How recruiters work

Greg Wyatt • April 3, 2024

I’ll start with some disclaimers and points for consideration:

My knowledge is principally in the UK. I’ve worked as an external recruiter, in-house recruiter, hiring manager, and I’ve looked for work in a downturn.
This post is aimed at giving a little insight into standard working practices, how we work with hiring processes, and why that leads to some of the experiences commonly talked about. It’s about expectation management.
I’ll use broad terms where applicable, and a steer on how others may use more obscure terminology to discuss the same

These are the areas I’ll cover today:

What a candidate is
Different agency recruitment models
Different types of agency recruiter
The internal recruiter
A few takeaways

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 what your experience is will differ wildly.

Part of this may be marketing gumpf.

My belief, based on many discussions with fellow recruiters, is that the industry definition is different to a job seeker’s definition.

The vast majority of 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, while 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 considered.

By this I mean 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 - because 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 consider 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 everyone that considers employment sees themselves as a candidate for employment.

After all, assuming you are accountable, you wouldn’t apply for any job you didn’t see yourself as suitable for.

And even if you chose not to apply, it’s not necessarily because you didn’t see yourself as a candidate. It may be because though you are a great 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.

There’s another industry nuance to the candidate definition.

In the same way you may have heard about the hidden jobs market, so too do we talk about the passive candidate market:

“70% of candidates aren’t looking for a job, and these are the best candidates.”

Not my words, btw.

If you’re interested in reading more on the active vs candidate debate, I’ve written about it on my other newsletter: Your Mileage May Vary.

If you think it strange that I’ve started an article on ‘how recruiters work’ with a discussion on candidates, it’s simply 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, so it is deeply integrated into how we work.

Different agency recruitment models

Typically agencies earn their money through the successful placement of staff, irrespective of the nature of work.

The fee is often derived as a percentage of salary, and in most situations is budgeted for separately from the pay the new employee receives.

The overall steps any recruiter works to are these:

Receive job description from employer
Advertise job (either on a job board or through outreach like emails, calls)
Find and submit qualified candidates
Arrange interviews
Coordinate offer process

The differentiator is 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. This is a simplified version of the first bullet point for me.

There are nuances 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.

But the general steps have a lot of crossover.

In a 100% transactional process, the steps are reliant on the quality of documentation- job description and CV- and leave the candidate and employer to do much of the rest.

Most recruitment processes are somewhere in between (I’m sure some are better than mine too, or do it differently, but this is for illustration).

You can tell a transactional process from public adverts - if an advert looks like a copypasta job description, it’s likely they haven’t qualified the vacancy in detail. Equally it shows in how the agency interacts with you.

How we are paid also has an impact in quality of service.

2.1 Contingency

This is the most popular recruitment model, akin to ‘no win, no fee’ where we only derive income from placements. This might be a percentage of salary or fixed fee.

In the UK it’s estimated that the average fill rate is between 20% and 33%. This is a range from several sources, but next to impossible to pinpoint clearly.

At the lower end, for ease of math, for every vacancy filled, that recruiter won’t fill four vacancies. Therefore their fee implicitly accounts for unfulfilled work.

The reason it’s so 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’ too, in that a submitted CV is seen to be owned by the agency that submitted them first.

As a small exercise - let’s say Joe Recruiter has to fill 3 vacancies a month to hit target. This means he has to work on 15 vacancies a month to achieve the goal. You can see how this might impact quality of service, especially if there are multiple different candidates for each role. And especially if the race is on to get CVs over as quickly as possible.

This can result in some of the bad experiences talked about in recruitment, from refusing to divulge company information (for fear of divulging competitor secrets), to trying to find out who you are interviewing with (which may be so they can use them as leads) to dropping contact if there is nothing they can do for you.

It isn’t necessarily the case, and there are some great contingency recruiters out there, especially those that work more closely with employers, often with exclusivity.

Fwiw, when I was a pure contingency recruiter, early in my career, my fill rate varied between 50 and 70%, annually. It’s higher, consistently, now.

