What does an agency recruiter provide?
An agency recruiter provides a network, active sourcing of candidates who are not applying, persuasion of passive candidates, and negotiation at offer stage. For hard-to-fill or senior roles, that network and that persuasion are the whole value.
What agencies rarely provide is transparent screening of your inbound applications against your own criteria. Their incentive is the placement fee, which rewards filling the role with their candidate rather than screening everyone who applied.
What does a Recruiter FTE provide?
A Recruiter FTE provides consistent screening of every application against the scorecard you set, a ranked shortlist with evidence behind each score, drafted candidate communication, and interview scheduling, all inside your applicant tracking system.
What it does not provide is a network of passive candidates or a persuasive voice on the phone. It screens and organises; it does not source from a personal contact list or talk a reluctant candidate into an interview.
How do the incentives differ?
A placement fee is typically a percentage of first-year salary, which means the agency's revenue rises with the salary of the candidate placed. That is a legitimate model with a known bias: agencies advocate for their candidates, and higher offers are not against their interest.
The Recruiter FTE is metered by the work it does and has no candidate to advocate for. It scores everyone against the same criteria and never makes the decision, which is a different relationship to the outcome.
- Sourcing passive candidates: agency
- Screening inbound volume consistently: FTE
- Persuasion and negotiation: agency
- Evidence behind every ranking: FTE
- Fee: placement percentage versus metered work
Where does the candidate experience differ?
Candidate experience differs mainly in speed and consistency for inbound applicants. The Recruiter FTE screens every application within its target window and drafts a status update for approval, so applicants are not left waiting for weeks because a recruiter was busy on a different search.
Agencies tend to deliver a better experience to the candidates they are actively placing and a worse one to everyone else, because their attention follows the fee. Neither model is wrong; they serve different candidates.
What is the sensible combination?
The sensible combination is the Recruiter FTE handling inbound volume roles, screening every applicant consistently and quickly, with agencies engaged for niche or senior searches where a network and persuasion are the point.
When an agency does deliver candidates, the FTE can screen them against the same scorecard as the inbound ones, which gives the hiring manager one consistent view rather than two unrelated shortlists.
How do you run the comparison on one role?
Run the comparison on one inbound-heavy role rather than across all hiring. Record the last two rounds for that role: applications received, time from close to shortlist, share of interviewees who met the hard requirements, candidate response times, and the agency fee where an agency was used. Then give the Recruiter FTE the next round with the scorecard written, every rejection and offer gated permanently, and interview scheduling the only class considered for promotion.
Compare on the same measures, then on what the agency model does not show: every score with its evidence in the shortlist, every candidate communication drafted and approved with a name, and applicants who heard back within the target window because screening ran the day they applied. Add the FTE's tokens and the hiring manager's review time as the cost. For inbound volume the FTE usually wins on speed, consistency, and record; for the senior or niche search the agency's network still earns its fee, and the comparison shows where the line between the two roles should sit.
The comparison also settles a budgeting question. A placement fee is a one-off tied to a salary; the Recruiter FTE's tokens are a metered line that follows the applications screened, bounded by its per-FTE budget. For a team hiring continuously, the second is easier to plan and to defend, and the record from one role shows which roles belong on which line.