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Best tech recruiting agencies for startups (2026): who to call, and what they charge

Tech recruiting agencies find, screen and close engineers, product people and go-to-market hires for companies that cannot fill those seats fast enough on their own. For a startup the choice usually comes down to a contingency agency for individual roles, a retained executive search firm for leaders, or a platform where you do more of the work yourself.

Coastal Recruiting is listed first because OneGTM built its candidate sourcing system, so we know how it works from the inside. Coastal is a OneGTM client; read the rest of the list with that in mind. After Coastal come the startup and technical recruiting agencies, the executive search firms and the hiring platforms worth knowing, with the fee model each one publishes. Most agencies do not publish their rates, and we say so where that is the case.

By Garrett Wolfe, founder of OneGTM (Clay Artisan Solutions Partner) and former GTM engineer at Unify. Updated .

Key takeaways

  • Coastal Recruiting places engineering, product and GTM talent at VC-backed startups and publishes its fee: 25% of first-year base salary, nothing upfront.
  • Contingency agencies get paid only when you hire. Executive search firms such as Riviera Partners and Hunt Club are built for VP and C-level roles, and Hunt Club runs retained search.
  • Platforms cost less per hire: Wellfound job posts are free and its managed Autopilot plan charges $500 per role per month plus 10% on hire.
  • Dover reports an average cost per hire of $4.8k through its fractional recruiter marketplace.
  • Ask any agency how it sources. The ones with a real candidate database and scoring send fewer, better profiles.

The tech recruiting agency OneGTM works with

Coastal Recruiting is a OneGTM client. Since April 2026 we have run the outbound engine that finds and scores candidates for Coastal's recruiters. The full story, with numbers, is in the Coastal Recruiting case study.

Coastal Recruiting

OneGTM client

Boutique recruiting firm for early-stage, VC-backed startups, placing engineering, product and GTM talent from founding engineer to VP of Sales. Offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Miami. Coastal's outbound runs on a candidate sourcing system OneGTM built: about a million candidate profiles kept fresh, 15 role scorecards calibrated on 1,880 recruiter decisions, and replies triaged into Slack. Recruiter-accepted candidate intros grew 4.7x, from 72 in April to 340 in August 2026, with 1,149 accepted in total.

Best for: Seed to growth-stage startups hiring engineers and early GTM roles

Pricing: Placement fee of 25% of first-year base salary. No upfront payment, no equity or bonus percentage. Free replacement if a hire leaves within the guarantee period.

Startup and technical recruiting agencies

These firms fill individual roles on contingency, embed recruiters in your team, or run your whole hiring function as RPO. The first three focus on startups and tech companies. The last three are large staffing firms that also do contract and contract-to-hire.

Recruiting from Scratch

Software-driven recruiting firm for technical roles at startups. Assigns a dedicated recruiter per client and says it sends three to five strong candidates per role, with a first shortlist in one to two weeks and an average of 29 days from kickoff to signed offer.

Best for: Startups that want a small number of vetted engineering candidates fast

Pricing: Contingency: a percentage of the hire's first-year salary. The percentage is not published. No retainer or upfront fee.

Betts Recruiting

Go-to-market recruiting agency for sales, marketing and customer success roles at tech companies from seed to IPO, from SDRs to CROs. Offers contingency search, executive search, a self-sourcing platform called Betts Connect, and Recruitment as a Service.

Best for: Hiring sellers and marketers, not engineers

Pricing: Fees not published. Recruitment as a Service is a subscription with unlimited hires; traditional search is contingency.

Hirewell

Recruiting and talent advisory firm covering executive search, volume and single hires, embedded interim recruiters, and full or fractional RPO. Technology roles include software engineering, product, data and AI, infrastructure and cybersecurity, plus GTM and corporate functions.

Best for: Companies that want an outsourced recruiting team (RPO)

Pricing: Fees not published; contact sales.

Motion Recruitment

IT staffing and consulting firm placing software, data, infrastructure, cybersecurity, product and embedded engineers across North America on contract, direct-hire and statement-of-work terms.

Best for: Contract and contract-to-hire engineers

Pricing: Fees not published; contact sales.

