The situation: agency-driven hiring was starting to crack

A 40-person payments and compliance fintech was growing quickly. New customers meant new demands across product, risk, sales and operations.

Hiring had been pushed through a handful of contingency agencies.

On paper, it looked workable. In reality, it created three quiet problems:

• Candidate quality was unpredictable
Agencies optimised for speed and placements, not whether someone would last 12–24 months in a regulated fintech environment.

• Fees were stacking up
Every risk analyst, product manager or BDM came with a 20–25% invoice attached.

• Nothing was compounding
Each hire was treated as a one-off transaction. There was no talent pipeline, no market visibility, no institutional knowledge building up over time.

As the business crossed 30 people and 8–10 hires a year, the model started to feel brittle.

They weren’t hiring badly — but it was expensive, inconsistent and disconnected from how the business was actually evolving.

The shift: moving from transactions to a hiring function

Instead of picking another agency, they changed the way recruiting was handled.

They brought in a dedicated recruiter who worked with the founders and team leads across all open roles.

That meant:

• One person owning the whole recruiting workflow
Role scoping, outreach, screening, shortlists, coordination and candidate care all sat in one place.

• Proactive market coverage
Rather than waiting for CVs, they started building pipelines across payments, compliance, operations and go-to-market roles.

• A fixed monthly cost
No placement fees, no percentage of salary. Hiring became a predictable operating expense instead of a variable hit every time someone resigned or a new role opened up.

The business didn’t become “better at hiring” overnight.

What changed was that recruiting became something the company actually ran, rather than something it outsourced in bursts.

The outcome: lower costs, better continuity

Within 12 months:

• Agency spend dropped by more than half
What used to be paid in placement fees was redirected into a single, ongoing recruiting function.

• 15 roles were filled across product, risk, sales and operations
Using the same process and the same market coverage, rather than starting from zero each time.

• Hiring got easier instead of harder as the company grew
Because candidate networks, interview frameworks and market knowledge were accumulating, not being thrown away after every hire.

Nothing flashy happened.

They just stopped paying a margin on every CV and started building a repeatable way to bring people into the business.

What this shows for fintechs

Once a fintech is hiring more than a handful of people a year, recruitment becomes a real operational function — whether anyone is formally running it or not.

Leaving it to agencies means:

• You pay a tax on every hire
• Knowledge never compounds
• And speed always beats fit

Running it in-house, even in a light-touch, flexible way, means:

• Lower long-term cost
• Better market coverage
• And a hiring process that improves with every role filled

For this company, stepping away from contingency recruitment wasn’t about being clever.

It was about treating recruiting as part of the business, not a series of transactions.