Making a first leadership or engineering hire with no HR function? See recruiting firms built for seed-through-Series-B startups, including Plenty Search, Nederlia, Coastal Recruiting and Crucial Recruiting, and what to ask about caseload.
46 of the 95 recruiting firms for startups tracked on Startup Recruiting Firms publish Early-Stage Startups as a specialty, as of October 14, 2026. The featured partner, Recruitmint, is pinned first when it qualifies; every other row is alphabetical, unpaid, and drawn from public information.
Early-Stage Startups flags firms built around seed-through-Series-B hiring, where a founder is often making their first leadership or technical hire without an internal HR function. Recruitmint, this site's publisher, works at this stage across embedded and fractional engagements for startups and government contractors. Plenty Search and Nederlia both run smaller executive-search caseloads specifically for Series A-C leadership hires; Recruiting from Scratch and Coastal Recruiting narrow further into technical and engineering hires at this stage. Crucial Recruiting moves between fractional and embedded models for pre-seed to Series A teams, and Rocket and Shields Group Search both run search across engineering, GTM, and executive roles from Series A through later rounds. What distinguishes early-stage-focused firms from generalists is usually pace and equity fluency: they're used to closing candidates in weeks, not months, and can talk through an equity grant the way a later-stage firm talks through base-salary bands. Ask a firm working at this stage how many active searches its lead recruiter is juggling at once — caseload matters more here than firm size, since a single overloaded recruiter can stall your only open role for weeks.
Which recruiting firms for startups do early-stage startups?
Featured partner pinned first and labelled; every other company is listed alphabetically. No paid placement.
Which recruiting firms for startups do early-stage startups?. Featured partner pinned first and labelled; every other company is listed alphabetically. No paid placement.
Recruitmint is an international search and recruitment partner for founder-led, growth-stage, and government-contracting organizations, with offices in Orange County, CA and Prishtina, Kosovo. It recruits across product, engineering, and AI roles (including founding engineers), growth and ecommerce leadership, executive and leadership search, and GovCon roles including cleared and OCONUS talent. Offered as full-search or embedded talent-partner engagements. Publisher of this directory; disclosed as the featured listing.
Arena Recruiting is an outsourced recruiting firm serving startups, SMBs and law firms. It offers fractional recruiting engagements (typically one to three days a week over 3-6 months), plus contingency, retained and direct-hire IT recruiting.
Athyna is a San Diego talent-matching platform, founded in 2019, for startups and scaling companies hiring remote professionals. It uses AI to connect them with vetted candidates, with a particular focus on talent from Latin America.
Authentech Talent is a boutique recruiting firm running technical, go-to-market, and executive search for startups from Pre-Seed through Series F, offering both embedded TA advisory and success-based placement across AI, fintech, healthtech, and cybersecurity verticals.
Balkan Hire is a boutique recruiting agency (Efficient Hire LLC) that sources and vets remote candidates from Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, and North Macedonia for growing startups and SMEs, covering marketing, finance, operations, and general business roles.
Betts Recruiting is a go-to-market recruiting agency headquartered in San Francisco with additional offices in New York, Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago, Denver, Miami, Seattle, and Toronto, placing sales, marketing, and customer success talent for startups from pre-seed through Series D via contingency search, executive search, and a recruiter-subscription (RaaS) model.
Bloom Talent is a woman-owned boutique recruiting agency based in San Francisco that partners with early-stage startups, venture capital firms, and established tech companies to fill senior and executive roles through a relationship-driven, white-glove search process.
Cadre is a boutique San Francisco Bay Area software engineering recruiting firm serving high-growth startups since 2007, deliberately capped at fifteen recruiters, sourcing candidates directly rather than through job postings.
Chasen Talent is a solo founder-led boutique search firm running engineering, revenue, and go-to-market searches for early-stage to growth startups in California, New York, and remote, with every search handled personally by founder Chasen Nick from intake through close.
Sales and GTM recruiting firm for seed and Series A startups, placing founding AEs/BDRs, marketing, VP Sales/Revenue leadership, sales engineers, and CSMs, with vertical experience across cybersecurity, fintech, healthtech, and vertical SaaS.
