: Full-time employees who focus solely on your hiring. They learn your culture and build lasting candidate relationships, but hey require full salary, benefits and equity plus time to onboard and manage.
Traditional Recruiting Agencies: Work on commission, typically charging 20-25% of the hired person's salary once they place someone. They handle sourcing and screening, but you have limited control over their process.
RPO Services: Recruitment Process Outsourcing services take over your entire recruiting operation with dedicated teams and technology for high-volume hiring. They typically require long contracts and large commitments.
Fractional Recruiters: Work part-time or project-based, giving you senior recruiting expertise without full-time costs. They integrate with your team while offering flexibility to scale based on your needs.
The recruiting market has shifted toward more flexible approaches that match startup growth patterns rather than one-size-fits-all solutions. The key is understanding how each option aligns with your current needs and growth plans.
Most founders initially consider agencies because they seem easiest, but the trade-offs are more complex than they look. The right choice depends on your specific situation, timeline and budget.
Fractional recruiting has become the sweet spot for most startups and the data shows why it's gaining traction. LinkedIn reported a 55% year-over-year increase in mentions of "fractional CTO" and "fractional CMO" roles in 2024, signaling the fractional recruiting model going mainstream.
Fractional recruiting means staffing your company with recruiters who work a "fraction" of the hours required by a full-time employee. Instead of hiring someone for 40 hours per week, you might engage a fractional recruiter for 10-15 hours weekly or on a project basis.
The economics here make sense. Rather than paying $150K+ for a full-time recruiter, you might spend $3K-5K monthly for fractional support. That's 60-70% cost savings while still getting access to senior-level expertise.
The flexibility is important. Your hiring needs aren't always consistent. Fractional recruiters let you scale up and down without the overhead of managing full-time employees.
The quality often exceeds expectations. Many fractional recruiters are senior professionals who've worked at top companies, bringing specialized expertise that would be impossible to afford full-time.
This is where marketplace models like Dover come in. Instead of finding and managing individual fractional recruiters, you get access to a network of professionals with built-in quality controls. Dover's approach offers cost savings and expertise exactly when you need it. For startups, this often makes the difference between successful scaling and hiring bottlenecks.
How Dover's Fractional Recruiting Works
Dover takes fractional recruiting to the next level with a marketplace model. Instead of relying on one fractional recruiter, Dover connects you to a network of skilled recruiters and sourcing experts, all powered by our free ATS.
Here's how it actually works in practice:
Recruiter Matching: When you submit a role, our team at Dover reviews your requirements and matches you with 2-3 recruiters who have specific experience in your industry, role type and company stage. You're not getting a generalist, you're getting someone who's successfully filled similar positions before.
Integrated Workflow: Everything happens inside Dover's ATS, so there's no juggling between different systems or losing track of candidates. Your fractional recruiter sources candidates, manages outreach and coordinates interviews all within the same platform your team uses.
Transparent Pricing: You pay hourly rates (typically $75-125/hour) with no long-term contracts or placement fees. If a recruiter isn't delivering results, you can switch without penalty. This creates accountability that traditional models lack.
Quality Controls: Dover vets all recruiters in their network, checking references and reviewing past performance. They also monitor ongoing results, so recruiters who don't deliver get removed from the platform.
Dover's accountability model tackles the biggest concern founders have about external recruiting, guaranteeing quality and results.
Key Benefits of Using Dover for Your First Recruiter
When you're hiring your first recruiting help, Dover offers several advantages that matter for early-stage startups:
Benefit | Description |
|---|---|
Cost predictability | Pay transparent hourly rates instead of 20-25% placement fees that can reach $30K+ per hire. Reduces recruiting costs by 40-60% compared to traditional agencies with more predictable engagement scope. |
Speed to results | Dover's recruiters start working within 48 hours vs. 6-8 weeks to hire internal recruiters or 2-3 weeks for agencies to ramp up. Critical when filling important roles quickly. |
Free ATS included | Access to full ATS platform at no cost, including candidate tracking, interview scheduling, team collaboration and hiring analytics. Comparable solutions cost $200-500 monthly. |
Specialized expertise | Network includes recruiters specializing in specific roles (engineering, sales, marketing) and industries (fintech, healthcare, SaaS) who understand your unique hiring challenges. |
Built-in sourcing tools | Sourcing platform includes LinkedIn integration, email finding, and automated outreach features. Enterprise-level tools without separate license purchases. |
Scalability without commitment | Easily scale up or down as needs change. No long-term contracts or minimum commitments. |
What makes this particularly powerful for startups is the combination of software and services. You get Dover's free ATS without expensive contracts, plus built-in project management with a single point of contact who makes sure your recruiter hits milestones. This removes the day-to-day overhead while keeping the cost and flexibility benefits of fractional recruiting.
FAQ
How much does fractional recruiting cost compared to other options?
Fractional recruiting typically costs $3K-5K monthly for part-time support, compared to $150K+ annually for full-time recruiters or 20-25% placement fees for agencies. Most startups save 40-60% on recruiting costs using fractional models.
How quickly can a fractional recruiter start working on my roles?
Dover's fractional recruiters can begin working within 48 hours of engagement. This is much faster than hiring internal recruiters (6-8 weeks) or waiting for agencies to ramp up (2-3 weeks).
What if the fractional recruiter isn't delivering good results?
Dover's hourly model with no long-term contracts means you can switch recruiters without penalty if results aren't meeting expectations. Performance monitoring is included with Dover as well.
Do I need to use Dover's ATS to work with their recruiters?
While Dover's recruiters work most efficiently within their integrated ATS, the platform is free to use and designed for startups. Most companies find the integrated workflow actually improves their hiring process.
How do I know if I'm ready for recruiting help?
The typical trigger point is when you're spending 20+ hours weekly on recruiting activities, planning to hire 8-10 people in the next few months, or finding that hiring bottlenecks are slowing your business growth.
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