Startup Recruiters and Staffing Specialists

IT Staffing Specialists

Your startup recruitment specialists

Nexus IT Group is your trusted recruiting partner for startup technology professionals, connecting early-stage and growth-stage companies with tech talent committed to driving innovation and building transformative products. As a staffing company focused on the startup ecosystem, we have extensive networks of software engineers, product managers, full-stack developers, and DevOps specialists who can help you scale your team, accelerate product development, and achieve your growth milestones. This is critical because the top startup technology professionals aren’t actively looking for a job–in fact, they’re contacted so frequently by headhunters they’ve shut down the most common ways to get opportunities in front of them.

Startup technology professionals are in high demand

In today’s world, startups are a transformative force for innovation and technological advancement. From the engineering teams you build to develop your MVP to your data infrastructure and go-to-market technology stack, startup tech capabilities are becoming essential to achieving product-market fit, securing funding, and scaling efficiently. Equally important is building with speed, maintaining code quality, and navigating the unique challenges of resource constraints and rapid pivots. Our recruiting teams’ acumen and understanding of the startup ecosystem let us balance all of these demands to bring early-stage companies the right employees for their needs. We can identify top talent at all levels, including executive search as well as individual contributors like front-end engineers, backend developers, data engineers, and cloud architects. The staffing services we provide at Nexus can help you build a world-class startup tech team, giving you the competitive edge to attract investors, ship products faster, and scale your organization.

Solving startup hiring challenges

Whether you’re a hiring manager with a set of difficult startup roles to fill or a technology professional considering joining a high-growth startup, we would love to chat about your needs and how our team of startup recruiters can serve as partners in your search. The startup sector is evolving rapidly, and having an experienced professional on your side can help you successfully navigate this changing landscape. Even if you just want some insights into how our recruiters help connect talent with startup opportunities, we hope you’ll reach out to our search firm so we can share our expertise and help your organization or career continue to move forward.

Clients

Join the many companies that staff their roles with our startup talent

Our startup case studies

WHY WORK WITH NEXUS

Nexus IT Group will quickly staff your open startup roles with high-quality committed candidates

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81%

of our successful candidates are submitted within one week

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92%

of our candidates will accept your offer

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96%

of our candidates are employed with your firm after 12 months

SERVICES

We offer a range of services to meet your recruiting needs

Executive Search (Retained)

We excel in placing top IT executives, including CIOs, CTOs, VPs, and other C-suite technology leaders at premier companies across the United States. Our retained executive search services have earned us recognition as a leading IT executive search firm, delivering an impressive 96% candidate retention rate through our rigorous and time-tested recruitment process. We specialize in building best-in-class IT leadership teams and providing executive succession planning for some of the world's fastest-growing brands, covering roles from Chief Information Officers to VPs of Digital Marketing, Infrastructure, and Security. Our commitment to investing in people has developed into recruitment solutions that propel organizations toward greatness, consistently outperforming other contingency search firms in both speed and accuracy. With expertise across the full spectrum of senior technology positions, we help companies secure transformative leaders who can drive their technological vision and success.

Direct Hire

We deliver direct hire IT recruitment solutions that succeed where traditional recruitment methods fail in today's market, where tech professionals are overwhelmed by generic outreach and ineffective cold calls. Our dedicated focus on the tech space has built an extensive network with immediate access to passive IT talent, setting us apart from conventional recruitment approaches that typically yield low response rates and can potentially damage employer brands. Our tech-enabled, iron-clad process delivers a shortlist of battle-tested, hire-ready professionals within just 4 days of receiving a requirement, understanding the urgency of tech hiring needs. We've developed a unique outreach approach, praised by candidates for standing out from decades of traditional recruitment methods, which helps prevent rejected offers and last-minute back-outs while maintaining our position as one of the top direct hire IT search firms in the US. Whether you need to scale your tech team quickly or find that rare "purple squirrel," our proven approach combines deep market knowledge with quick "text message" level access to IT talent, ensuring successful placements in both public and private sectors.

