Permanent Recruitment in Bulgaria

Permanent recruitment means we find and assess the people, and you employ them. The contract is between the candidate and your company, on your payroll, with your benefits. We are paid once, when the person starts, and we step out of the relationship after that — apart from the guarantee period described below.

Who this suits

This model fits when the role is a permanent part of how your company works, and when you can already employ someone in Bulgaria. Concretely:

• You have a legal entity in Bulgaria, or you are in the process of registering one.
• The role is ongoing rather than a project with an end date on it.
• You want the person fully inside the company — your systems, your equity, your career track, your line management.
• You are filling one to five roles over the next quarter, not standing up a team of twenty at once.
• The headcount is approved and the salary band is agreed internally before we start.

If several of those are not true yet — no entity here, headcount that moves quarter to quarter, a market you are still testing — the outsourced teams model is usually cheaper and faster to start. We will say so in the first conversation rather than sell you the more expensive option.

What the process actually looks like

1. Intake call. Forty-five to sixty minutes with the person the hire will report to, not only with HR. We ask what the team is missing, what the manager has rejected candidates for in the past, and the full salary band including the top of it. If the brief cannot be filled at that budget in this market, you hear it on that call. We write the brief up and you approve it before anything goes out.

2. Market read. Before we approach anyone we check how many people in Bulgaria plausibly match, what they are paid now, and who else is hiring the same profile. For narrow IT staffing briefs in Bulgaria the answer is sometimes forty people, most of whom are employed and not looking. That number changes both the strategy and the timeline, so we give it to you in writing.

3. Sourcing. A mix of direct approach, our own network in the Sofia market, and advertising where advertising works. For senior engineering roles almost the whole pipeline comes from direct outreach; for office, finance and customer support roles advertised applications carry more weight. We do not post your role publicly without asking you first.

4. Screening. Every candidate we put forward has had a structured conversation with us — motivation, notice period, salary expectation stated as a number, language level tested in the language itself, and the specific technical or functional ground the brief calls for. We reject most of the people we speak to.

5. Shortlist. You get a small number of candidates with a written note on each: why they fit, where they are weaker, what they want to be paid, when they could start, and what would make them say no. We send fewer people and tell you why each one is on the list. If the market cannot support a full shortlist at your band, we send what we have and explain the gap instead of padding it.

6. Your interviews. We schedule, brief the candidate on who they are meeting, and collect feedback within a day of each round. If your process is slow the good candidates drop out of it — we will push you on this, politely and repeatedly.

7. Offer and close. We run the salary conversation, test the offer against what the candidate has told us privately, and manage the counter-offer from their current employer, which is the single most common reason a signed candidate never turns up on day one.

8. Start and follow-up. We check in with both sides during the first weeks and again later in the guarantee period. Most problems that end in an early resignation are visible well before the resignation.

What you have to do

The parts of this that only you can do:

• One person on your side who owns the decision and can be reached.
• Interview feedback within two working days of each round, detailed enough to act on.
• Interview slots booked in advance rather than found week by week.
• An offer decision made in days, not weeks, once the final round is done.
• A salary band you are willing to defend, and a straight answer when the market says it is too low.

How long it takes

Time to hire depends far more on how scarce the profile is and how fast your interview process moves than on how hard we work. A well-defined office or support role in Sofia with a responsive hiring manager moves quickly. A senior specialist in a thin part of the market — a particular framework, a particular domain, a language requirement on top — takes considerably longer, and the honest range is wide.

Confirm the actual figure: replace this with your own average time from signed brief to accepted offer, and the range you have actually seen, split by role type. A real number you can stand behind is worth more than a promise every agency makes.

If the hire leaves early

Every placement carries a guarantee period. If the person resigns or is dismissed for cause inside it, we replace them and you do not pay a second fee for the same seat. The replacement search starts on the same brief unless you want it changed.

Confirm the actual figure: state your guarantee length here and exactly what it covers — a free replacement, a pro-rated refund, or the client choosing between the two — and what voids it, such as redundancy or a substantial change to the role after the hire.

How the fee works

One fee per hire, invoiced when the person starts. It is calculated as a percentage of the agreed first-year gross salary, so a more senior hire costs more. There is no charge for the intake call, for the market read, or for a search that does not produce a hire you want to make.

Confirm the actual figure: your percentage, whether it varies by seniority or role type, your payment terms, and whether the percentage applies to base salary only or to base plus guaranteed bonus.

What we recruit for

Two areas, deliberately. The first is technology: software engineers, QA, DevOps, data, and the leads and managers above them — which is most of what companies mean when they say they want to hire developers in Bulgaria. The second is the commercial and back-office side: finance and accounting, office and operations administration, and multilingual customer support.

We work with Bulgarian companies hiring locally and with companies elsewhere in the EU — Germany, the Netherlands, the Nordics and the UK — building teams here. As a recruitment agency in Bulgaria most of our work sits in Sofia, but fully remote roles across the country are normal now and we recruit for them the same way.