I am reluctant to work together with headhunters or personnel service agencies. Why?

In the first case it is simply extremely expensive for a startup to mandate a headhunter. In our stage of company development the need for discretion is a little less than may be in the case of a high-profile CEO search for a large publicly traded company. Plus cash is scarce. No way you are going to a pay up to 30% success fee (of the total compensation). 

As for the personnel service agencies my experience so far was say “inconsistent”. You receive a ton of applications from some unknown agency all still with the claim of up to 20% of the first year’s salary for basically sending you an email with an (CV) attachment. Most of the CVs I normally receive through such channels are surely of likable and hard working folks. Yet their skills and our required skill seldom match. It ends to be a huge clear-my-email-box-from-unwanted-applications exercise. 

Then I got approached in early summer by Sara Moss of Pleinert & Partner. At first I was reluctant to agree to a meeting for reasons just outlined. But still, the approach was nice, and one of our ground rules here at Memonic says “Be nice”. So we set up a meeting with low expectations on my side. 

But now and again you can be wrong. Sara – thoroughly prepared – understood the specifics of our startup situation also in terms of conditions, payment terms and recruitment process. I agreed for a search mandate for once easily. 

Over the next weeks we received each week a number of quality applications from Switzerland and around Europe. (We were actually looking for an additional Python expert, and are still looking for great people wanting to join Memonic). 

And indeed just a few weeks later we found our new colleague through Sara: Welcome Aengus!

Learning: Thorough selection of your external partners pays.