You need to hire. You do not have £15k lying around. Welcome to the club.
Most agencies charge 15 to 25% of first-year salary. On a £75k engineer, that is £11k to £18k per hire. For a seed-stage startup, that is a runway problem disguised as a hiring solution.
Here is how to hire fast without a recruiter, without sacrificing quality, and without losing three weeks of your life.
Build the shortlist yourself in 5 days
Start with a tight job scorecard. Three must-have skills, three nice-to-haves, one clear outcome for the first 90 days. If you cannot write it in 15 minutes, you do not know the role well enough yet.
Then source in parallel across three channels. Post on LinkedIn and Wellfound on day one. DM 40 people on LinkedIn who match your scorecard, using a two-line message with the salary band. Ask your investors and 10 founder friends for two intros each.
Do not wait for inbound. Inbound is slow and biased toward people who are actively job hunting, which is rarely your best candidate pool.
Screen 250 CVs in 90 minutes, not 9 hours
Screening is where founders lose the plot. You open the inbox, see 250 CVs, and close it again. A week passes. Candidates go cold.
Fix it with a single rubric. Score every CV 1 to 5 on each must-have. Reject anything scoring under 3 on any must-have. You will cut 80% of the pile in under an hour.
For the remaining 50, a 15-minute phone screen with four fixed questions is enough. Same questions, same order, every time. Score them on the spot. You now have a top 10.
This is the step most founders skip, and it is exactly where agencies earn their fee. Do it yourself and keep the £15k.
Interview with a script, decide in 48 hours
Three interview stages, maximum. A technical or practical test that mirrors real work, a values and ways-of-working interview, and a founder chat. Each uses the same questions for every candidate, scored 1 to 5.
Give yourself a 48-hour decision window after the final interview. Any longer and your top candidate accepts somewhere else. Make the offer by phone, follow up in writing within an hour, and keep the close warm until the contract is signed.
Done properly, this whole loop runs in 21 to 28 days. That is faster than most agencies deliver, and you keep the cash.
The bottleneck is almost always CV screening. That is why Sieve exists: to turn that 250-CV pile into a ranked, scored shortlist in minutes, using the scorecard you already wrote. Try it at sievecv.com.