How recruiters work
What follows it Chapter 8 in A Career Breakdown Kit (2026).
Like a lot of the chapters it's both too long and not long enough.
Too long because who wants to read 9 pages of navel gazing on the recruitment industry.
Not long enough because one of the most helpful things you can do at the start of a job search is to understand what you are dealing with, and the rules of the game. So this might have provided even more detail to cover the specific categories of recruiters you might build relationships with.
I've tried to find a balance that makes you think differently.
When you see the word 'recruiter' you might have an expectation of how they'll help you, but that word and it's brothers and sisters can be so wide ranging as to mean nothing.
It's regrettable that I often get replies from job seekers that show annoyance that I can't help them directly. "Did you look at my profile - it's what you do?" sort of thing.
So this may be a valuable read in showing what candidates are for recruiters, the different ways in which we work, how we are often held back by the system we work in, and how this might inform your strategy.
And if you still have questions, you can join me and Simon Ward on Tuesday 24th at 1pm GMT for our LinkedIn Live on this subject. I'll include the link here on this article when it's ready.
8 - How recruiters work
This chapter illustrates standard recruiter working practices and why they lead to some of the experiences commonly talked about among job seekers. This is about managing your expectations, by lifting the curtain on recruitment.
I’ll use broad terms where applicable and a steer on how others may use more obscure terminology.
What a candidate is
If you jump on any recruiter website, I’m pretty sure the vast majority will say something along these lines:
‘We’re disrupting the market with better candidate experience.’ As well as a lot of promises of being different in a way that looks much the same as everyone else.
And yet your experiences will differ wildly.
Part of this may be generic marketing.
Based on many discussions with fellow recruiters, my belief is that the industry definition is different to a job seeker’s definition.
Many hiring processes see candidates as an employable person being considered for a job.
I use this terminology myself. For example, a job advert may have 99 applications, while only 5 are potential candidates - because they meet the criteria of the role and the remaining applicants don’t.
The nuance of this definition is that the more cynical the process, the worse the memory retention of which candidates were assessed.
Some companies may have seen you as a candidate at 2nd stage interview, then completely forget about you if they’ve discounted you from the process - you are no longer a candidate.
Using this definition, many recruiters think they give a first class of candidate experience because they only relate it to the people they think of as candidates.
This is equally true of someone who treats everyone decently and those who only treat people they place into jobs decently.
On the other hand, pretty much anyone who looks at new employment sees themselves as a candidate for that employment.
Assuming you are accountable, you wouldn’t apply for any job you didn’t see yourself as suitable for.
Even if you chose not to apply, it’s not necessarily because you didn’t see yourself as a candidate. It may be that even though you are a suitable candidate for that vacancy, your experience of the process made you choose to step away - which might be as simple as not liking the advert or email you read.
This last point relates to the phenomenon of candidate resentment (p89).
There’s another industry nuance to the candidate definition.
In the same way you may have heard about the hidden jobs market, recruiters talk about the passive candidate market:
‘80% of candidates aren’t looking for a job, and these are the best candidates.’
Not my words, btw. A passive opportunity (p160) explores why this happens and how you can use the same principles to improve your odds.
If you think it odd that I’ve started ‘How recruiters work’ with a discussion on candidates, it’s because our relationship with our candidates is a sign of how we work with employers.
Without placing candidates in one form or another, most recruiters wouldn’t make any money. It is deeply integrated into how we work.
Different agency recruitment models
Typically, agency fees come from the successful placement of staff irrespective of the nature of work.
The fee is often a percentage of salary and in most situations is budgeted separately from the new employee's pay.
The overall steps recruiters often work to are these:
- Receive job description from employer
- Advertise job (on a job board or through outreach like DMs and calls)
- Find and submit qualified candidates
- Arrange interviews
- Coordinate offer process
The differentiators are the quality of information at each step and how rigorously they are executed.
For example, my requirement for recruiting a vacancy is a full consultation on the company, vacancy, context and culture, which I summarise in writing in a detailed candidate pack. Where there are issues, I advise the employer on how we can overcome them.
There are variations around this type of process.
Some agencies may rely more on a video presentation, others may ‘sell in’ candidates.
Some agencies will use psychometrics or other types of assessments.
Some will meet all candidates, some won't even talk to them.
The general steps have a lot of crossovers.
Contingency
The most popular recruitment model is akin to 'no win, no fee'.
In the UK, it’s estimated that the average fill rate is between 20% and 33%. This is a range from several sources, although it’s next to impossible to pinpoint accurately.
At the lower end, for every vacancy filled, that recruiter won’t fill four vacancies. Therefore, their fee implicitly accounts for unfulfilled work.
The reason it’s low is that most vacancies provided to recruiters are given on a ‘multi-agency’ basis and even in competition with the employer themselves.
A lot of contingency recruitment is first past the post, in that a submitted CV is seen to be owned by the agency which submitted it first.
Let’s say Joe Recruiter has to fill 3 vacancies a month to hit target.
At a 20% fill rate, he works on 15 vacancies a month. You can see how this might impact quality of service if there are multiple different candidates for each role. And if the race is on to get CVs over as quickly as possible.
This can result bad behaviours like refusing to divulge company information (for fear of divulging competitor secrets) to trying to find out who you are interviewing with (which may be to use them as leads). And classics like ghosting and poor responsiveness.
