Should we use a recruiter or hire one in-house?
Companies that posted an in-house recruiter role
Twelve months to October 2026. By group, over every company in the group; by size, over the companies in the band that posted any role.
By group
By company size
Shares where 30 companies in the band posted a role; counts below that.
What the postings say
- 0129 of the 118 Series A and B AI companies we follow posted an in-house recruiter role in the twelve months to October 2026; 6 of the 124 seed-stage AI companies did.
- 02Of the 48 companies at 20 to 49 people that posted a role in that time, 8 posted a recruiter; of the 41 at 50 to 99, 11 did.
- 0324 of the 88 Vista Equity Partners portfolio companies and 11 of the 91 Bonfire Ventures portfolio companies posted an in-house recruiter role in the same months.
For founders and CEOs
An in-house recruiter is a seat most companies your size have not posted for. If you are hiring several roles at once, the alternatives are an agency on one seat, a recruiter on contract, or you; the chart shows how far along peers are.
For portfolio talent teams
Use the group counts as the talent conversation agenda: portfolio companies that posted a recruiter role are building the function, and the rest are where a partner's help lands.
For hiring managers
If you run hiring today without a recruiter, you are in the majority at your size. The benchmark here is peers, not a rule.
Questions people ask
Should we use a recruiter or hire one in-house?
It turns on how many seats you are filling and how hard they are. One hard seat a year rarely justifies a full-time recruiter; a steady run of hires usually does. This page shows how many companies like yours posted for an in-house recruiter, not which choice is right.
When do companies hire their first in-house recruiter?
The postings show no size at which it happens. They show, for each size band, how many of the companies that posted any role posted a recruiter; a share for a band is given once 30 companies of that size posted any role.
Does a posting mean the company hired someone?
No. A posting says a company was looking for the role, not that it filled it, and a company that posted the same role five times counts once. The page reads what was posted and listed, never who was hired.
Is a company that posted nothing not hiring?
Not necessarily. Many companies hire through referrals, agencies and their own networks and never post, and many run no public job board we can read. A company with no posting we could read is unknown, so every figure here counts the companies that did post, and is the least of the group that was hiring a role, never the most.
Methodology and data
Window
2025-10-25 to 2026-10-25.
Who is included
- By group: every company in the group. The seed-stage group is stated over the 124 companies of its published study; 119 of them are tracked in the CRM, so its count is the least that posted, never the most.
- By size: the companies in the band with any posting in the window; the Vista Equity Partners portfolio is left out of the bands.
Coverage
- A recruiter role is any posting the title rules file under talent and recruiting: recruiter, sourcer, talent acquisition, head of talent.
- Postings pool the twelve-month history and the weekday board read, so a group's count here can be higher than its study page, which reads the history alone.
Limits and caps
- The 100 to 199 band reaches 30 posting companies in about two months at the current rate; until then it shows counts.
- Whether to use a recruiter or hire one is a judgement the data does not make; the page shows who posted for one.
- A share is stated only over 30 companies or more; below that the page gives counts. Medians, never means. Rules dashboards@1.0.0 (src/lib/dashboards.ts, tested in test/dashboards.test.ts).
When each figure can be stated
| Figure | Stated from |
|---|---|
| Counts and shares for the Series A and B, Bonfire Ventures and Vista Equity Partners groups | today: each holds more than 30 companies |
| Valor Ventures | counts only: fewer than 30 companies |
| Bands of 20 to 49 and 50 to 99 people | today |
| Band of 100 to 199 people | about 60 days, at two new posting companies a month |
Sources
- when-do-companies-like-mine-hire-a-recruiter.json (the Sunday recompute of crm.role_openings)
- seed-stage-ai-companies.json (study, version vertical@1.0.0)
- Dashboard file computed 2026-10-25T11:10:43.581Z; board read of 2026-10-24.
- Original research computed from the signal layer of the recruiting CRM behind Human in the Loop Talent: public job boards, company news, funding announcements and headcount readings, collected continuously for every tracked company and recomputed every Sunday. A figure is published only when the sample supports it; the data behind every page is published as JSON next to it.
- Licence: CC BY 4.0. Reuse with attribution.
Cite this
Related: Hiring Intelligence, the hiring benchmark.
Next step
Scoping the seat your peers posted?
Thirty minutes on what companies at your stage posted, what the seat looks like at your size, and whether it needs a hire at all.