Coastal Recruiting is a boutique Los Angeles tech recruiting firm for early-stage, VC-backed startups. It hires engineering and product talent, specializing in the first wave of technical hires at a company.
Seattle-based fractional and embedded recruiting agency for pre-seed to Series A startups. A dedicated recruiter joins your team to run sourcing and hiring, scaled up or down with hiring volume.
DRH Search is a solo-founder recruiting firm connecting talent with venture-backed startups from seed through Series B, placing candidates across software engineering, sales, marketing, GTM, talent acquisition, data science, product, and finance functions.
Early Stage Talent is a boutique agency founded by Ryan Sapper specializing in early engineering, product, and go-to-market hiring for startups, offering individual-contributor search, fractional recruiting leadership, and executive search.
EqualAccess is a New York recruiting and executive search firm built by former startup operators, placing founding engineers, SDRs/AEs, customer success, and ops hires for early-stage companies using behavioral-assessment-backed screening.
Founders Connect is a startup recruiting agency for venture-backed teams from pre-seed through Series D, focused on go-to-market roles such as account executives, SDRs, marketing, and revenue operations.
Golden Gate Recruiting is a boutique San Francisco staffing agency running full-cycle recruiting for early-stage startups across engineering, product, sales, marketing, operations and legal roles, with the person running the search owning the hire.
Herd Freed Hartz is a Seattle retained executive search firm with a Pacific Northwest focus (Seattle, Portland, Alaska) and national search reach. It recruits leaders across functions including CEO, CFO, COO, CRO/sales, CTO/engineering, CMO, VP Product, and HR/talent, with technology and startups among the industries it serves.
Hire With Near is an Austin staffing and recruiting agency, founded in 2021, for U.S. startups hiring remote professionals in Latin America. It handles sourcing, vetting, and compliance support.
Hired By Startups is a boutique London recruitment agency, founded in 2017, for early-stage and high-growth startups in Europe. It places go-to-market talent across sales, marketing, and customer success.
HireKosovo is a structured international hiring firm sourcing AI-fluent, tech, and creative talent from Kosovo and the Balkans for venture-backed startups and scaling companies, offering both self-directed platform access and full-service role architecture, sourcing, and vetting engagements.
Magenta is a remote staffing and recruiting agency that helps founders and high-growth startups hire full-time and virtual-assistant talent from Latin America, with full-cycle candidate management and a proprietary LATAM candidate database.
Marathon Talent is a LATAM-focused recruiting and Talent-as-a-Service firm. It offers full-cycle recruitment, fractional people and talent strategy where a consultant embeds with the client's team, plus salary and market studies, for US companies hiring bilingual talent in Latin America.
Masarna provides recruiting support for founder-led startups and growth companies through three models: success-based search, embedded recruiting, and fractional talent leadership. It also advises on workforce planning and hiring-process design.
Nederlia is a venture capital-focused executive search firm specializing in early-stage startups, from seed to Series B, placing C-suite and VP-level leaders across tech hubs in Europe and the UK.
Omnes Group is an IT-focused recruitment firm sourcing developers in Serbia, offering pay-per-hire, pay-per-stay and recruiter-as-a-service models with focus areas in AI, Web3, SaaS, GTM and Fintech.
Pipeline Recruiters is a SaaS sales and go-to-market recruiting agency that helps startups across Canada and the US hire SDRs, BDRs, account executives and revenue leaders, from early-stage seed companies to Series B and C.
Plenty Search is a boutique New York executive search firm built by former startup operators. It runs leadership searches for Series A-C and early-stage startups, with a smaller caseload per recruiter than traditional retained firms.
Recruiting from Scratch is a technical recruiting firm that pairs software-driven sourcing with recruiters focused on engineering hires, working with companies from seed stage through Series D.
Refery is a startup recruiting network for VC-backed Seed to Series B companies hiring engineering, AI, and go-to-market talent, combining specialist independent recruiters with referrals from founders, operators, and investors.