Contract Staffing

We provide contract-to-hire IT staffing solutions, serving as both the dedicated recruiter and W2 employer during the contract period to eliminate co-employment risks for our clients. Our expert tech recruiters employ a multi-touch system to find and evaluate the best candidates, engaging in detailed discussions about project scope, culture fit, and growth opportunities, maintaining our exceptional 94.3% quality of hire ratio. We handle all aspects of the process, from initial recruitment to unemployment obligations, allowing you to terminate the contract without additional fees or convert the employee to full-time after the agreed period. This flexible staffing solution is ideal for companies seeking to grow predictably, manage projects with uncertain durations, or work within current budget constraints while maintaining access to top IT talent. Our contract-to-hire model gives both your company and the IT candidate the perfect opportunity to ensure a lasting, successful fit before making a permanent commitment.

Recruitment as a Service

We offer a simple tiered monthly subscription pricing model for our Recruitment as a Service (RaaS) solution, designed to help growing companies efficiently manage their hiring needs without the burden of internal recruitment. Our service handles all aspects of the top-of-funnel recruitment process, including candidate marketing, curation, vetting, and delivery, while clients focus solely on the final interview and closing stages. We generate and deliver an engaged talent pipeline for specific roles in less than 7 days, providing a scalable solution at a fraction of the traditional recruitment cost. This service is particularly valuable when company growth accelerates and management teams can no longer sustainably handle recruitment responsibilities themselves. By managing the critical initial stages of talent acquisition, we offer an efficient and cost-effective alternative to traditional recruiting methods while delivering a steady stream of qualified candidates.
OUR ROLES

We have filled a variety of startup roles

  • Backend Engineer
  • Chief Technology Officer
  • Data Engineer
  • DevOps Engineer
  • Engineering Manager
  • Frontend Engineer
  • Full-Stack Engineer
  • Head of Product
  • Mobile Engineer
  • Platform Engineer
  • Product Manager
  • Senior Software Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineer
  • Solutions Architect
  • VP of Engineering
Contact us

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Testimonials

What our startup clients have said about working with Nexus IT Group

FAQ

Frequently asked questions about startup recruiting

To nexus IT group, placement is an art—one that requires the proper alignment of talent with opportunity, experience with need, personality with environment, and aspirations with value. The startup sector is a fast-paced, highly competitive recruiting environment that offers big opportunities for tech candidates. Our full-cycle recruiting system is a 51 step touchpoint process from start to finish. Our engagement process starts with a discovery call to understand the needs of the role. With this series of questions, our startup recruiters are able to build a sales cadence that we will use to deploy a multi-touch recruiting cadence precisely and accurately to hundreds of candidates that fit the expectations of the role. Once our targeted search is executed, we spend a series of 3 calls to get to know the candidates’ needs, wants, and future career interests. Once we’ve created a shortlist of qualified and fully vetted candidates, we will deliver our top 2 to 3 candidates to the startup hiring manager. Once the interview process starts, we work with the candidate and the hiring team to make sure communication is responsive and transparent. Once a candidate is placed, we stay in touch with the placed candidate for 2 years just to see how things are going.

Our candidate sourcing can be described in 3 words: Identify. Engage. Toolstack. Typically, the best job prospects are those who are passive. This indicates that they are not actively seeking employment. As a result, they are not surfing the Internet in search of online job postings. And because they are not viewing online job postings, we have developed a robust and 100% outbound recruiting strategy. We begin our sourcing strategy by creating a candidate persona. Once we have successfully created the candidate persona, we will then create a content strategy that will attract top talent in the startup space. Once we’ve developed our cadence, we will use a number of sources to scour the web to get our message in front of the right candidates. Strategies include searching our database, sourcing for referrals, sourcing from specific organizations, LinkedIn, Meetup, Angel List, Dice, alumni boards, GitHub, and many other niche tech community sites. We craft highly personalized messages that drive above industry reply rates. Our recruiting strategy is to begin conversations with passive candidates to learn about their future career interests, needs, and wants and align those needs with future openings with a high-touch approach.

Quality of Hire is very important for nexus IT group and our startup recruiting team. Currently our startup recruiters hold a 96.08% quality of hire ratio. This is measured by any contractor who successfully completes their contract, and/or a direct placement candidate who is at our client for at least 6 months of duration.

Currently our 1 year retention rate with our startup clients is running right at 96.2%.

