TeamEx vs Freelance Recruiters

TeamEx vs freelance recruiters at a glance

The real difference: who decides who to interview

A freelance recruiter works like a recruiting agency, run by one person. You explain the role and your culture, the recruiter reads that brief, decides who matches it, and sends you the people they chose. Everyone you never meet was filtered out by one person’s reading of your company.

TeamEx moves that call to the founder. You search engineer profiles labelled by real experts, filter by what matters to you, such as products they have built and how they work, think and communicate, and decide who is worth an interview. TeamEx still does the unscalable work, three profiling interviews per engineer and the hiring logistics, but the judgement of fit is yours.

One person, one network, one calendar

Hiring one recruiter means hiring their limits too. Their reach is the people they already know and the hours they can spend sourcing. Their attention is shared: most freelance recruiters work for several clients at once, so your search competes with everyone else’s. And when they are busy, sick or on holiday, the search waits.

Each search also starts from scratch. The recruiter reads your brief, builds a list, screens it, and judges fit again for every role. How good that judgement is depends on how well one person understood a company they have known for a few calls. Founders who make it work treat it as a job of its own. As Stan co-founder Vitalii Dodonov puts it, “you will need to treat your recruiter like a direct report, checking in with them often and offering frequent feedback on their candidates.”

Misunderstood and pressured

Founders who have worked with a freelance recruiter often describe the same two feelings.

Misunderstood, because the brief never quite captures how the team works. Ask a founder about their culture and the answer is often “we move fast” or “we’re a family”, and neither tells a recruiter who will fit. The people who come back look right on paper and wrong in the first call.

Pressured, because the recruiter has every reason to close. On hourly terms, a longer search costs you more. On pay-when-you-hire terms, the recruiter is paid only if you hire from their shortlist, so the push toward an offer comes early and often.

Facts you can filter on

TeamEx’s search is built for founders who know the right person, even if they cannot write it down as a job description. You search the engineer profiles and set your own standards with filters designed around how founders already think about people and judge whether an engineer fits:

• How they work, think and communicate.
• Products they have built, from 174 categories.
• Skills and specialties, from 3,000+ skills.
• Salary expectation, location and US work permit.
• Or up to five AI-based custom criteria, written in plain English.

Then send intro requests to the people you pick. Founders often go from first search to the person they want to interview in a few minutes. 96% of TeamEx hires are still in place at three months, and founders at Clipboard Health, Maple and TopHelpers have hired this way.

What freelance recruiters cost, and what TeamEx costs

Freelance recruiters set their own prices, and most use one of four models:

• By the hour: $50 to $150.
• By the month: $3,000 to $5,000 for about 10 hours a week.
• A flat fee per hire: $5,000 to $20,000, often half up front.
• Pay when you hire: 15% to 25% of first-year salary.

Ranges are from Dover and TechHiringCost, 2026. On hourly or monthly terms, you pay for the work whether or not anyone is hired, and there is usually no guarantee if the hire leaves.

TeamEx charges a 25% placement fee on first-year base salary, paid once, only when you hire. If the hire leaves in the first 90 days, TeamEx replaces them for free, and if it can’t, you get a full refund. Searching and interviews are free.

On contract, TeamEx’s fee is 25% of your monthly bill, with monthly billing and a six-month minimum: on a $10,000 engineer rate you pay $13,333 a month, and TeamEx keeps $3,333. The conditions are in the client service agreement.

How each one vets engineers

Each freelance recruiter sets their own process, usually a résumé review and a screening call against your role. The quality depends on the person: their technical depth, their time, how well they understood your brief, or how well you put the brief together.

A recruiter’s recommendation can also stand in for checks nobody ran. In July 2025, the founder of an AI startup in San Francisco described hiring an engineer who, it later emerged, was working for several startups at the same time. On how he got through the door:

TeamEx vets the engineer, not the role. Every engineer has three calls with real people: a recruiter checks identity, work history and credentials; an engineer goes deep on skills, specialty and products built; a team lead looks at how they work, think and communicate. Interviewers apply the same written rubrics to everyone, each call becomes labels backed by evidence, and a human signs off every label. There is no pass or fail. TeamEx only stops if something critical comes up, like misrepresentation or an identity issue. The facts go on the profile, and you decide who fits.

When to pick a freelance recruiter, and when to pick TeamEx

Pick a freelance recruiter when:

• You want one person to run the whole search and the scheduling for you.
• The role is easy to describe in a brief.
• You have several roles open and want someone embedded part-time.
• The recruiter already knows the exact niche you are hiring in.

Pick TeamEx when:

• You are making an early AI/ML hire, where founder–engineer fit matters most.
• You want to judge who fits and decide who to interview yourself.
• You want reach beyond one person’s network and calendar.
• You want to pay only when you hire, with a replacement or refund if it doesn’t work out.