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Posted: 1/14/2026

Read Time: 7 min

Not All Recruiting Help is the Same: How to Choose the Right Model for Your Hiring Goals

If you've ever stared at a job posting that's been open for two months while your team stretches thinner by the week, you know the feeling. You need help hiring, and you need it yesterday. So you start researching options, and suddenly you're neck-deep in vendors who all seem to promise the same thing in different words.

They all sound helpful in theory, but when you're trying to decide which one to use, the differences get blurry fast. What's the real difference between these options? Which one will solve your problem? And more importantly, which one won't leave you three months and several thousand dollars later, still stuck in the same place?

Recruiting help isn't one-size-fits-all. What works brilliantly for a startup hiring their first five engineers might be completely wrong for a mid-sized company scaling their go-to-market team. Understanding what each model is built for can save you months of frustration.

The 3 Most Common Recruiting Models

When most companies say they need recruiting help, they're usually considering one of three options:

AI sourcing tools that generate candidate lists
Traditional recruiting agencies that take full ownership of filling specific roles
Contract recruiters or RPO-style support that gives you dedicated recruiting bandwidth

Each of these models has been around long enough to prove it works for certain situations, but they solve different problems.

AI sourcing tools: Great data, but limited ownership

AI sourcing tools are designed for teams that already have strong internal recruiters who mainly need better raw material. If your recruiters are spending hours scrolling through LinkedIn and building lists by hand, an AI sourcing tool can compress that work from days into minutes.

What you get with AI sourcing tools

The best AI sourcing platforms deliver ranked candidate lists based on your specific criteria, complete with verified contact information and fast turnaround. You define what good looks like for a role, and the system surfaces people who match that profile. Some tools even predict likelihood of interest based on career trajectory and other patterns in the data.

When it works well, you can get a list of 50 qualified candidates in the time it used to take to find five.

Where AI sourcing tools fall short

AI sourcing tools give you data, not outcomes. You still need someone to write personalized outreach, track responses, screen replies, schedule calls, and qualify whether candidates are a real fit. You still need someone to nurture interest and guide candidates through your process. There's no accountability for whether those candidates become hires, and if your recruiters are already stretched thin, that "help" can quickly become just another task on an already overwhelming to-do list.

Key takeaway

AI sourcing tools are powerful when you already have execution muscle on your team. They're not enough when roles are complex, timelines are tight, or your recruiters don't have bandwidth to convert lists into hires.

Traditional recruiting agencies: High stakes and high cost

Traditional recruiting agencies shine in high-stakes, singular hiring situations. If you're looking for a VP of Engineering or need a highly specialized expert in a niche field (and the cost of a bad hire far outweighs the placement fee), then agencies can deliver.

What you get with a recruiting agency

When you engage a traditional agency, you're outsourcing the entire hiring process. Senior recruiters with deep networks take ownership, leverage their relationships, and tap into passive candidate pools. The contingency model aligns incentives: they only get paid if you make a hire.

For critical, one-off roles where you need senior-level expertise and can't afford to get it wrong, that model makes sense.

Where recruiting agencies fall short

The cost is the most obvious hurdle. Agencies typically charge 20-25% of first-year salary, which means a $150K hire costs you $30,000 to $37,500. If you're hiring multiple roles, those fees compound fast.

Beyond price, you often get limited transparency. You don't always know who's being contacted, what's being said, or why certain candidates aren't responding. If your initial criteria were off or the role needs to shift, iterating with an agency can feel clunky. And once you're engaged, flexibility tends to decrease. Agencies are optimizing for placement, not for helping you learn what works or building a system that gets better over time.

Key takeaway

Agencies are designed to close deals, not build sustainable hiring processes. They're a strong fit for mission-critical, standalone hires where outcome matters more than cost or control. But they're tough when you're scaling a team or need to move quickly across multiple roles.

RPO or contract recruiters: Extra hands, but mixed results

RPO and contract recruiters make sense for teams with steady hiring volume who need embedded support quickly. Maybe you're scaling and don't have time to hire full-time recruiters, or you have seasonal spikes and need flexible capacity. Bringing in contractors can plug immediate gaps.

