Most recruitment agencies are paid per signed offer. That model rewards speed over fit, volume over judgement, and short-term wins over long-term teams. We work differently — and so does the result.
IC to C-level, stealth to scale — HMT has it covered. Three common shapes of engagement, all run by the same senior team.
Pre-product, sometimes pre-funding. Every hire is load-bearing — they'll set the architecture and the culture for everyone who comes after. We map the market, run the founder loop, and close the people you can't afford to lose to a competitor.
Product-market fit found, headcount accelerating, the bar must hold. We embed inside your hiring function — pipeline, calibration, interview design, offers — so velocity and quality move together, not against each other.
The roles that can only be filled by a handful of people in the world. We run senior search — confidential where it needs to be — for the AI leaders, research heads and VPs who will own a category, not just a function.
We compare each model on the two metrics that decide whether hiring is helping or hurting the business: cost per hire and time to hire.
Contingent · paid on success
Most agency recruiters haven't come from the best tech companies. The result is volume over quality — irrelevant profiles flooding the hiring manager's inbox, wasting their time and slowly eroding the startup's brand with candidates.
Senior candidates respond more to recruiters who've lived in the same world they have. When the candidate has multiple offers, an agency recruiter has limited influence on what they actually pick.
A success fee feels low-risk. In reality, the time wasted on irrelevant candidates, the higher cost per hire, and the longer time to hire usually make it the most expensive way to hire — measured properly.
A single internal recruiter
One person juggling reqs, sourcing, scheduling, debriefs, offers, vendor management — and trying to build a team and tooling around themselves at the same time. Time to hire stretches; cost per hire balloons.
At a certain scale, an internal talent lead is genuinely valuable — but mostly as the connective tissue around an embedded team, not as the engine doing the work directly.
Tooling, sourcing licences, ATS, interview platforms, employer-brand work — all of it gets billed back to one cost centre, before a single hire lands. The economics rarely work below a certain headcount.
Senior recruiters, inside your company
Our senior recruiters know the work, know the industry, know the candidates and the hiring managers. They bring their own tooling and a sourcing team behind them. Day one is productive — not a brief-and-source learning curve.
They have the experience to properly sell the company, protect its brand, train hiring managers on interviews, and act as a trusted advisor to the leadership team on the most important resource the company has.
As the company scales, both time to hire and cost per hire drop significantly. With some of our customers, the cost per hire is less than 20% of the other models — and the founders get to focus on the company while recruiting is run by our team.
