Run It Yourself or Hand It to a Specialist? Deciding Role by Role

Run a role yourself when your team can describe it precisely, the market is wide enough that a good search finds plenty of people, and someone on your side can make the case to them. Hand it to a specialist recruiter when the pool is small, the person has to be persuaded to leave a job they like, the search must stay confidential, or the role has stayed open despite a decent search.

The mistake most companies make is deciding this once, for the whole company: "we use agencies" or "we hire in-house". The right answer is almost always a mix, decided role by role. Your fifth backend engineer and your first head of perception are different problems, and they deserve different approaches.

We built 100Networks to offer both from the same place: the 100Networks Workspace for the roles your team fills itself, and the 100Networks recruiter marketplace for the ones it should not have to. In our own words: hand us the hardest roles; run the rest yourself. This post is about how to tell which is which.

Why decide role by role?

Because the constraint is different for different roles.

For most roles, the constraint is reach and time. There are plenty of good people; your team does not have the hours to find them, write to each of them and chase replies. That is exactly the work an AI hiring team does well (we explained the idea in what an AI hiring team is).

For a smaller set of roles, the constraint is access and persuasion. The credible pool is a few hundred people, most of them known to each other, and none of them are looking. 100Networks reports that 72% of the people it places were not looking for a job when they were found. For those roles, finding the name is the easy part. Getting a senior specialist to take a call, take the role seriously and then leave a job they like is human work, done best by someone who has placed that exact role before.

A single policy for the whole company gets one of these wrong. Agencies on every role is expensive and slow for the easy ones. In-house on every role leaves the hard ones open for months.

Signs a role fits the Workspace

A role is a good candidate for your own team to run in the Workspace when most of these are true:

• You can write the brief. The must-haves are clear, and the hiring manager agrees with them.
• The market is wide. A search returns many plausible people, not a handful.
• The pitch is straightforward. A specific, honest message about the role and the team is enough to start a conversation.
• Someone on your side can close. A hiring manager or founder who can take the second call and make the case.
• Volume or repetition. You hire this kind of role regularly, so what the agents learn from your decisions carries over.

Typical examples: backend, frontend and full-stack engineers at mid and senior levels, product designers, account executives, customer success and operations roles. For these, the Sourcer works the brief overnight in rounds, Outreach drafts messages in your voice for your approval, the Caller checks interest and notice period, and the Interviewer runs a first round built from your job description. There is no per-hire fee on roles you fill in the Workspace.

Signs a role needs a specialist recruiter

Hand a role to the marketplace when any of these is true:

• The pool is small. Perception and SLAM, low-level systems, production ML infrastructure, some security specialisms: the people who can do the job number in the hundreds in any market.
• The hire must be persuaded. Engineering leaders and senior specialists are rarely moved by a message, however well written. They are moved by someone they trust explaining why this role is worth a conversation.
• The search is confidential. Replacing someone, or building a team nobody should know about yet. 100Networks routes confidential and leadership searches to a restricted, named group of recruiters under NDA, and never publishes the role.
• The role is outside your team's knowledge. A software company hiring its first hardware lead, or a first sales hire into a new market. A specialist brings the map you do not have.
• It has already stalled. Covered below.

What is the difference, side by side?

For more on how the marketplace model works, see what a recruiter marketplace is.

When should you hand over a role you started yourself?

This is the most useful decision to get right, because it is where most roles quietly lose months.

Starting a hard role in the Workspace is a reasonable first move. A round or two of sourcing tells you a great deal about the market: how many people exist, where they work and what they look like on paper. The question is when to stop. Set a checkpoint before you start (two weeks, or three sourcing rounds) and look at these signals:

• The gaps are not closing. Round after round, the same must-have stays thin. The people may exist, but they are not visible to a search.
• People are found but not replying. Strong and good fits are on the shortlist and outreach has gone out, but nobody engages. The problem is access or persuasion, not search.
• Candidates drop at the first conversation. They reply, take one call and go quiet. The pitch needs someone who can sell it.
• The brief keeps changing. If every round's decisions are for different reasons, the role is not defined yet. Fix that first; a specialist will start with the same conversation. We described this pattern in why you can't hire good engineers.

If you hit the checkpoint and two of the first three signals are present, hand it over. You are not starting from zero: share the brief and what the searches taught you about the market with the specialist, and they start a step ahead.

A worked example: three roles, two routes

Consider a Series B fintech in Bengaluru with three open roles:

Senior Backend Engineer, Payments. A wide market, a clear brief, a hiring manager who interviews well. The team runs it in the Workspace. The Sourcer works it overnight, the team decides on the shortlist each morning, and outreach goes out once approved.

Customer Success Manager, Enterprise. Also a wide market, and the team hires this role every quarter. Run in the Workspace, with the Caller checking notice period and expected CTC before anyone spends time on an interview.

Head of Risk Engineering. Perhaps a few hundred credible people in the country, all employed and none looking. The company also does not want its competitors to know it is hiring. This goes straight to the marketplace, routed to a small group of specialists who have placed similar leaders, on a confidential brief.

Two routes from the same place, and a fee only on the one where a specialist does the convincing.

Doing the maths

The marketplace fee is 8.33% of first-year salary, which is one month's pay, invoiced on joining. For a hard senior role, compare that with what an open seat actually costs: months of a team running short, and the senior-engineer hours spent screening people who were never right. 100Networks reports a median of six days from signed brief to a vetted shortlist on managed search.

For everyday roles the maths runs the other way. A per-hire fee on a role your own team could fill in a few weeks is money spent on reach you can now have without it. That is why we built the Workspace, and why we do not charge a per-hire fee on roles filled there.

How this works with 100Networks

Both routes start from the same place. Run your everyday roles in the 100Networks Workspace, with access by request and pricing set with each team. When a role gets hard, hand it to the recruiter marketplace on the success fee. The marketplace is non-exclusive, so it runs alongside your own team and any agencies you already use.

See what your team can run itself on the 100Networks Workspace page. For a role that needs a specialist, send us the role or read how it works for companies.