Why should I pay a recruiter instead of searching myself?

Well it can come down to a few factors really. It depends on your position and remit. If your going to use a job board it will cost you money for a subscription. How many times are you going to use the job board? Is the cost of the job board/vacancies in your company on a yearly basis worth the spend? How quickly do you need the person?

If its not mission critical and you can afford to wait for someone to put their CV up then I would personally go for it. Most recruitment these days are not done through job boards, the databases are bereft of good candidates. The best recruiters go out and headhunt thats where we make are money, we make very little from using job adverts and databases as the competition for the candidates on databases is insane.

I would say it would be cheaper to get your company website and brand out there so people come to your website and apply. Very little cost, hire a decent SEO to get you up on the Google results and increase the traffic to your website.

Where recruiters add benefit is through speed, and expertise. We get a brief, we sift out the bad candidates we make all the phone calls, set up the interviews, do all the paperwork and make sure they are screened and checked for you. Saving you time to do your job rather than wasting time sifting through 100's of CV's.

I work with companies with Internal Recruitment Teams with 20-30 recruiters and they still use me to recruit. Why? Because they don't have the database, resources or same drive as we do to find the candidates.

I would say look at the costs of doing it yourself, factoring in the cost of your time to do it, rather than doing other parts of your job which are more valuable. Then look at how much it would have cost you to use a recruiter. Do it by a role by role basis, when you get a really tough vacancy get a recruiter in, negotiate the rate until they cry. Then get them to do the hard work.