Kforce

Staffing and solutions firm specializing in technology and finance and accounting, placing professionals on temporary and direct-hire terms, with team and project-based options on top.

Best for: Larger companies filling many tech roles on contract

Pricing: Fees not published; contact sales.

Robert Half

Global staffing firm with a technology practice that supplies contract and full-time talent, from developers to cybersecurity staff, plus a separate technology consulting arm.

Best for: Fast contract coverage for IT and support roles

Pricing: Fees not published; contact sales.

Hiring platforms and recruiter marketplaces

Cheaper than a traditional agency, and you do more of the work. Good for pre-seed and seed companies, or for adding capacity next to an agency.

Wellfound

Startup job board (formerly AngelList Talent) with a free ATS, an AI sourcing product called Reach, and Autopilot, a managed recruiting service priced per open role.

Best for: Early-stage startups posting jobs and sourcing on a budget

Pricing: Job posts free; job ads from $200. Reach: Explore free, Starter $135 and Growth $199 per seat per month, Scale custom. Autopilot: $500 per open role per month plus a 10% placement fee, no contract.

Paraform

Recruiting marketplace that matches your roles to independent recruiters from a network of 10,000+, backed by AI agents and a dedicated talent strategist. Reports a 27-day average time to hire.

Best for: Spreading hard roles across many specialist recruiters at once

Pricing: Pricing not published; get a demo.

Dover

Free applicant tracking system plus a marketplace of fractional recruiters who set their own rates and can work hourly, on retainer or per hire.

Best for: Founders running their own hiring with part-time recruiter help

Pricing: ATS free; Premium ATS $199/month. Marketplace recruiters set their own rates; Dover reports an average cost per hire of $4.8k.

Prices are from each vendor's site as of October 2026 and change often, so check before you buy. This is an opinionated list, not a paid ranking. Some links are referral links that may earn us a credit; that never changes what you pay or who makes the list.

Tech recruiting agencies compared

ToolBest forStarting price
Coastal RecruitingSeed to growth-stage startups hiring engineers and early GTM roles25% of first-year base salary
Recruiting from ScratchStartups that want a small number of vetted engineering candidates fastContingency, % not published
Betts RecruitingHiring sellers and marketers, not engineersCustom pricing
HirewellCompanies that want an outsourced recruiting team (RPO)Custom pricing
Motion RecruitmentContract and contract-to-hire engineersCustom pricing
KforceLarger companies filling many tech roles on contractCustom pricing
Robert HalfFast contract coverage for IT and support rolesCustom pricing
Riviera PartnersVP Engineering, CTO and CPO searchesCustom retainers
Daversa PartnersLeadership hires at well-funded startupsCustom retainers
Hunt ClubC-level and VP hires through warm referralsCustom retainers
WellfoundEarly-stage startups posting jobs and sourcing on a budgetFree posts; Autopilot $500/role/month + 10%
ParaformSpreading hard roles across many specialist recruiters at onceContact sales
DoverFounders running their own hiring with part-time recruiter helpFree ATS; avg $4.8k per hire

Starting prices as published by each vendor in October 2026.

Contingency, retained search and RPO

Contingency agencies get paid when you hire someone they introduced, usually as a percentage of first-year salary. Coastal publishes 25% of base. Recruiting from Scratch works the same way without naming its rate. You can run several contingency agencies on one role, which also means none of them owns it.

Retained search firms are paid to run the search, so you get a committed team and a structured process. Hunt Club states it works on retained search; Riviera Partners and Daversa do not publish their terms. That is the right setup for a VP or C-level hire where a wrong pick costs a year.

RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) means renting a recruiting team. Hirewell and Betts offer versions of it. It makes sense once you have a steady flow of roles and no in-house recruiters to handle them.

How to choose a tech recruiting agency

Match the firm to the role. An agency that fills founding engineer seats well is rarely the one you want for a CRO search, and a staffing giant is built for contract coverage at volume.

