Proxify alternative — AI-native engineering recruitment for European scale-ups.

The honest answer: Proxify is good at a related but different job. Proxify is optimised for "I need a solid European senior backend engineer, flexible on contract or full-time, and I want a curated platform that delivers a shortlist in a week or two". Its product-market fit is generalist engineering placement, and its matching speed and CEE/Nordic supply are built around that. Recruo is optimised for "I need a full-time senior LLM engineer into my platform team this quarter, and I need structured AI-engineering signals — not generalist coding tests — to separate real production builders from LinkedIn-keyword candidates".

Two structural differences drive the rest. First, Recruo charges a one-time success fee on placement, not an ongoing margin on an engineer's contract rate. On a €85K engineer placed for 2+ years, Recruo costs €12,750 total; a platform with a 35–50% rate margin layers €25K+ per year onto the engagement. That delta vanishes for short contracts or contract-to-hire trial periods, which is exactly when Proxify makes sense and we do not. Second, every Recruo shortlist is reviewed by a human recruiter before you see it, and our AI interview framework was built by AI engineers against production signals — inference tail latency, retrieval chunking tradeoffs, eval methodology on open-ended outputs — not a generic coding test.

Proxify's screening is a curated three-step pipeline: coding test, live technical interview and soft-skills interview, refined against a claimed top-2% acceptance rate. It is a strong process for generalist engineering and produces consistent candidate quality across backend, frontend and mobile. What it is not is AI-native — the rubric targets broad engineering competence rather than production-AI signals, and public documentation does not indicate LLM-specific output evaluation, retrieval-architecture probing, or evals methodology in the flow.

Recruo's screening was built by AI engineers for AI engineers. When you are hiring an LLM engineer, the 12-minute structured AI interview probes production signals generalist screens miss — inference p95 before and after speculative decoding, how you score output quality on open-ended tasks, why you picked X over Y on retrieval chunking, how you catch RAG regressions before they reach users. A human recruiter reviews every transcript before a shortlist reaches you. For non-AI roles, the same structured approach filters unqualified candidates so your team's interview time goes to final-round decisions, not triage. See our AI interview agents vs traditional screening post.

If your hiring pipeline touches EU candidates and includes any AI-assisted evaluation, the EU AI Act's Article 6 + Annex III classify it as high-risk. The Council's March 2026 postponement of high-risk obligations to December 2027 does not change the classification — it only delays the penalty deadline. Enterprise procurement in 2026–2027 will still require documented compliance from vendors. Recruo was built for this: candidate consent before every interview, DPA in every contract, human oversight by design, bias monitoring on outputs, and 5-year audit logs.

Proxify is a Swedish company and GDPR-compliant, with a public privacy policy and DPA framework. As of 2026-Q1, we did not find public EU AI Act compliance documentation at the vendor level for Proxify's screening flow. That is not a criticism — most agencies and platforms do not yet — but if you are buying to get compliance off your plate, confirm the vendor has a roadmap before signing. Our EU AI Act hiring checklist covers the 12-point diligence pattern.

Recruo: 15% of annual salary on placement, one-time. On a €85K senior LLM engineer, that is €12,750. Fixed-fee alternative at $8,000 flat for junior/mid roles. Retained search for VP/Head roles negotiated per engagement. No retainer, no upfront costs, no monthly platform fee. 90-day replacement guarantee. If the first shortlist does not produce a hire we re-run sourcing at no cost; if the second fails we refund the fee.

Proxify: its published pricing points to a subscription-style placement model. For contract engagements, a margin is layered on the engineer's rate — third-party analyses of 2024–2026 Proxify placements consistently report an effective markup in the 35–50% range above engineer take-home. For permanent placements, public guidance and third-party reviews cite a flat fee around £12K–18K depending on seniority. On a €85K engineer engaged for 2+ years through a rate-margin model, cumulative client-side cost sits materially above Recruo's one-time 15%; on a 6-month contract-to-hire pilot where the client wants the option to walk away, Proxify's model is often more sensible.

Choose Proxify when: (1) you are hiring a generalist senior engineer — backend, frontend, mobile, data — where broad competence matters more than AI-native production signals, (2) you want a contract-to-hire pathway with a built-in trial period and the option to convert later, (3) you want a European platform with strong CEE and Nordic supply and are comfortable paying a rate-based margin for a faster match, (4) your engagement horizon is under 9 months.

Proxify's platform speed, vetted CEE/Nordic supply and contract-to-hire flexibility make it a credible tool for those jobs. We would pick it ourselves over a slow in-house search for a generalist backend hire on a tight timeline.

Choose Recruo when: (1) you are hiring full-time (6+ months, typically 2+ years tenure), (2) the role is AI-native — LLM, RAG, evals, agentic AI, ML platform, AI/ML engineer — where generalist coding tests do not separate real production builders from keyword-matched candidates, (3) you need documented EU AI Act compliance posture because you ship into enterprise EU buyers, (4) you prefer one-time success-fee economics over an ongoing rate margin that compounds over a 2-year engagement.

Our 15% one-time fee pays back vs a rate-margin model at roughly month 8–10; after that the delta compounds. On a €85K engineer held for 2 years, the typical total-cost delta runs into the €20–35K range in Recruo's favour. If those numbers matter and the role is AI-native, book a 30-min discovery call and we will scope your brief together.