What you get with RPO or contract recruiters

With contract recruiting or RPO, you get someone who operates as an extension of your team. They handle sourcing, outreach, screening, scheduling, and coordination. Unlike an agency, a contract recruiter works in your systems, uses your language, and represents your company directly. You have more control and visibility.

Where RPO and contract recruiters fall short

Productivity and quality vary dramatically by recruiter. Some contractors are phenomenal; others are fine but not exceptional. Because you're often working through staffing firms, you don't always know what you're going to get.

Beyond individual performance, the model itself is limited. Contract recruiters are still doing manual sourcing and outreach, so they hit the same productivity ceiling as internal recruiters. If you need to double your hiring pace, you need to double your contractors. Scaling is linear and slow.

Key takeaway

Contract recruiters are helpful when you need extra capacity, but the model is often capped by human bandwidth alone, and results depend heavily on who you get. It's an incremental improvement, not a step-change.

Where SeekOut Spot fits

AI tools give you great data but no execution. Agencies give you outcomes but at high cost and with limited control. Contract recruiters give you extra hands but without guaranteed efficiency. Each model makes you choose between speed, cost, quality, and control.

That's the gap that SeekOut Spot was built to fill.

SeekOut Spot isn't just another sourcing tool that hands you a list. It's not a traditional agency that charges 20% and keeps you at arm's length. And it's not simply more recruiter hours doing the same manual work.

SeekOut Spot is an embedded recruiting team where AI agents and human recruiters work together to deliver interview-ready candidates in weeks, not months.

What makes SeekOut Spot different

With SeekOut Spot, AI agents handle the high-volume, repetitive work:

Searching massive databases
Identifying matches
Crafting personalized outreach at scale
Tracking responses
Following up consistently

Spot’s human recruiters focus on the parts where judgment and nuance matter:

Refining what good looks like as you learn more
Conducting in-depth screens
Building relationships with promising candidates
Adapting based on what's working

Because AI does the heavy lifting on repetitive tasks, productivity with SeekOut Spot is roughly 2x what you'd get from traditional contract recruiters. Your team moves faster without sacrificing candidate quality. And the pricing is flexible. No 20% agency fees, no long-term RPO commitments. Just transparent costs that scale with your needs.

Why this matters

The reason this model works is that you get momentum without having to give up control over your hiring. You can scale quality hiring without your costs scaling linearly. And you're not locked into rigid terms or left staring at a spreadsheet full of names wondering what to do next. Spot exists for teams that need genuine hiring progress: not more tools to manage, not more tradeoffs to navigate, just a system that moves roles forward.

How to choose the right sourcing support

Here's a straightforward framework to help you decide which option is best for your team:

Choose AI sourcing tools if:

You already have recruiters with the bandwidth to execute
Your main problem is candidate volume
Your roles are straightforward, and your team can handle outreach and screening

Choose a traditional agency if:

You're hiring for a mission-critical, singular role.
Budget is less of a concern than getting the outcome right.
You're willing to trade cost and control for hands-off accountability.

Choose SeekOut Spot if:

You're hiring for complex or specialized roles where quality matters.
You want both speed and quality without choosing one or the other.
Your team needs real execution help: not just data or extra hours, but a system that moves candidates through the entire funnel.
You value transparency, flexibility, and results over rigid contracts.
You're tired of tradeoffs and want a model that reflects how hiring works when it's working well.

Why more teams are choosing SeekOut Spot

The recruiting landscape has shifted in the past few years, and the teams that are building momentum have stopped treating AI and human recruiters as competing options. They're using AI to handle the repetitive, high-volume work that bogs down traditional recruiting, while recruiters focus on the conversations and assessments that require real judgment.

That's what makes the difference between grinding through roles one by one and making steady progress across your entire hiring pipeline. Instead of drowning in candidate data you don't have bandwidth to act on, or waiting weeks for a single screened candidate, you get interview-ready people faster than traditional models deliver them.

SeekOut Spot's productivity runs about 2x higher than contract recruiting, and costs significantly less than agencies. The tradeoff between speed, quality, and control doesn't exist here because the model is built differently from the start.

Ready to see how SeekOut Spot can work for your roles? Request a meeting today.