TeamEx vs Recruiting Agencies

TeamEx vs recruiting agencies at a glance

The real difference: who decides who fits

With an agency, the recruiter is the gatekeeper. You describe the role in a brief, a call or two, or a job description, the recruiter decides who matches it, and you interview the people they send. Everyone you never see was filtered out by someone else’s reading of your company.

TeamEx moves that gate to the founder, without turning founders into recruiters. You search 14,000+ engineer profiles labelled by real experts and decide who is worth an interview. TeamEx still does the unscalable work, three expert calls per engineer and the hiring logistics, but the call on fit is yours.

The search and filters are built to make that call easy. They let you find a cracked engineer fast, across 3,000+ skills and 400+ traits: what they have built, their expertise and specialties, the kinds of teams they have worked in, and how they work, think and communicate. Instead of explaining who you want in a call or a job description, you dig into the profiles until you find the people you would enjoy working with, and often it takes minutes to find the engineer you want.

Both models interview engineers before you see them, but they look for different things. An agency recruiter interviews with your role in mind and makes a fresh judgement of fit for every search, which is hard to do well when they are switching between several roles at once. TeamEx interviewers do not judge fit for any one company. They apply standard, proprietary written rubrics to every engineer, pull out the facts and traits, and put them on a profile you can search and filter. TeamEx still does the hard, unscalable work of finding out what is true about each person; the judgement of fit is left to the founder.

That shift changes three things: what you have to explain, whose incentives shape your shortlist, and how much pressure you feel to hire from it.

Agencies work best at later stages

Recruiting agencies do their best work when a company already knows exactly what it is hiring for: a defined culture, standard roles with clear job descriptions, and an HR or talent team that briefs the agency, coordinates interviews and holds it to a bar. With that in place, a recruiter has something precise to match against, and bringing in the best person for the role is what agencies are built to do.

Early-stage startups rarely have any of it. A recruiter can only find what you can describe, and culture is where briefs break. Ask a founder about theirs and the answer is often “we strive for excellence” or “we’re a family.” Neither tells a recruiter anything. Culture is how disagreements get resolved, how people support each other, and what happens when a deadline is missed. Very few founders have put that into words.

At the earliest stage, the fit that matters is usually founder–engineer fit more than company–engineer fit. Your first engineers work side by side with you, so how the two of you think, disagree and ship matters more than any culture statement, and that is the hardest thing to hand to a recruiter. The gap between the brief and the day-to-day work is where misaligned hires come from.

Percentage fees work better when the founder controls the shortlist

Agencies and TeamEx both charge a percentage of salary. The difference is who decides who you meet.

When the recruiter controls the shortlist and is paid a share of the salary, the incentives do not line up with yours. A higher-salaried person, sent first, earns the agency more.

On TeamEx the percentage cannot steer your shortlist, because TeamEx does not build it. You see the field, you set the salary range in your search, and you negotiate the offer directly with the engineer. If you want help with the negotiation, TeamEx can assist on request, at no additional charge.

The pressure

Agency hiring often follows the same arc. The recruiter sends a few people and pushes for a decision. The founder wants to see a few more before committing. Each round takes days, and the pressure to settle grows with every one.

On TeamEx there is no round to wait for. If the first ten profiles do not feel right, change a filter and look at the next ten. Nobody is waiting on your answer to get paid. 96% of TeamEx hires are still in place at three months, and founders at Clipboard Health, Maple and TopHelpers have hired this way.

Search that does the explaining for you

Most founders cannot write down exactly who they want. TeamEx’s search is built so they do not have to. Instead of a job description or a culture statement, you search the engineer profiles with filters grouped the way founders already think about people:

• How they work, think and communicate.
• Products they have built, from 174 categories.
• Skills and specialties, from 3,000+ skills.
• Extra areas of expertise and the highlights of their careers.
• Up to five AI-based custom criteria, written in plain English.

You do not need to define your culture first, just refine the search, and build a shortlist of people you would enjoy working with.

What recruiting agencies cost, and what TeamEx costs

Agency fees are a share of first-year salary, set in each contract. Agencies paid only when you hire typically charge 15% to 25%, according to Dover’s 2026 guide, and TechHiringCost’s October 2026 benchmarks put data science and ML roles at 22% to 28%. Retained searches run 25% to 35%, usually paid in thirds: on signing, on the shortlist, and on the hire. JRG Partners notes the first installment is almost always earned on receipt, so it is not refunded if the search stops.

Ninety days is the closest thing to a standard guarantee, but in a Top Echelon survey of agency recruiters, 61.4% offered a replacement with no money back, and only 8.4% offered a full refund.

TeamEx charges a 25% placement fee on first-year base salary, paid once, only after the engineer starts. If the hire leaves in the first 90 days, TeamEx replaces them for free, and if it can’t, you get a full refund. On a $160,000 salary that fee is $40,000; an agency at 20% to 25% would charge $32,000 to $40,000.

On contract, TeamEx’s fee is 25% of your monthly bill, with monthly billing and a six-month minimum: on a $10,000 engineer rate you pay $13,333 a month, and TeamEx keeps $3,333. The conditions are in the client service agreement. Which one costs less depends on the salary and the terms you agree. What differs is what the percentage buys: a recruiter’s judgement of fit, or your own.

How each one vets engineers

Each agency sets its own process, so there is no common standard to compare against. And because an agency vets people against your role, the recruiter’s judgement is made fresh for every search, which is hard to keep sharp when they are working several roles at once. Ask any agency which steps it runs, who runs them, and what it checks beyond the résumé.

TeamEx vets the engineer, not the role. Every engineer has three calls with real people: a recruiter checks identity, work history and credentials; an engineer goes deep on skills, specialty and products built; a team lead looks at how they work, think and communicate. Interviewers apply the same written rubrics to every engineer, each call becomes labels backed by evidence from the conversation, and a human signs off every label. There is no pass or fail. TeamEx only stops if something critical comes up, like misrepresentation or an identity issue.

The result is a set of facts that mean the same thing on every profile. TeamEx does not decide who fits your company; it gives you the facts to filter on and leaves that judgement to you.

When to pick a recruiting agency, and when to pick TeamEx

Pick a recruiting agency when:

• Your company is past the early stage, with a defined culture and standard roles.
• You have an HR or talent team to brief the agency and run the process.
• You are hiring outside AI/ML, or for a VP or C-level role.
• You want someone else to source, pitch and close for you.

Pick TeamEx when:

• You are making an early AI/ML hire, where founder–engineer fit matters most.
• You want to judge who fits and decide who to interview yourself.
• You know the right person when you see them, even if you can’t write it down.
• You want price transparency and direct negotiation with the expert.