HirePort Runs a Recruiter Marketplace Instead of Sourcing Directly

01 /The Concept

The original promise of the marketplace model was disintermediation: cut out the middlemen, connect buyers and sellers directly, reduce friction and cost. HirePort is a data point suggesting that, at least in senior hiring, the model is inverting.

HirePort is a recruiting platform for mid-to-senior hires – lead engineers, sales directors, heads of marketing, and comparable roles. Its defining feature is that it doesn't source candidates itself. Instead, over a hundred independent recruiters and small agencies work inside the platform, monitoring posted roles and submitting candidates from their own pipelines.

Every recruiter is vetted before joining. Upon approval, they fill out a profile specifying the types of candidates they typically work with – by specialization, seniority level, geography, and other criteria. When a company posts a role, the platform notifies all recruiters whose profiles match the position; they then present suitable candidates from their existing relationships.

Companies receive all incoming candidates in a built-in applicant management interface – essentially a lightweight CRM inside the platform – or can integrate HirePort with their existing ATS. The startup claims that 8 in 10 client companies schedule first-round interviews within two weeks of posting, and that overall time-to-hire drops by 70% on average.

Pricing is free for companies hiring one or two people per month; a €99/month subscription covers higher hiring volume. Recruiter fees – which HirePort takes a commission on – are standardized across all recruiters on the platform, set as a percentage of the placed candidate's annual salary. Companies receive a 30-day replacement guarantee. Recruiters are paid on the day a candidate starts.

Founded in the summer of 2021, HirePort has raised €1 million in its most recent round, bringing total investment to $1.6 million. The startup, based in the Netherlands, has stated its ambition to become Europe's leading senior hiring platform.

02 /Why It Matters

HirePort is not alone in this design. Jomigo, a German startup [covered previously](/review/tut-nuzhno-chto-to-novoe), runs a nearly identical model – a marketplace connecting companies with third-party recruiters to fill roles. Jomigo raised €10 million. Visage, [reviewed in 2021](/review/iskusstvennyj-pljus-estestvennyj), operates in the same space but adds an AI layer to the early pipeline stages, automating initial candidate outreach before handing engaged prospects to human recruiters. Visage raised $10.9 million.

The talent shortage driving demand for all three is structural. Qualified senior candidates have become genuinely scarce, and traditional job boards have grown increasingly expensive and ineffective at reaching people who aren't actively looking. The supply of passive candidates – people worth hiring who aren't browsing job postings – sits almost entirely inside recruiter networks, which makes third-party recruiters a distribution channel rather than an overhead cost.

The broader pattern is more interesting than the staffing vertical alone. Marketplaces were built to remove intermediaries from transaction chains. The original model worked well when acquisition costs were low and both sides of the market could be efficiently reached through a digital interface. As marketplace acquisition costs have risen, a countertrend has emerged: re-introducing selective intermediaries who bring supply-side inventory that the marketplace itself can't easily reach.

This dynamic appears across categories. Zarya built a wholesale clothing marketplace where users resell to their personal networks, turning buyers into a distributed sales force. Jobox built a "headless" marketplace for home repair contractors – no customer-facing interface of its own, just APIs distributed to partner websites and SEO operators who each run their own front end while transactions flow through Jobox's platform. Fermat lets influencers open curated storefronts within its marketplace, selling to their own audiences without leaving the platform's commercial infrastructure.

Each of these is a version of the same structural move: the marketplace provides backend infrastructure, intermediaries provide distribution and supply, and the economics are shared rather than contested.

03 /Opportunities

The reintroduction of intermediaries into marketplace models is not a retreat – it's a recognition that cold-start supply aggregation is expensive and that some supply pools are better reached through trusted networks than through direct outreach.

The first path forward is geographic replication: HirePort and Jomigo have demonstrated that recruiter-mediated hiring marketplaces work in Western European markets. The model is portable, and most markets outside the US and UK are underserved by both senior hiring infrastructure and sophisticated recruiter networks that could power it.

The more interesting question is thematic: which other markets currently depend on marketplaces that are struggling with supply-side cost and quality, where introducing vetted intermediaries on the supply side would improve outcomes for both buyers and the platform? The construction labor market, specialized legal services, and fractional executive placement each have characteristics that could support similar architectures.

The question worth answering before building: who already has the supply-side relationships, why would they route their inventory through your platform rather than their own, and what does the fee structure need to look like to make that worthwhile for everyone?