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Agency fees are a significant and often recurring cost for most hiring teams. A typical contingency search costs 15 to 25 percent of first-year salary. For senior roles, that's often 30,000 to 80,000 SEK or more per hire.
Some of those fees are worth paying. Many are not.
This guide explains where internal recruiting teams can take back sourcing work from agencies, what tools make it practical, and how to decide when agency support is still the right call.
Where agency fees come from
Most teams don't track their total agency spend precisely. It shows up as individual invoices across departments, approved in the moment of urgency. Adding them up is often uncomfortable.
The underlying issue is usually one of three things:
No internal sourcing capacity. The hiring team handles coordination and interviews but doesn't do active outreach. Sourcing is outsourced by default.
No usable candidate database. Past candidates, referrals, and previous applicants sit in an ATS that nobody searches. Every new role starts from zero.
Pressure to fill quickly. When a role needs to be filled in four weeks, there's no time to build a pipeline. The agency gets the call because they can start immediately.
All three are solvable. Not all at once, but systematically.
Your ATS is an asset you're probably not using
Every organization with more than a few years of recruiting history has a candidate database. Most of them don't use it.
Why? Because the data degrades. People change jobs. Contact details go stale. A search returns records from 2022 with outdated information, and the team learns to ignore the ATS for sourcing.
The answer isn't to abandon the ATS. It's to enrich it.
Tools that connect to your ATS and update existing records with current job information, emails, and phone numbers turn a dead database into a sourcing asset. For many roles, you'll find strong candidates already in your system who applied in the past, were rejected for timing rather than quality, and are now in a different position in their career. No agency fee required.
Building direct sourcing capacity
The longer-term version of reducing agency dependency is building an internal sourcing function. This doesn't require a dedicated sourcing team. It requires the right tools and a consistent process.
What this looks like in practice:
A searchable, enriched candidate database that surfaces relevant past applicants when a role opens
Automated outreach sequences that let a recruiter engage 50 candidates without copying and pasting 50 messages manually
A process for tracking conversations so outreach doesn't fall through the cracks
Hiring manager involvement so they can see candidate pipelines and flag people who look interesting
Building this takes a few months. Maintaining it is much cheaper than agency fees.
The math
If your team makes 20 hires per year and 8 go through agencies at an average fee of 50,000 SEK each, that's 400,000 SEK in annual agency spend.
If better tooling and a more structured internal process reduces that to 4 agency hires per year, you've saved 200,000 SEK. The cost of the tooling is a fraction of that.
The savings compound as your internal database grows. Each enriched candidate record is an asset. Each relationship built without an intermediary reduces future dependency.
When agencies still make sense
Some use cases genuinely warrant agency support:
Executive searches. Senior leadership hires require discretion, network reach, and market knowledge that's hard to replicate internally. For C-suite and VP-level searches, a good firm earns its fee.
Highly specialized roles. If you're hiring for a very niche skill in a market you don't know well, an agency with a specific network in that space is genuinely useful.
High-volume burst hiring. If you need to hire 20 people in 60 days, supplementing internal capacity with agency support is often the right call. Just don't let burst hiring become the default.
The goal isn't to eliminate agencies entirely. It's to use them where they actually add value rather than by default.
How TalentRiver reduces agency dependency
TalentRiver gives recruiting teams the sourcing capability that reduces reliance on agencies. It searches your ATS and millions of external candidate profiles together, enriches existing candidate data with current contact details, and automates multi-step outreach sequences.
Eeze Consulting cut their search time by 50 percent using TalentRiver. Teams across Europe use it to cover more roles internally before turning to agencies.
If your team is spending more on agency fees than you'd like, talk to us about what internal sourcing could cover.
