> "Not to mention HR companies which in my opinion are during this stage, a complete waste of time and money. But mostly time." Well, most recruiters are promi

> "Not to mention HR companies which in my opinion are during this stage, a complete waste of time and money. But mostly time." Well, most recruiters are promising you that they are "experts" in their field and will bring you the best engineers. And then nothing happens for weeks or you get spammed with crappy CVs which is even worse (waste of time). I am a former programmer, now running coderfit.com in Zurich. I am doing tech recruitment for a couple of very early stage startups here. I am switching to a retainer-based model where the company prepays me a third of the fee before I start working. Especially for hard to fill roles, for instance, no-name startups, this is a better strategy than just working on pure commission. So, if working with recruiters at all look for the ones that will offer this. Also ask: "From ten profiles you send us, how many will we approximately hire?" When they can't answer, that is a bad sign.