How unicorn startups hire without recruitment agencies

If you’re building a startup, you’ve probably realised that hiring is one of your biggest challenges. So you turn to recruitment agencies, because that’s what everyone does.

But here’s the problem. Recruitment agencies don’t solve the problem, they contribute to it. They’re expensive, and they don’t leave you any better at hiring than when you started.

Having worked with over 90 startups from 2019 to 2026, from seed to Series B, I’ve seen the same pattern again and again. Agencies draining the hiring budget and leaving startups dependent on their services.

In 2019, I was determined to solve the “who” problem for startups, and I formed Reedmace Talent, the only company that shows startups how to hire, rather than just doing it for them.

Let me break it down for you. Read on to find out  how unicorn startups hire without recruitment agencies.

The real cost of outsourcing hiring

Let’s be clear. Agencies can charge anything from 20 to 30 percent of salary per hire. They don’t understand your culture, they don’t understand strategic talent acquisition, and they don’t help you build a repeatable internal hiring process.

For early-stage startups, that’s a problem. You’re burning cash and outsourcing one of the most important parts of your business, finding your team.

Unicorns found a better way

100% of unicorns in the UK have talent acquisition departments. Look them up on LinkedIn and you’ll see. Their staff advertise roles with a clear tagline, “no recruiters please.”

Talent acquisition is the function that aligns the people plan to the strategy. Recruitment is a subset of that field. Talent acquisition looks at redeploying internal skills, succession planning, and even outsourcing, all of which are critical at volume. Recruitment ignores all of this, it is simply the act of hiring a person.

By harnessing talent acquisition, unicorns build their own hiring intelligence and take the power back. They put systems and processes in place to support hiring, and it’s all aligned to their core goals.

Small startups can’t afford a talent acquisition team

While the unicorn method sounds great, it doesn’t make sense to implement talent acquisition internally until you’re hiring around 10 heads per year. At that point, you’ll spend about the same on internal talent acquisition as you would on outsourcing to agencies. The difference is that now you’re in control of your strategy and hiring.

That’s a big problem for small startups. They’re left with either having a go at their own hiring or using agencies.

That was the first problem I set out to solve in 2019.

How it all started

I came across a startup that was about to hire a commercial team. They knew they wanted to do their own hiring, but the founders were both software engineers and didn’t even know what made a good business development manager.

They approached me and asked how I could help, without doing the hiring for them. I coached them and wrote the first iteration of our Talent Acquisition Playbook. It shared all the secrets that recruitment agencies use when hiring, and with my coaching, they went on to hire their own staff.

They had five staff in 2019. By 2025, they had hired 73 people without using recruitment agencies and were turning over $13 million.

Final thought

Nailing the ability to hire is one of the greatest skills a startup can gain. Outsourcing to recruitment agencies blocks startups from learning this skill.

Whether your startup is big or small, the sooner you reduce your reliance on third parties for hiring, the quicker you can grow and the more money you can save.

About the author

Dan Corcoran is the founder of Reedmace Talent. He helps startups hit funding and growth milestones by turning hiring from a bottleneck into a capability. Rather than recruiting for companies, Reedmace Talent teaches startups how to hire properly, so growth plans can actually be executed. Dan is also a startup mentor, NED, and advisor to UK incubators and accelerators.

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