Five ways to fill a senior role, what each costs in Australia, how much founder time each takes, and the one question about the candidate that picks the method.
The right hiring method follows from one fact about the person you need: whether they are currently looking. If the strongest candidate for your role is already applying somewhere, a job ad or a contingency recruiter will reach them, and a retained search fee is money you did not need to spend. If they are not looking, no amount of internal process reaches them at all.
Most advice on this decision frames it as internal recruiting versus an external firm, or retained versus contingency. Both framings argue about who does the work. What actually decides it is who you're trying to reach, and both skip three of the five options on the table. This covers all five, what each costs in the Australian market, what each one costs you in founder time, and how to tell which your specific role needs.
Founders usually open this decision with a budget question or a stage question. Neither one predicts the answer. Two roles at the same company, in the same quarter, with the same money behind them, can need completely different methods.
Take a Senior Backend Engineer role at a Series B company. In most Australian tech markets there is a real population of strong engineers who move every eighteen months or so and who will absolutely read a well-written job ad. They are looking, or close enough to it. A job board plus a competent internal recruiter will produce a genuine shortlist, and paying a third of first-year compensation to reach them is waste.
Now open a Director of AI search at that same company, in a narrow technical domain. Count the people in the country who have actually done that job and you might get to a dozen. All employed. Most promoted inside the last year. None of them with any reason to have touched a resume since. You can write that ad beautifully and it will still return nothing, because the people it was written for are never going to see it.
Key Distinction
A cheap method aimed at a passive candidate does not produce a worse shortlist; it produces no shortlist at all, eight weeks later.
That's the real cost of getting this wrong, and it lands long after the decision is reversible.
So the budget is the wrong place to start. Ask instead whether the three people you would most want in this seat would be reading job ads this month.
Before any fee gets discussed, two options are already sitting on your desk, and nobody selling search is going to lead with them.
The first is the network you already have. Your investors have a portfolio full of companies who have made this exact hire. Your best engineers worked somewhere before you, alongside people they rated. Your board has seen this seat filled well and filled badly. Asking those people, specifically and by name, is the cheapest high-signal move available, and a surprising number of founders skip it because it feels less rigorous than running a process.
"One of the best ways of acquiring high calibre talent, is if you already have it."
Paul Graham, Y Combinator
Strong people cluster. If you already employ two or three engineers you would fight to keep, the people they would vouch for by name are a better starting pool than anything a keyword search will surface, and it costs you a few conversations.
Push one ring further out and the same free option keeps paying off. Ex-employers your own team has worked for, university alumni groups, and the open-source or technical communities your engineers already move in all carry candidates nobody on your cap table happens to know personally. It takes more legwork to activate than a text to your lead investor, but it costs nothing but time, and it's where a surprising share of the strongest passive candidates are actually sitting.
The second free option is your own talent function, if you have one worth the name. Internal recruiting handles senior hires well under specific conditions: your recruiter has placed leaders at this level before, you have a founder or CTO with real standing who can sell the opportunity personally, the role is a conventional one rather than a narrow technical mandate, and you can run a disciplined process over eight to sixteen weeks without it stalling.
Where internal search reliably breaks is not skill; it is attention. A recruiter carrying fifteen other open roles can't also run an executive search properly, because executive search is mostly patient, unrewarded outreach to people who say no. That work is the first thing to get deprioritised when a pipeline needs filling this week.
Everything above assumes one hiring decision in isolation, but the same company answers this question differently at ten employees than it does at eighty. Early on, hiring is unavoidably founder-led: whoever is closest to the vision has to run the intake call and close the candidate personally, because the first ten to fifteen senior hires set the bar every later hire gets measured against. Handing that off to a recruiter or a delegate too early is how a company ends up with a senior hire nobody on the founding team would have chosen themselves.
Past that stage, the job changes from a single high-conviction decision into a repeatable one. What you need stops being one perfect search and starts being a system: a standing list of people worth calling when a seat opens, built before you need it rather than assembled from scratch once it does. If your recruiting effort still starts from zero every time a role opens, that's usually the sign the company has outgrown founder-led hiring and hasn't yet built the process to replace it.
If neither free move fits, three paid models remain. As of September 2026, here is roughly what each costs in the Australian market.
Paid only on placement, and often non-exclusive, so the same firm may be working your role for several clients at once. Best fit: the role already appeals to people in the market.
Exclusive engagement, with the fee split across kickoff, shortlist, and placement. Best fit: the person you need is employed, well regarded, and has no reason to be looking.
Someone experienced in the seat part-time, with no permanent commitment. Best fit: you're not yet certain what the role should own, and hiring permanently would lock in a guess.
The 17% to 18% contingency average comes from the 2025 RCSA Fee Survey and covers all sectors; technology and executive placements sit at the top of that spread. AESC data puts retained search at roughly 12% of the Australian recruitment market by revenue. Retained is the exception in this market, not the default, which is a useful corrective if a firm is presenting it as the only serious way to hire.
The headline percentage is the least useful number in any proposal, because firms calculate it against different things. Some quote against base salary, some against total first-year cash including bonus and superannuation. The same 28% produces materially different invoices depending on which basis sits underneath it, so ask what the percentage applies to before you compare two quotes at all.
Every fee conversation covers money. Almost none of them covers time, and that's the thing a founder running a Series B company has the least of.
Take our own numbers as a reference point. Perpetuate Talent asks for one hour of a founder's time, once, to build the profile and craft the pitch. Two to three candidates arrive within five to ten days. That is time to a shortlist you can start interviewing, not time to a signed offer; how fast you move from there is still your own process. If you want to know how that intake hour is actually spent, our Talent System™ walks through the concentric-circle method behind it.
Run these before you talk to anyone. Most of the time, three or four answers point the same direction and the decision makes itself.
Before You Choose a Method
The role question sits underneath all five, and it is worth settling first. If you're still deciding whether the seat is a CTO or a VP Engineering, our decision guide on that split is the better place to start, because choosing a search method for a mandate nobody has agreed on is how a placement fails a year later.
Every method above has a failure mode that shows up months after the decision, including ours.
That last one is worth saying plainly, because it's our own model. Off-market search earns its fee on a small number of high-stakes, hard-to-reach hires. It is not built for filling a headcount plan, and it is the wrong tool for a role where twenty qualified people would each do the job well. If you need five engineers hired this quarter, a volume recruiter or an internal talent function will serve you better and cost you less, and we'd rather tell you that than stretch the model somewhere it doesn't belong.
If you do land on off-market search, the next problem is that every firm in the category claims it. Our companion piece on how to tell whether a search firm actually has off-market access covers the questions that separate a real relationship-based process from a faster database search, and they work as well on us as on anyone else.
If this points you toward off-market search, the practice depends on the seat. CTO, VP Engineering, and Director of AI searches run through our Executive practice, led by Stephen Tung. Message Stephen on LinkedIn →
Head of Product, VP of Product, and CPO mandates run through our Product Search practice, led by Sophia Philippou. Message Sophia on LinkedIn →
And if the honest answer after reading this is that your role does not need us, that is a useful outcome too. Tell us what you are hiring for and we will say so.