the honest comparison
Hyring is a marketplace that connects you directly with vetted independent recruiters and human capital specialists, paid for their time or on a success fee rather than a percentage of first-year salary. A recruitment agency employs recruiters, owns the client relationship, and charges 20 to 30 percent of the salary of everyone it places. We do the same work, including executive search, without the percentage. This page is the side-by-side, and it does not skip the parts where we are still early.
side by side
Four routes to hiring capability, compared on the things that actually change the outcome and the invoice.
| Hyring | Recruitment agency | Job board | RPO contract | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fee basis | Day rate, project or success fee agreed per brief | 20 to 30% of first-year salary, per hire | Flat listing fee | Fixed contract, often multi-year |
| Cost of ten hires vs one | Roughly flat if embedded. You are buying time, not hires | Ten times the fee | Flat, but you do all the work | Flat, but committed whether you hire or not |
| If the search fails | Your money back in full | What you paid up front usually stays paid | Not applicable | Committed spend up front |
| Who does the work | The named specialist you chose from a validated shortlist | Whoever is on the desk that quarter | You | The provider's team, resourced by them |
| Can you choose the individual | Yes | No | Not applicable | No |
| Whose brand candidates see | Yours, on embedded engagements | The agency's | Yours | Usually the provider's |
| Time to start | Days | Days, but re-briefed every role | Immediate | Months of procurement |
| Scope beyond recruitment | HR, employee relations, fractional CHRO on the same bench | Recruitment only | Listings only | Recruitment operations only |
| Exit | End the engagement. No redundancy, no notice | Nothing to exit | Cancel the listing | Contractual notice, often painful |
the money, worked through
On one hire the gap is modest. The model diverges sharply with volume, which is the whole point.
| Senior hires at AED 350,000 each | Agency at 25% | Hyring, embedded specialist |
|---|---|---|
| 1 hire | AED 87,500 | Comparable, sometimes higher |
| 3 hires | AED 262,500 | Materially lower |
| 10 hires | AED 875,000 | Not close. You paid for days, not a share of ten salaries |
| What you keep afterwards | Nothing. Next hire, full fee again | Process, pipeline and market knowledge inside your business |
Agency percentage is mid-range for the UAE market. Hyring day rates are agreed per brief with the specialist, so the exact crossover depends on your quote and your hiring volume. verify Publish indicative day rate bands here so buyers can calculate their own crossover.
the three things people assume we cannot do
The assumption behind each of these is that a marketplace is a lighter thing than an agency. It is not. The bench includes executive search specialists, and where an agency would run a mandate, so do we.
Perfectly normal, and priced as one search. You get a named specialist who works that exact market rather than whoever is on a desk that quarter, and you agree the fee before anyone starts.
We will say so if a fractional window would cost you less.The bench includes executive search specialists who have run these mandates for years and own the networks that make them work. It is a retained-style search, run confidentially, without naming your entity until you choose to. The difference is that you meet and choose the searcher, and you are not paying a percentage of a package to a brand.
We run it. The specialist you pick is the one doing the work.Embedded specialists, as many as the plan needs, working inside your team on your systems and brand. What you do not sign is a multi-year outsourcing contract that is hard to unwind when the volume changes, which is the part of an RPO people regret rather than the delivery.
We scale to it, and you can stand it down when it is delivered.and the honest weaknesses
Three fair criticisms of our model, stated by us rather than discovered by you in month two.
Our bench is smaller than a large agency's headcount and we have delivered fewer total placements than a firm trading for thirty years. What we have is depth in specific disciplines and markets. If your requirement sits outside that depth we will tell you before you commit, rather than accept the brief and work it out afterwards.
An embedded specialist works inside your team, which means your hiring managers have to show up to intake calls and turn feedback around. The portal makes that visible: it shows how long each side held a candidate, and that number is uncomfortable if the delay is yours. It is the honest cost of a model that does not simply post a role and forward CVs.
You are buying a specific person rather than a brand-backed team, which is the strength and also the risk. We mitigate it by vetting hard, checking every match ourselves and replacing anyone who is not working, but we are not going to claim the variance is zero. The upside of the same fact is that one named person owns your shortlist and cannot pass you to a colleague you never chose.
comparison questions
Not in the traditional sense, though we do not pretend there is no overlap. Like a good agency we take responsibility for your outcome, and the Hyring team checks every match before a specialist reaches you. Unlike an agency, the specialist is an independent professional you choose and deal with directly, you are not paying a percentage of first-year salary, you get your money back if we do not deliver, and the bench covers HR, employee relations and CHRO-level work as well as recruitment. The shorthand: the judgement of a good agency, the economics of a marketplace.
It depends entirely on volume, and on one hire it may not be cheaper at all. An agency at 25 percent on an AED 350,000 salary charges AED 87,500 per hire, and charges it again on the next one. Hyring charges for the specialist's time or an agreed fee per brief, so the cost does not multiply with each hire. The crossover is typically around three hires, and above ten the comparison is no longer close. On a single hire, contingent agency terms may well be the simpler choice.
Scale and commitment. Recruitment process outsourcing is a large, often multi-year contract where a provider takes over a function, typically preceded by months of procurement and implementation. Hyring engages a small number of named specialists who can start within days, on terms you can end when the hiring plan is delivered. RPO makes sense at very high, stable volume. Hyring makes sense for surge capacity, specialist depth, or a hiring plan with an end date.
You get your money back in full. The risk of a failed search should sit with the party that controls the search, and that is us. Traditional retained search takes money up front that you do not get back, which puts the cost of failure onto the client who has the least control over the outcome. We think that is the wrong way round.
Yes, and many clients do. A common pattern is keeping incumbent agencies on the roles they genuinely fill well, and using Hyring for the roles they keep missing, for surge periods, or for HR and employee relations work agencies do not cover at all. There is no exclusivity requirement and no preferred supplier arrangement to sign.
Tell us early and we replace them. Because engagements run on day rates or milestones rather than a single contingent fee, unwinding an assignment that is not working is straightforward and you are not left having paid in full for an outcome you did not get. This is structurally easier than exiting a retained agency mandate or an RPO contract.
No. Hyring, at hyring.ai, is an independent UAE-headquartered human capital marketplace serving Abu Dhabi, Dubai, the GCC and global markets. We have no affiliation, ownership link or commercial relationship with hyring.com or any similarly named service.
keep reading
ready when you are
Including when that answer is an agency. Five minutes on the web, and a person comes back to you within 48 hours.