  • Ask for three recent placements at companies your stage and size, and call those founders.
  • Get the fee, the guarantee period and the replacement terms in writing before the first candidate arrives.
  • Ask how they source. A firm with its own candidate database and a scoring method sends a short list you will actually interview.
  • Check they will not pitch your own employees to other clients, and that they keep an off-limits list.
  • Agree on how many candidates per week and how fast they need your feedback, then hold both sides to it.

What a modern candidate sourcing system looks like

Most agencies still source by hand: a recruiter runs LinkedIn searches, writes messages and waits. That caps volume at what one person can do in a day, and replies arrive in bursts when a new search launches.

The system OneGTM built for Coastal Recruiting works in five steps. It keeps about a million candidate profiles fresh, scores each one against role scorecards calibrated on real recruiter decisions, sends short notes from real recruiters, sorts replies in seconds and puts each interested candidate in front of a recruiter in Slack to accept or pass. Every decision trains the next batch. The case study has the full build, and the same parts show up in our guides to data enrichment and LinkedIn automation.

  • A candidate database that refreshes on its own, so you never message someone who already joined a client.
  • A scorecard per role, written with the recruiters and tested against their past accepts and passes.
  • Copy written in each recruiter's voice, sent from their own accounts.
  • A reply desk where every interested candidate gets an accept or pass, and that outcome is logged.

Run a recruiting firm? When to get help with candidate outbound

If your recruiters are good on the phone but spend half the week sourcing, the bottleneck is the top of the funnel. That is the part OneGTM builds: the candidate data, the scoring, the outreach and the reply triage, wired into the tools your team already uses.

We did this for Coastal Recruiting, where accepted candidate intros went from 72 a month to 340 in four months. You own the system and the data.

  • Interested candidates arrive in bursts when a search launches, then dry up.
  • Your candidate data is months stale and you have messaged people who already joined a client.
  • Recruiters write every outreach email by hand because AI copy sounds wrong.
  • You cannot say which sources and messages produce accepted intros.

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Tech recruiting agencies FAQ

What are the best tech recruiting agencies for startups?
For engineering and early GTM hires at VC-backed startups, Coastal Recruiting and Recruiting from Scratch are contingency options built for that stage. Betts Recruiting focuses on sales and marketing roles. For VP and C-level searches, Riviera Partners, Daversa Partners and Hunt Club run executive search. On a tight budget, Wellfound, Paraform and Dover let you do more of the work yourself. Coastal is a OneGTM client.
How much do tech recruiting agencies charge?
Contingency agencies usually charge a percentage of the hire's first-year salary. Coastal Recruiting publishes 25% of first-year base salary with nothing upfront, and Dover says traditional agencies typically charge 15% to 25%. Wellfound's Autopilot charges $500 per open role per month plus a 10% placement fee. Retained executive search firms do not publish fees.
What is the difference between contingency and retained recruiting?
A contingency recruiter is paid only if you hire a candidate they introduced, so you can use several at once. A retained search firm is paid to run the search, works the role exclusively and is the usual choice for executive hires such as a CTO or VP of Sales.
What is RPO in recruiting?
RPO, or recruitment process outsourcing, means an outside firm runs part or all of your hiring function, often with recruiters embedded in your team. Hirewell offers full and fractional RPO, and Betts Recruiting sells a subscription version it calls Recruitment as a Service. It suits companies with many open roles and no in-house recruiting team.
Should a startup use a recruiting agency or hire in-house?
Use an agency for the first few critical hires or for roles your network cannot reach, because you pay only on success with contingency. Once you are hiring more than a few people a quarter, an in-house recruiter or an RPO setup usually costs less per hire than paying agency fees on every role.
How long does it take a tech recruiting agency to fill a role?
Recruiting from Scratch reports an average of 29 days from kickoff to signed offer and Paraform reports a 27-day average time to hire. Both are the firms' own numbers. Senior and executive searches take longer, and slow interview feedback from your side is the most common delay.
How do recruiting agencies use AI to source candidates?
The better ones keep a candidate database fresh with enrichment data, score candidates against a scorecard for each role and automate personalized outreach, so recruiters spend their time on calls. OneGTM built this for Coastal Recruiting, and recruiter-accepted candidate intros grew 4.7x, from 72 in April to 340 in August 2026.

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