Agency, marketplace or curated register: which is right for an AI hire?
7 minute read. Updated 2026-08-08.
Match the hiring channel to the role. Use a marketplace for bounded work you can check yourself, an agency when filling several similar roles and you want the process handled, and a curated register for a single hard-to-assess hire where getting it wrong is expensive. A curated register is genuinely smaller and slower; that is the trade for the reasoning it gives you. Most businesses need more than one channel across a year.
Three channels, one real question
An agency, a marketplace and a curated register solve the same underlying problem in different ways: you need someone with AI skills you cannot fully assess yourself, and you need to find them faster than growing the expertise in-house. Each channel makes a different trade between speed, cost, and how much of the assessment work is done for you before a name reaches your desk.
The honest way to choose between them is to ask what you're actually buying in each case, and to be clear-eyed about the weaknesses as well as the strengths, because every one of these three has a real weakness, not just the ones you aren't using.
The case for an agency
A traditional recruitment agency earns its fee by handling volume and paperwork. If you need several similar hires this year, or a permanent role filled at pace with contracts, references and IR35 status sorted along the way, an agency's infrastructure does real work you would otherwise do yourself. They hold a bench, they know the local salary market, and one point of contact is accountable if something goes wrong with the process.
The weakness is incentive. Most agencies are paid on placement, which rewards filling the role over finding the best fit for it, and a generalist recruiter assessing an AI specialist is often working from the same signals you would use yourself, a CV and a screening call, without the domain knowledge to tell a strong candidate from a well-written one. You are frequently still doing the technical filtering; you are just doing it later in the process, after the agency has done the sourcing.
The case for a marketplace
A marketplace platform wins on speed and price transparency. For a well-scoped, bounded piece of work, build this pipeline, fine-tune this model on this dataset, a marketplace can put candidates in front of you within days, at a rate you can see before you commit to a conversation. For work that doesn't need deep organisational context, this is often the fastest and cheapest route to a working result.
The weakness is the one this whole industry exists to point at: a star rating measures whether past clients were happy, which is a different thing from whether the work was any good. A contract with high satisfaction scores can still have shipped a model nobody checked properly. And the pricing pressure on marketplaces pulls rates towards the bottom of the range, which is a poor fit for a role where the failure mode is expensive, a model making decisions about customers, not just slow delivery.
The case for a curated register, and its weakness
A curated register exists for the specific case a marketplace handles badly: a role you cannot assess yourself, where getting it wrong is costly, and where a written account of why each name was ranked where it was matters more than a star average. You get fewer names, but each one comes with reasoning you can read and challenge, rather than a rating you have to take on trust.
The honest weakness is real and worth stating plainly: a curated register is smaller than a marketplace by design, and curation takes time that a marketplace search does not. If you need ten CVs by Friday for a straightforward contract role, a curated register will frustrate you, because it is optimised for judgement over volume. It is the wrong tool for a hire you could safely make from a long list, and there is no point pretending otherwise.
What actually decides it
Three things determine which channel fits: how well you can assess the role yourself, how expensive a wrong hire would be, and how many similar hires you need. A well-scoped, bounded task with a low cost of failure points towards a marketplace. A recurring need for similar permanent roles, where process and paperwork are the bottleneck, points towards an agency.
A single senior or fractional role that you cannot assess alone, feeding a decision that matters, an AI governance lead, someone setting model risk practice, someone who will be trusted with production data, points towards a curated register, because the thing you're buying there is not access to candidates, it's the reasoning behind why this candidate over another. That reasoning is worth more than speed when the wrong hire is the expensive outcome.
Price is part of this too, and it cuts against instinct. Advertised UK contract rates over the six months to August 2026 show a wide spread, £400 at the 10th percentile for artificial intelligence roles broadly against £788 at the 90th. The cheapest name on a marketplace for a senior, hard-to-assess role is not a bargain if the low rate reflects junior supply rather than the specific seniority you need. Advertised figures are not agreed figures either, and that gap widens the further up the range you go, whichever channel you're negotiating through.
A rule of thumb
Use a marketplace for anything you could describe fully in a two-paragraph brief and check the output of yourself. Use an agency when you're filling several similar roles this year and want the process managed for you, accepting that you will still do the technical filtering. Use a curated register when you have one hire to make, cannot assess it alone, and the cost of getting it wrong is higher than the cost of it taking longer to fill.
Most businesses need more than one of these channels over a year, not a single loyalty. The mistake is picking a channel by habit rather than by what this specific hire needs.
What to do about it
- Match the channel to the role, not to what you used last time.
- Use a marketplace for bounded, well-scoped work you can check yourself.
- Use an agency when filling several similar roles and you want process handled for you.
- Use a curated register for a single hard-to-assess role where a wrong hire is costly.
- Don't treat the cheapest advertised rate as a bargain for a senior role; check what it reflects.
- Expect to use more than one of these channels across a year.
Questions people also ask
Is a curated register better than a marketplace for hiring AI specialists?
Better for a specific situation, not in general. A curated register suits a single role you cannot assess yourself, where a wrong hire is costly and the reasoning behind a shortlist matters more than speed. For bounded, well-scoped work you can check the output of yourself, a marketplace will be faster and cheaper, and that is the right trade for that kind of task.
Why not just use an agency for every AI hire?
Agencies are paid on placement, which rewards filling the role rather than finding the strongest fit, and a generalist recruiter often lacks the domain knowledge to separate a strong AI candidate from a well-written CV. Agencies do real work on volume and paperwork, particularly for permanent roles or several similar hires at once, but you're usually still doing the technical filtering yourself, later in the process.
What's the actual weakness of a curated register?
Size and speed. A curated register is deliberately smaller than a marketplace because the shortlist depends on judgement, not search volume, and building that judgement takes longer than running a keyword match. If you need several CVs quickly for a straightforward role, a curated register will feel slow. It's built for the opposite situation: one hire, hard to assess, expensive to get wrong.
Does a low day rate on a marketplace mean I'm getting a bargain?
Not necessarily. Advertised UK contract rates over the six months to August 2026 span £400 at the 10th percentile to £788 at the 90th for artificial intelligence roles broadly, and a rate at the bottom of that range often reflects junior supply rather than the seniority a hard role actually needs. Advertised figures are not agreed figures either, so treat any quoted rate as a starting point, not a fixed price.
Where the figures come from
Every rate and salary quoted in this article is a median or percentile of figures advertised in UK job postings over the six months to 8 August 2026. They are not rates paid, and the gap widens at the top of a range.
- IT Jobs Watch, UK contract rates, 6 months to 8 August 2026, read 2026-08-08.
- IT Jobs Watch, UK permanent salaries, 6 months to 8 August 2026, read 2026-08-08.