It isn’t necessarily the case. There are some great contingency recruiters out there who work closely with employers, often with exclusivity.
When I was a pure contingency recruiter, my fill rate varied between 50% and 70% annually. It’s higher consistently now, though I don’t work contingently anymore.
Other models
The traditional counterpoint to contingency is retained where we receive a portion of a fee up front to service a vacancy. This requires exclusivity and better access to hiring information.
Retained isn’t intrinsically better than contingency - both have their issues, challenges and opportunities.
It can lead to mutual obligation from the employer while allowing a more quality focused approach to candidate work, resulting in a better experience for everyone.
A different approach is RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) whereby a third party manages recruitment for the employer.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen other models come through, from subscription types (bizarrely called Recruitment as a Service), to embedded / insourced / fractional (acting as an in-house recruitment function as a third party) to Uber-style apps.
Different types of agency recruiter
There are as many types of agency recruiter as there are recruitment models.
What complicates matters is that as an industry we sometimes try to hide what we do by clever names.
Am I a boutique headhunter or am I a recruiter? Or a Talent Ecosystem Intelligence Officer?
I’m proud to be a recruiter who wears my process on my sleeve.
Whatever we term ourselves the nature of an agency will inform whether they might help you:
Temps / interim
Where you sign up for temporary work on an hourly or daily rate employed through a contract for service.
While Interim recruitment also relates to temporary projects it is quite different. Interims have a skills set a traditional employee doesn’t have. They provide a service through their limited company, held outside of IR35 (off-payroll working regulations).
The agency will make money on a margin / markup based on your pay.
Permanent
An agency that works mainly on permanent vacancies typically paid on filling a job, by the employer.
Many agencies offer both.
Specialist
These are typically recruitment agencies that specialise in a domain. This could be a broad industry like manufacturing or professional services, or a market vertical like marketing or HR.
It doesn’t necessarily mean they have specialist knowledge of the roles they recruit, although this can be the case. It means more that they regularly recruit a specific type of role.
Generalist
These won’t have one specialty and may work closer with certain employers across a variety of vacancies. They might be pure scattergun.
You may find them excellent for the one vacancy you are in discussion for, yet that’s the only time they’ll have something for you.
Headhunter
This can mean many things.
The idea is that headhunters access passive candidates who don’t apply for jobs. Although many use the same tools other recruiters do.
Some won’t advertise at all. Others might advertise alongside other activities.
The crux of the message for employers is that they have a capability beyond what employers can achieve themselves, which can be true.
Executive Search
Typically, this works on a retained basis for board level appointments. It’s rare to see these roles advertised.
They use many of the same proactive channels others do and may cultivate a specific network of contacts who are go-to candidates. Some are so niche they may not go outside of their network.
And many more
It doesn’t matter so much how a recruiter works, more that they can be a conduit to your next job.
Two points come from the sections above:
1/ that candidate experience is hard to deliver consistently when dealing with the volume of vacancies you see in a contingency model, and takes intent in other models,
2/ that agencies are paid to fill jobs, not explicitly to help find people jobs.
That second point can cause much frustration if you assume it’s the job of a recruiter to help you find a role, especially when our marketing talks about how we help candidates.
Recruitment is often a short-term business. It’s rare that you’ll see recruiters cultivate long-term relationships with job seekers if they can’t help you directly.
This is ironic, considering many job seekers will reciprocate the help they’ve received with people they’ve built trust with. Doubly ironic, when it’s someone with hiring authority that gets radio silence from previous suppliers.
It’s common to hear of job seekers blacklisting agencies for poor service - frustrating, demoralising and occasionally crushing to be on the end of bad experience.
Don’t let a bad process get in the way of what might be good employment.
This is as true at the employer end as with agencies.
With agencies, the onus is often on winning the next vacancy, rather than giving service to people who may or may not be candidates. Their client may not even know how those agencies work with candidates.
These same agencies may have further vacancies you could be seen as a good candidate for with different employers.
At the same time, many hiring managers have never been trained on recruitment or interviewing, while being busy at work. This can lead to a poor experience as a candidate compared with what they would be like to work with.
The internal recruiter
These are recruiters employed directly by the employer to fulfil their recruitment. Often these are called Talent Acquisition Managers, Internal Recruiter, or Recruitment Manager.
More than filling vacancies, they manage the system of recruitment. There are many specialist domains within talent acquisition including workforce planning, retention, enablement, marketing and branding.
It’s a field that is overwhelmed by a large number of redundancies and where internal recruiters are often overburdened.
When working on vacancies, the priority is to fill them. This can lead to frustration if you ask corporate recruiters, ‘Do you have any jobs I might be suitable for?’
Whether or not there is an argument that they could help you, it’s more effective to do the work yourself. Research the business areas they recruit for and ask directly ‘could you tell me who is the best contact for <your field>‘ or ‘when are you likely to recruit for these roles?’
Help them help you.
Takeaways
There’s much to talk about on this subject and I’ve no doubt I’ve missed glaringly obvious topics. Equally, it’s easy to oversimplify what is a huge and complex industry.
It’s worth learning the rules of the recruitment game when you can. Be curious and ask questions.
While we should be criticised for poor behaviour, if you don’t understand why a recruiter works in a certain way, please don’t assume it’s for bad reason.
Recruitment is a stressful job at the best of times. This can lead to thick skin and callous behaviour. It’s not an excuse, more a symptom of the system we all work in.