2.2 Other models

The traditional counterpoint to contingency is ‘ retained ’ where we receive a portion of a fee up front to service a vacancy. This also requires exclusivity, and because employers have skin in the game, better access to hiring process information.

I don’t like this term personally, because it can be used to imply one approach is better than the other. That’s not true, neither is inherently better, each with their own issues and challenges, and it is just a fee model.

However, what it can mean, in how it can lead to mutual obligation from the employer while allowing a more qualitative approach to candidate work - this is what can lead to superior service. I.e. the philosophy is what’s important, and a fee model can reflect that.

A different approach is through RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) whereby, like any outsourced arrangement, a 3rd party can manage recruitment for the employer, to different service levels.

Over the past few years we’ve seen other models come through from subscription types (bizarrely called Recruitment As A Service), to embedded/insourced (acting as an in-house talent/recruitment function but as a 3rd party, similar in notion to RPO) to Uber-style apps.

Personally, my approach is try and find employers who benefit from a strategic partnership - any fee is just a consequence, and can take roughly the shape of any of those above.

I think two important points come from the paragraphs above:

a/ that candidate experience is really hard to deliver consistently when dealing with the volume of vacancies you see in a contingency model, and still takes intent in other models

b/ that agencies are paid to fill jobs, not to help find people jobs

That second point can cause so 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 - which comes back to that definition above.

Recruitment is typically quite a short-term business, so it’s rare that you’ll see recruiters cultivate long-term relationships with job seekers, if they can’t help you directly.

Which is ironic, considering many jobseekers 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.

I don’t mind saying that while my goal is to help job seekers, a happy byproduct is the same job seekers occasionally ask for my help recruiting in future, with less of the need to sell my credibility.

Different types of agency recruiter

There’s around as many types of agency recruiter as there are recruitment agencies.

What complicates matters is that as an industry we sometimes try to hide what we do by clever names, some of which may have meaning, some of which are smoke and mirrors.

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 there are broadly a limited number of types of agency:

2.1 Temps/interim Agency

This is where you sign up for temporary work, on an hourly/daily rate employed through a contract for service.

This is typically on-demand recruitment, where the agency will make money through a margin/markup related to your rate.

Interim recruitment is a little different technically, in that interim typically have a skills set a traditional employee wouldn’t have, and provide a service through their limited company that is held outside of IR35.

The agency here will likely have a margin on the daily rate.

2.2 Permanent agency

An agency that works mainly on permanent vacancy, typically paid on filling a job by the employer.

2.3 Specialist recruiter

These are typically recruitment agencies that specialise in a domain. This could be a broad industry like ‘industrial’ or a market vertical like ‘marketing’.

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 on a type of role.

2.4 Generalist recruiter

Typically they don’t have one specialty, but may work closer with certain employers across a variety of vacancies. They might be pure scattergun of course!

2.5 Headhunter

This can mean many things, principally as a marketing spiel.

The idea is that headhunters access candidates who don’t apply for jobs, typically passive. Although broadly they use many of the same tools other recruiters do.

The crux of the message for employers is that they have a capability beyond what the employer can achieve themselves, which can be true.

2.6 RPO / embedded / insourced

An approach which manages part or all of a recruitment function. I find RPOs often are pitched at the multinational end of the market, while embedded / insourced are geared more towards start-ups and scale-ups.

2.7 And many more

Ultimately it shouldn’t matter what a recruiter does, more how they can be a conduit to a job.

It’s quite common to hear of job seekers blacklisting agencies for poor service. I get it - so frustrating, demoralising and occasionally crushing to be on the end of bad experience.

However, a key message I always say is this

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. And that employer may not know how those agencies work.

While with employers, many hiring managers have never been trained on recruitment or interview, while being very busy at work. It’s not an excuse, but can lead to a more polarised experience as a candidate, than 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 termed Talent Acquisition Managers, Internal Recruiter, Recruitment Manager.

