RPO in Bulgaria — your recruiter, embedded.
StaffUpNext places one of our senior recruiters inside your team for a fixed period. They work your roles under your employer brand, train your hiring managers as they go, and leave you with a process that outlives the engagement.
When RPO is the right answer
If two or more of these are true, an embedded recruiter usually beats paying an agency per hire.
No in-house recruiter
Hiring lands on managers who already have a day job, and it slips.
No hiring process yet
Your managers interview on instinct — no scorecards, no benchmarks, no view of the market.
Hiring has a deadline
A funding round, a new office, a signed contract that needs a team.
Agency fees are stacking up
Percentages of salary stop making sense past a certain number of hires.
Four steps. No surprises.
- 1
Scoping call
Which roles, what volume, what timeline, and what your hiring process looks like today.
- 2
Embed
One of our recruiters joins your team, your tools and your stand-ups.
- 3
Deliver & train
We run the hiring, and coach your managers through interviewing, market realities and the decisions that go wrong most often.
- 4
Hand back
A documented process, learning materials, a warm pipeline, and a team able to run it without us.
Everything an in-house team would do
- A named senior recruiter — a founder or a long-trusted associate — embedded in your team
- Your ATS, your tooling, your employer brand — not ours
- Sourcing, screening and shortlisting end to end
- Interview scheduling and candidate communication
- Offer construction and negotiation support
- Interview training and structured scorecards for your hiring managers
- Learning materials and hiring playbooks your team keeps
- Guidance on your talent market — where the people are, what they cost, what will not work
- Weekly pipeline reporting against agreed targets
- A documented hiring process you keep at the end
RPO, answered
How is RPO different from using a recruitment agency?
An agency works as an external partner, with no direct access to your systems, and typically charges a percentage of each deal. RPO embeds a recruiter inside your team for a fixed period, working on behalf of your employer brand, for a predictable monthly fee plus a possible bonus on a successfully completed search. Past roughly five hires it is usually the cheaper of the two, and unlike an agency, it leaves your managers better at hiring than it found them.
What does RPO cost in Bulgaria?
It is a retainer plus a monthly management service fee for the length of the engagement, rather than a percentage of each hire. The cost is therefore known in advance and does not rise with the salaries you are hiring at. We quote after a scoping call, once the role count, seniority and timeline are clear.
What happens if our hiring volume drops halfway through?
You are not locked into a headcount you no longer need. We agree a review point in the contract where the scope can be reduced, paused, or redirected onto different roles. Scaling down is a normal part of the model — an engagement that no longer matches your hiring plan helps neither of us.
What is the minimum engagement?
There is no hard minimum, but six months is where this model does its best work. Below that there is time to fill roles and little else; from six months there is time to map your market, build a pipeline that keeps producing, and train your managers so the process still runs after we leave. Shorter engagements are possible — we will tell you honestly what you will and will not get from one.
Who employs the recruiter you embed — do they go on our payroll?
No. The recruiter is ours, employed by or contracted to StaffUpNext, and stays that way for the whole engagement. You contract B2B with us and receive a single invoice for the management fee, so they never touch your payroll, your HR system or your headcount, and you carry none of the employment risk for them. The people they hire for you are a separate matter — those become your own direct employees, which is the whole point of the exercise.
Can we take the embedded recruiter on permanently at the end?
Often, yes — if it suits you and it suits them. Tell us rather than approaching them directly and we will handle it. It is treated as a permanent placement and carries a one-off fee, the same as any other permanent hire we make for you. Nobody is moved against their wishes, and we will say early if the fit is not there.
Can you recruit outside Bulgaria?
Yes. We recruit across Bulgaria, Europe, North America and the Middle East. Our model applies regardless of where the roles sit, though our deepest market knowledge is in the European and Bulgarian markets.
Tell us how many roles.
One scoping call is enough to say whether RPO works out cheaper than agencies for your numbers — and we will tell you if it does not.