Should I use a recruitment agency or hire myself in Nigeria?

It helps to be precise about what you are buying. A recruitment agency takes your brief, searches its own database and network, approaches people who are not applying to anything, screens them against what you said you wanted, and hands you a shortlist of three to six people to interview. The good ones will push back on a vague brief and tell you when your salary band does not match the market you are describing. That challenge is often worth as much as the candidates.

What they do not do is run your hiring. You still interview. You still decide. You still onboard. The agency's work ends somewhere around the offer, and the process it used to get there stays with the agency.

On price, contingency agencies in Nigeria are commonly paid a percentage of the hire's first-year salary, billed only when someone actually starts. Executive and retained searches are structured differently, usually with part of the fee paid upfront. The percentage varies by agency, role and how hard the search is, so treat any figure you read online as a starting point for a negotiation rather than a rate card. Ask two things in the first conversation: what triggers the invoice, and what happens if the person leaves in month two.

That second question matters more than people expect. Most agencies offer a replacement guarantee, and most guarantees are short. If a hire fails in month four or five, which is when culture and capability mismatches usually surface, the guarantee has typically expired and you pay again.

There are searches where doing it yourself is not stubbornness, it is a mistake. If you are replacing a finance director who does not yet know they are being replaced, you cannot post that job. Confidentiality is a real service and you cannot provide it to yourself.

The same applies when the people you want are not looking. A senior backend engineer with eight years of payments experience is employed, comfortable, and ignoring job ads. Reaching that person takes a warm introduction or a persistent recruiter who has been talking to them for two years. Posting a job and waiting will produce a pile of applications from people who are not that person.

Agencies also earn their keep when you are hiring into a market you do not know. A Lagos company opening in Abuja or Port Harcourt, or hiring its first person outside Nigeria entirely, is guessing at salary bands, notice-period norms and where candidates actually look. Someone who works that market daily will save you a full hiring cycle of learning.

And there is the honest bandwidth case. If the role is open, the pressure is on, and nobody on your team has ten free hours this month, an agency converts a problem you cannot solve into an invoice you can pay. That is a legitimate trade.

The structural issue with contingency recruitment is that the agency is paid for a placement, not for a good hire. Those two things overlap most of the time, but not all of the time, and the gap always opens in the same direction. A candidate who is available now beats a better candidate who needs three weeks. A shortlist arrives before the search is really finished because a competing agency is also working the role. None of this requires anyone to behave badly. It is what the incentive rewards.

You also learn nothing about your own market. After an agency hire you know one person's name. After a search you ran yourself, you know what your salary band actually attracts, which channels produced serious applicants, which of your requirements quietly halved your pool, and you have twelve near-miss candidates you can call the next time you open a similar role. That knowledge compounds. The invoice does not.

Then there is the part people forget when they imagine outsourcing the pain away: you still interview. The shortlist is the middle of the process, not the end. You still write the brief, block the calendar time, run the conversations, chase references, negotiate, and onboard. An agency removes the sourcing and the first screen. It does not remove the judgment call, and the judgment call is where a bad hire is usually made.

Finally, most Nigerian roles are simply not scarce. For a customer support lead, an operations manager, a sales rep, a finance analyst or almost any junior role in Lagos, the problem is not finding candidates. Post the job on Jobberman or MyJobMag and you will have two hundred applications by Friday. Paying a percentage of first-year salary to solve an abundance problem is the wrong tool.

Most people who hire an agency are not really buying a network. They are buying an escape from two hundred CVs and the guilt of leaving applicants unanswered for three weeks. That is a volume problem, and volume problems have cheaper answers than a percentage of salary.

Running it yourself well means three things. Write down what the hire must achieve in the first year before you write the job ad, so every stage is measured against something. Ask every applicant the same structured questions, so you are comparing answers rather than the confidence of CV formatting. And use something that does the reading and the note-taking for you, so your attention goes to the ten people worth a conversation instead of the first thirty in the inbox.

Tezera is one option for that middle path. It analyses every application against the outcomes you defined, runs role-specific AI-scored assessments so you see what candidates do rather than what they claim, and sits in on your interviews to capture the transcript and the notes. You keep the decision and the market knowledge. The limitation is real and worth stating plainly: Tezera does not source for you. It has no candidate database and no recruiter making calls, so you still have to attract applicants through job boards, your own network and your channels. If your problem is that the right people are not applying at all, a recruiter's network is the thing that solves it and no software will substitute.

Run the role through these. If most of your answers point one way, you have your decision. If they split, the usual resolution is to run it yourself first and brief an agency only if four weeks produce nothing.

• Can you describe what this person must achieve in twelve months? If not, an agency will only sell your vagueness back to you as a shortlist. Fix the brief first, whoever runs the search.
• Will posting the job produce enough serious applicants? For most operational, sales, admin and junior roles in Nigeria the answer is yes, and an agency is buying you nothing you cannot get.
• Do the people you want read job ads? Senior specialists, rare technical skills and leadership hires usually do not. That is a network problem, and networks are what agencies sell.
• Does the search have to be quiet? Replacing someone who still holds the job is not a do-it-yourself search.
• Do you know this market? Hiring in a new city, a new country or a function nobody on your team has managed is worth paying to shortcut.
• Will you hire this role again? If yes, running it yourself once buys you a process, a salary benchmark and a candidate list you keep.

The same question, phrased the other ways people ask it. Every one of them lands on this page.

• Is a recruitment agency worth it in Nigeria?
• Should I hire a recruiter or do it in-house?
• When should a small business use a recruitment agency?
• How much do recruitment agencies charge in Nigeria?

• →Tezera vs external recruiters
• →How much does it cost to hire an employee in Nigeria?
• →How do I screen hundreds of job applications quickly?
• →Hiring an account executive in Lagos

Everything else we have written like this sits on the answers index.