Why Wouldn't I Just Find And Hire People Myself

Because the seat stays empty while you do it, and the empty seat costs more than the fee you avoided. Running the search in house is genuinely cheaper on the invoice. It is not cheaper on the calendar, and the calendar is where the revenue goes missing. Outstaffer sells the alternative, so treat this as a disclosure of interest rather than neutral advice: our recruitment and employment products exist because that gap is expensive enough to build a business on, and you can sign up and test the claim on one role.

A competitor published the number, and you should read it sceptically

ConnectOS, a Philippines based staffing provider, released its State of Offshoring Report on 1 September 2026. Its own page states that one in three Australian businesses are losing customers or seeing service quality drop because they cannot fill critical roles.

CFOtech reported the detail on 7 September: 32 per cent of employers said they had lost customers, 27 per cent lost or delayed contracts, 26 per cent turned away new business, and 60 per cent took between 30 and 60 days to fill a critical role. The sample was 214 employers and 495 employees.

Now the caveat, because you deserve it. That is a vendor survey, the methodology sits behind an email form, and ConnectOS sells the remedy its own findings point at. So do we.

Does that make the figures useless?

It makes them unaudited, which is different. Take the direction as real and the decimal places as marketing. Nobody who has tried to fill a load bearing role in the last two years thinks 30 to 60 days is implausible.

The arithmetic nobody does before deciding to hire people themselves

Put the published prices side by side, because three of the four are on public pages right now.

Outstaffer publishes Employer of Record from USD $250 per employee per month, which is USD $3,000 across a year. Deel publishes $599 per EOR employee per month, so USD $7,188. Remote publishes $699 per employee per month, so USD $8,388. On one seat, the spread between the cheapest and the dearest of those is USD $5,388 a year, which is the part of this decision most founders actually argue about.

Then put 45 days of an empty seat next to all three.

You know what that role carries. I do not. If it is a client facing seat billing $18,000 a month, a 45 day gap is $27,000 of work that either did not happen or landed on somebody already at capacity. Against that, the entire annual platform fee is a rounding error, and the fee you saved by doing the search yourself bought you nothing except a slower start. That is the trade, stated honestly. It is also why what a seat costs once you add the statutory on costs matters far less than how long the seat is unoccupied.

The strongest argument for finding and hiring people yourself

Founders who hire well themselves usually share three things: a warm candidate pipeline they have maintained for years, a role they can describe precisely, and slack in the current roster so the work does not stall while they search. Where all three are true, an intermediary is a tax on something you are already good at, and you should skip it. The honest counter to this entire post is that the survey above was commissioned by a company selling the cure.

What actually changes the answer

Whether the seat is load bearing. A second designer can wait nine weeks. A sole bookkeeper who resigned in the middle of a quarter cannot, and the difference between an agency placement and an employment arrangement matters most in exactly that case, which is where the two models diverge.

Related reading

• The hidden cost of getting your first offshore hire wrong
• The companies that built offshore capability in H1 are already compounding

Where I land on this

Do the search yourself when the seat can wait. Hand it over when it cannot, and stop pretending the choice is about the fee. It is the smallest number here. Our prices are published so you can run that comparison without a discovery call.

So here is the question I would like answered in the comments. When you last decided to just find and hire people yourself, how long did the seat actually stay empty, and did anyone ever put a figure on it?