AI companies mapped across eleven published landscapes.

The arithmetic

Route	Year one	Per hire
In-house recruiterSalary every year, plus equity, plus severance if hiring slows	215,000	26,875
AgenciesA fee every time. Nothing retained between hires	288,000	36,000
Embedded with meOne monthly fee, whatever the hiring plan turns out to be	144,000	18,000

In-house recruiter, $215,000. That is a $165,000 median base, read off 16 live adverts at AI companies that published a range, plus employer taxes, benefits and a LinkedIn Recruiter licence.

Agencies and embedded are both costed at eight hires in year one on a blended base of $180,000, to compare like for like.

The reality is that embedded can fill many more roles in twelve months than eight, for the same fixed price. The more you plan to hire, the further apart those two numbers get.

The part the salary hides

A recruiter from a general tech or SaaS background arrives without a network. They do not know the twenty companies you compete with for candidates, which ones just raised, or which ones are about to lose people. They will learn. It takes three to six months, and you pay full salary throughout.

Cover even two roles on a per-hire fee while they find their feet and year one is $215,000 of salary plus $72,000 of fees. That is $287,000, double the embedded price, for pipeline that starts in month six.

How it works

You are buying my time, my judgement and my network, not a process with a name on it.

• A dedicated hiring partner inside your tools and your process.
• Every search run by me. No juniors, nothing outsourced, no handover after the sale.
• In your applicant tracking system, your Slack, your weekly hiring meeting.
• A pipeline review every week, so you always see exactly where each search stands.
• Scale up or down at each renewal point as the plan changes.
• You keep everything: the market maps, the pipelines, the intelligence.

If you only need to hire one or two people, that is best done as a single search. I work at 20% of base salary, with no upfront fees. Same market, same person, same network. No retainer and no commitment.

That is not the full list. I cover every commercial role across Sales, Marketing, Product and Delivery. If the role you are hiring is not above, it is still one I run.

Across those companies I have placed Account Executives, Solution Engineers, Solution Architects, SDRs, Sales Managers, Product Marketing, a Director of Demand Generation, VP Sales, VP Marketing, VP Financial Services and a CRO, among others.

One of them has had seven of those searches open with me at the same time, across the US and EMEA.

The AI market redraws itself constantly. To stay on top of it I map a slice of it every few weeks, publish it, and then email the founders on it to ask whether I placed them correctly. They write back, at length, and often to disagree. What they say is usually more interesting than the map, and none of it is available anywhere else.

Most of it goes out on LinkedIn. The maps are the biggest pieces, built on what the companies on them wrote back when I asked whether I had placed them correctly. Several disagree with me in public, which is the most useful thing that can happen.

Alongside those, shorter notes on who is hiring, which roles are moving, and what I am seeing across the AI stack week to week.

Follow along on LinkedIn →