Recruitment Agencies

These are the people you hire when a vacancy needs filling and you don't have the time, network or internal capacity to fill it yourself. A recruitment agency takes your job brief, works out where the right candidates actually are — often people not applying anywhere, just doing their current job well — and runs the sourcing, screening and shortlisting so you only see people worth interviewing. Depending on the engagement, they'll also handle reference checks, salary negotiation, and stay involved until the person has started, sometimes through a guarantee period after. Some run this for a single senior hire; others embed a team inside your business and run the whole hiring pipeline for months at a time.

You end up looking for one of these firms when a role has been open too long, when your own team keeps getting outbid or ghosted by candidates, or when you're hiring for a skill set nobody in-house has the network to find — a niche engineering specialty, a country you don't operate in yet, or a senior leadership hire where getting it wrong is expensive. It's also common when hiring volume spikes faster than your internal recruiters can handle — a new office, a funding round, a product launch — and the choice becomes outsource the extra load or watch the backlog grow.

The main split is in how they're paid and how exclusive the arrangement is. Contingency recruiters only get paid if they place someone, which means they'll often work the same brief for several clients at once and move fast on volume; retained search firms take an upfront fee for exclusive focus on your role, which suits senior or hard-to-fill positions where thoroughness matters more than speed. RPO providers go further and take over recruiting as an ongoing function, running requisitions and reporting rather than filling one role at a time.

Beyond that, compare firms on where they actually specialise — by function, by seniority, or by geography — because a generalist covering everything rarely has deep networks in a narrow field. Ask about guarantee terms if a placement doesn't work out, typical time-to-shortlist, and whether they source candidates directly or just post your role and filter inbound applications; that difference shows up fast once you see who they put in front of you.