There is a moment familiar to almost every growing company. Funding lands, or a contract is signed, or a product finally finds its market — and suddenly six roles need filling at once. The founder who has been handling hiring alongside everything else looks at the calendar and realises it is no longer possible.
The default next step is to call a recruitment agency. And for a single, well-defined role, that can work perfectly well. But when hiring comes in bursts, the economics start to look strange.
The standard contingency model charges a percentage of the successful candidate’s first-year salary. In the UK, that sits somewhere between 15 and 20% for general roles, rising to 20–25% and beyond for specialist technical hires. Fill five engineering roles in a quarter and the arithmetic becomes uncomfortable quickly.
More importantly, the model creates an incentive that does not always point in the same direction as yours. A success fee rewards placements. It does not reward telling you that a role is badly scoped, that two of your six vacancies should really be one, or that your interview process is losing good candidates at the second stage. It does not reward building your hiring team’s capability, because a more capable hiring team needs the agency less.
And it does nothing at all for the work that surrounds recruitment: onboarding that actually lands, policies that hold up when someone raises a grievance, a salary structure that does not fall apart the moment two employees compare notes.
Most companies under ca. 50 people sit in an awkward middle. There is too much “people-work” for it to keep living in a founder’s inbox, but not enough – or not enough certainty about the next twelve months – to justify a permanent Head of People at £70,000 or more.
So the work gets distributed. The operations lead picks up onboarding. The founder does the offers. Someone downloads a contract template. It functions, in the way that a lot of things function in a growing business, right up until it doesn’t.
The failure is rarely dramatic. It looks like a strong candidate going cold because nobody chased the reference. It looks like a new starter spending their first fortnight unsure who they report to. It looks like a good engineer leaving eighteen months in because nobody ever had a conversation with them about where they were going.
Fractional HR and recruitment support means a senior recruiter and HR generalist working inside your team, on a monthly retainer, for as many days a month as the work actually requires. Not an external agency you brief and wait on but someone with experience and a passion for the startup hustle embedded into your org. Using your email address, using your systems, putting your logo on their LinkedIn, essentially representing your brand in every candidate conversation, and treated by your team as one of your own.
That covers three things at once. Recruitment and hiring: sourcing, screening, interviewing, and coaching your existing hiring managers to do it better. HR foundations: policy, onboarding design, org structure, ATS and HRIS setup, performance frameworks. And the retention side that usually gets ignored until it becomes urgent: mentoring, culture, and the particular dynamics of keeping a distributed team connected.
The commercial shape matters as much as the scope. One transparent monthly fee, no cap on the number of open roles, and the ability to scale up or down at short notice as priorities move. If you have a heavy hiring quarter followed by a quiet one, you should be able to reflect that.
Since 2018, Ivy Tech has built and run entire remote software development teams for startups and scaleups from start to finish, not just sourcing. Doing that well meant developing the HR and recruitment operating system that sits underneath it: how you assess, how you onboard, how you keep people for the long term rather than the first year.
That system is what we now make available directly, as a fractional resource inside your business.
“A true partner who genuinely cares about the collaboration between talent and client. Highly organised, kind, honest, and always ready to help.”
Felix, Founder & CPTO, Medudy · Berlin
If you are not sure whether the gap in your business is recruitment, HR, or something further upstream in how roles are scoped, the honest answer is that a diagnosis is worth more than a proposal.
We run a two-day HR and recruitment health check: a fixed-fee, no-commitment review of where the gaps actually are, and what it would take to close them. If you decide to continue afterwards, the fee is credited in full against your first month.
Contact our MD Cameron directly at [email protected]
