Recruiting has always been all or nothing. We built the middle ground.
Full outsourcing or full in-house. That has been the only choice for years. Bridgebees was built because the right answer is almost always somewhere in between... and no one had built that product yet.
For most of recruiting's history, internal TA teams have had two options: do everything themselves, or hand it to an agency. The decision has always been presented as binary. You either own the process or you outsource it.
Why the binary exists
The all-or-nothing structure of recruiting is not accidental. It reflects how the industry built its business models.
Agencies make money from placement fees (a percentage of salary paid when a hire is made). That model requires them to own the process end to end: sourcing, screening, shortlisting, presenting. You cannot charge a placement fee if you only did one part of the work.
Internal TA, on the other hand, was built to own the entire process in-house. The tools, ATS systems, job boards, LinkedIn recruiter, are designed for teams running the full cycle. None of them are designed to let you hand off a specific piece and stay in control of the rest.
What the middle ground looks like in practice
The middle ground is not a single thing. It is the ability to decide, for each role and each moment, how much support you need and for which part of the process.. on demand.
Sometimes that means uploading your pipeline and asking Bridgebees screeners to rank the top five. Sometimes it means requesting a single screening on one candidate you are uncertain about. Sometimes it means sourcing from the Bridgebees network when your usual channels are thin, without committing to a full agency engagement.
The common thread is that you stay in control. You decide which pieces to outsource and which to keep. You see the work that was done. You own the final decision.
Why it took this long
The infrastructure for a middle-ground product requires trust from both sides. Employers need to trust that the screeners are doing real, consistent work. Candidates need to trust that the network they are in is not going to expose them to agencies or spam.
Building that trust takes time and deliberate choices: a verification process for employers, structural exclusion of agencies, trained and certified screeners rather than crowd-sourced assessors. These are not features you can ship in a weekend.
The other reason is incentives. The all-or-nothing model is very profitable for agencies. Building a product that competes with part of what they do, without being a full-service agency, is not a business model that traditional recruiting companies were motivated to pursue.
The bet we are making
Internal TA Teams know their companies. They understand the culture. They have the context that an external recruiter can only approximate in early days.
What they lack is capacity and specific infrastructure for specific moments. Bridgebees is built to fill those gaps, not replace the team, not take over the hire, but make the hard parts easier and the expensive parts more transparent.
That is the middle ground. It has always existed in theory. We are building it in practice.
See Bridgebees in action.
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