Are there any good software engineering recruitment agencies?

Hello HN users, we need your help :)

Every time we hire new engineers, we face the same problem. We're a specialized software engineering and design agency with a ~20 people team (all of us are engineers or designers). We don't have a dedicated HR team or department due to our size (we handle everything ourselves).

When hiring, we create a blog post announcing what we're looking for, also listed on our careers page. We also publish job offers in the mainstream networks. We often get some candidates, and that's how we managed to hire most of our team, but we're limited to whoever gets to see our job offers.

We have received emails from recruitment agencies who offered their services and promised only to send us the best candidates. Still, the ones we tried so far never made us find a good hire.

The main problem is that they get paid per hire (with pretty high fees). Therefore, they limit themselves to sending you as many candidates as possible, hoping to increase their chances to close a hire and get their payments. But this situation for us translates into having many candidates we still need to review ourselves, many of which are apparent mismatches. Not only because they may not match our technical requirements but often because the profiles they send us don't fit our company culture and philosophy.

We're a fully remote company, and our company is people-first minded. We are a dynamic, remote team of engineers and designers, with people enjoying traveling, gaming, sharing, and doing things together. This philosophy is only sustainable with proactive people motivated to build something together as a team.

We'd love to find a software engineering recruitment agency that values our hiring process. Pre-filtering candidates, perhaps by doing some initial interviews with them. Checking if they could be a good match for the kind of company we are (beyond the candidate's skillset).

That would save us time, an agency whose profiles are people eager to speak with us and know more about us. But we understand this requires spending some time learning who we are, what we do, what kind of clients we have, and understanding the company culture we've built over the years. And we'd be happy to pay high fees if we see there's a proactive interest on their side to pre-filter candidates.

[Optional] If you want to have a little bit more context, we made a blog post about the issues we face and what we're looking for: https://mobilejazz.com/blog/why-recruitment-agencies-never-worked-for-us/

Have you worked with recruitment agencies? Has your experience been similar to ours? Did you find one that tries to understand your company and only brings you candidates who have high chances of being a good fit?

Any tips or recommendations on this?

Thank you!