Rheaction is a boutique recruiting firm headquartered in San Francisco with additional offices in New York and Denver, specializing in design, product, and technical leadership placements for venture-backed startups, including Series A-B companies competing for engineering talent.
Rocket (Neatly Technologies, Inc.) is an AI-native recruiting firm started in San Francisco with additional teams in Toronto and New York, placing engineering, product, go-to-market, and executive roles for high-growth, VC-backed startups from Series A through IPO via contingency, executive search, and embedded models.
s1 is a GTM-only recruiting firm for AI and SaaS startups, placing account executives, SDRs, and sales leaders from seed through Series D, run by former GTM operators from companies including Intercom and Contentsquare.
Sales Talent Inc. is a software and SaaS sales recruiting firm that headhunts SDRs, account executives, sales leaders, customer success, sales operations and marketing talent in the US and Canada for seed through Series C and PE-funded SaaS companies.
Schultz Staffing is a founder-led fractional recruiting practice that embeds with VC-backed startups, pre-seed to Series A, as their in-house recruiter. It runs personalized outreach from the client's own inbox, and the founder, Erich Schultz, previously recruited in-house at Earnest, Rutter, and Forethought.
Shields Group Search is a New York City-based executive recruiting firm specializing in startup and scale-up hiring, providing executive and technical talent acquisition for venture-backed companies from Seed through Series C across SaaS, fintech, healthtech, and Web3.
Solara Talent is a New York-focused technical recruiting firm that helps venture-backed startups hire software engineers, product managers, designers, and growth talent using a proprietary sourcing platform called Recruiter OS.
Solo-operator technical recruiting practice based in the San Francisco Bay Area (also working New York City), specializing in AI/LLM and software founding-engineer hires for seed through Series A/B startups, with 20 years of Bay Area recruiting experience and the last decade focused on startups.
Start Wise Hires is a remote-first, US-based recruiting firm helping early-stage and scaling tech startups hire across fintech, AI, biotech, blockchain, and cybersecurity, offering hiring services, recruitment outsourcing, and hiring-strategy consulting.
Talent Vine is a small New York-based search firm founded by three former Palantir recruiters that runs retained search and hiring-partnership engagements for forward-deployed engineering, technical/product leadership, and business-leadership roles at growing startups.
Tangerine Search is a San Francisco Bay Area-headquartered boutique recruiting and fractional HR firm serving startups and growth-stage tech teams, offering startup recruiting, technical recruiting, executive search, embedded/RPO support, and fractional HR across the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
Techy Recruiter is a boutique tech recruitment consultancy based in Cairo, Egypt, serving funded startups and scale-ups across Europe and the Gulf region. It offers embedded recruitment, sourcing-as-a-service, and hiring-process design.
The Search Experience (TSE) is a San Francisco-based startup recruitment agency that partners with venture-backed founders from Seed through Series C to build go-to-market, technical, and design teams, working with companies backed by firms such as Sequoia, Greylock, and SoftBank.
The Startup Talent Agency is a recruiting firm founded by a CHRO that works only with startups. It recruits across engineering and product, go-to-market, executive and leadership, and G&A roles.
Solo strategic recruiting partner for seed-to-Series B B2B SaaS startups, building GTM and Product hiring systems and running embedded/fractional talent-leader engagements alongside retained executive search for CRO/VP-level roles.
Turmero Talent is a contingency recruiting firm focused only on technical roles, placing backend, platform, infrastructure, DevOps/SRE engineers and engineering managers at seed to Series A startups of roughly 11-50 employees.
How many recruiting firms for startups do Early-Stage Startups?
46 of the 95 companies in this directory. The list is compiled from public information and refreshed as companies change.
How is this list ordered?
The featured partner, Recruitmint, which publishes this directory, is pinned first and labelled. Everyone else is alphabetical. Position is not for sale.
Do companies pay to appear on this page?
No. Inclusion is free and unpaid. Recruitmint is the only company with a commercial relationship to this site, and it is disclosed on every page.