The startup hiring space is fast-paced, so our team of startup recruiters are trained to work swiftly. The time required to send qualified candidates to the startup hiring manager varies on the position you are seeking to fill and the challenges we will face such as lower than market compensation, equity concerns, slow feedback, onsite expectations, etc. We can deliver applicants on the day of contract signing, within a few days, or within a few weeks.

We’ve spent a great deal of time in early-stage recruiting and have had the distinct pleasure of collaborating with a number of amazing VCs and founders. From our perspective, the Musks of the world represent the future of technology, and we are major believers and investors in technology because, of course, it is the future. The startup revolution is particularly exciting as we help companies build teams that are shaping the next generation of innovative products and services. However, recruiting for Seed and Series A/B early-stage firms presents a distinct set of obstacles.

Startup recruiters specialize in a specific market sector. Every day, our startup recruiters contact a specialized set of tech candidates who thrive in fast-paced, high-growth environments. When starting a new search, our team has a pool of personally-known candidates to call immediately. The point is that specialized startup recruiters sprint out of the gate more effectively than staffing firms that go back to the drawing board for each search.

When employers receive a resume from a startup recruiting firm, there is a high probability that they are familiar with the individual. Our clients trust that we have thoroughly screened the candidate over a series of multiple conversations, and that they will be worth the hiring manager’s time to interview.

Another benefit of using a specialized startup recruiting firm is you will experience less of a “resume broker” relationship and more of a “sector expert.” We spend countless hours every day conversing with tech prospects and startup employers, making us more “in the know” about the startup space. Startup recruiters can provide insight into the landscape of startup employment, equity compensation, current pay, and the most recent candidate challenges.

Ultimately, startup recruiters have access to a concentrated pool of candidates, resulting in increased efficiency during the hiring process and the ability to establish long-lasting relationships with the industry’s top talent.

Our startup recruiting practice is hyper-focused on clients in the early-stage through growth-stage startup space. Our startup recruiting team has successfully worked with clients ranging from pre-seed startups to Series C+ organizations, as well as venture-backed companies across various tech sectors.

Whether you’re recruiting for Software Engineers, Product Managers, DevOps Engineers, Data Scientists, Full-Stack Developers, or Cloud Architects – our recruiting solutions have you covered. Our hires range from just about anything you can imagine that a startup would need when building a tech team — including leadership roles like CTO, VP of Engineering, Head of Product, and many more—with a niche focus in startup tech staffing.

Our startup recruiters use a series of stages to make sure we minimize candidate fallout during the recruiting cycle. Our recruiters will perform an in-depth conversation where they work to uncover the needs, wants, and desires of their next career move. We ask candidates specific questions about their experience with startup environments, technical skillsets, ability to wear multiple hats, and comfort with ambiguity. If the team feels that there’s a fit, then another person from our team will speak with the candidate. If the 2 nexus reps feel that there’s a good fit, then we ask the candidate to complete a 4 question feedback form so we can better understand if the role is a good or great fit. Once we receive the candidate’s feedback, then we will perform a “Lockdown” conversation where we ask a series of questions around counteroffers, interview stages, target salary expectations, equity expectations, and much more. If this goes well, then we will submit the candidate for client review.

First, it is incredibly difficult for startup hiring managers with little time to receive responses to job ads. Second, an increasing number of professionals do not respond to recruiters, particularly top tech talent. They prefer to hear directly from the CTO or founder, which brings us to the third challenge: recruitment is a full-time, highly specialized profession for which startup hiring managers do not have time.

Our startup recruiting fee is 22% to 25% of the candidate’s first year base salary. We do our best to find a payment structure that works best for your team.

Our startup recruiters are paid by the companies for which they place candidates. Your recruiter does earn a commission if you are hired, but the commission is paid by the company that hires you. Our recruiting fee isn’t taken out of your salary, and it doesn’t lower the salary that you would be offered. Another misconception is that if you are presented by a recruiter, and another candidate is not, that you would be at a disadvantage because you have a fee associated with you getting that role. In our experience, companies are seeking the best person for the job, and they are not concerned about a fee being paid at that point. In fact, candidates that work with recruiters actually tend to make more than those who job hunt alone.

Contact us

Recruit with Nexus IT Group in startup