I second this, it's been my experience at smaller companies, too. If you can find a smaller recruiter company, generally they have seemed to perform better tha

I second this, it's been my experience at smaller companies, too. If you can find a smaller recruiter company, generally they have seemed to perform better than the larger name-brand recruiter companies in my experience. At least in the US, expect to pay a good recruiter who finds you a candidate you hire somewhere in the 20-25% of first year salary for the hire (ie: you hire a candidate for $100k/year total comp, you pay the recruiter $20-25k in fee for that hire). No matter what you do, you're going to sift through a LOT of candidates who are definitely not the right fit. I also concur with going to local university recruiting days. It's a whirlwind and you'll likely lose your voice after the first day talking to so many students, but it costs less than hiring a recruiter and you'll likely get enough good resumes and enough first interactions with the humans behind those good resumes to justify it. But also, just offer to pay your existing employees a non-trivial referral bonus for finding someone (like multiple thousands of USD, as compared to paying a recruiter this is super cheap). Sure, the incentives aren't perfect, but if you have someone you already trust as an employee or partner or past coworker referring someone they want to work with, odds are that candidate is going to be pretty good.