They aren’t always about just filling vacancies, but also about managing the system of recruitment.

It’s a field that is overwhelmed due to a huge amount of layoffs, where internal recruiters are often overburdened, even in very large companies.

When working on vacancies, the mandate is to fill those vacancies, and again 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 and either research the business to what they are recruiting, or simply ask directly “could you tell me who is the best contact for <your field>”, “when are you likely to recruit for these roles” and help them help you.

Takeaways

There’s so much to talk about on this subject, and I’ve no doubt I’ve missed glaringly obvious topics. If I have, let me know and I’ll update this article.

Equally it’s easy to oversimplify what is a huge and complex industry - please treat this as an illustration rather than something to specifically rely on.

Some takeaways:

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, which can lead to thick skin and callous behaviour. It’s not an excuse, more a symptom of the system we all work in.

The next article will be on ‘principles of a good CV’.

Thanks for reading.

Greg

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How to experience a job advert. Jobseeker Basics XIX

By Greg Wyatt • March 23, 2026

This might seem a weird chapter. Surely you look at a job advert, maybe even read it, then decide to apply or not? Yet a job advert is more than just what's presented on a job board. It's a microcosm of everything in recruitment, including everything wrong, and you can learn a lot about what to expect in your job search by the least intentional of words. And when you do read a job advert, in its entirety, there are only two questions you should ask of it: Am I qualified? Should I be interested? It's somewhat odd that 99% of job adverts don't actually try and help you answer that. But maybe that's why employers say job adverts don't work. And why you don't think they do either. While you're here, why not check out A Career Breakdown Kit in its entirety? This series of always free chapters is an advert, after all. But it was never supposed to be an easy book to read, just accessible and comprehensive. I expect most readers are over 50, ND, or other marginalised demographics, considering these will likely be the longest out of work in our 'diverse and inclusive' world. If you're 'in demand' though, you'll probably click apply and wonder what the fuss was about. 44 - How to experience a job advert This chapter is about job adverts, what they are and aren’t, how you might experience them, how they might inform your decisions and your responses. I say experience rather than read because not all adverts are written or read. What’s a job advert? A job advert is the first step in a multichannel commercial approach to filling a vacancy. It’s the inverse of your job search taking a multichannel, through-the-line approach - we go where the candidates are. It’s the first step because it’s the first thing you experience of that vacancy irrespective of whether it’s a: Listing on a job board A post on social media A DM from a recruiter A phone call from a hiring process A referral Or any other means by which you become aware of a vacancy Each of these is a marketing or sales channel that may result in a candidate's application. It’s regrettable employers don’t necessarily see it this way because of the transactional nature of much recruitment process. They think it’s sticking a job posting up on LinkedIn. Employers forget that when you experience such an advert you first make the choice to entertain that advert rather than a yes or no to ‘Should I apply?’ Indeed much advertising neglects the psychology of a job move, which principally relates to problem awareness. How you experience an advert, what may encourage you to progress an enquiry and what you are prepared to put up with in the process relate to your situation and the problems you currently face. Are you out of work, needing any job to pay the bills? Are you in work, desperate to escape a toxic culture? Are you gainfully employed yet wouldn’t mind a bit more flexibility to pick the children up from school? Are you apparently smashing it, with that missing something you don’t even know about, and the right vacancy might improve your lot? And everything in between. The answer to these questions informs your experience of any advert. Because many employers don’t consider what informs an experience and think people would be lucky to work there, it’s rare that more than the minimum acceptable skill will be applied to an advert. As discussed in Better use of job boards, the emphasis is on more rather than better. It’s often thought that ‘if we can reach more candidates, we might fill the job.’ Rather than appeal to the right people for the right reasons. And so we are in a market where an advert attracts hundreds if not thousands of applications, most of whom are wholly unsuitable. What isn’t a job advert? A job advert isn’t a fake job, although many of these are listed. They aren’t Job Descriptions either - the next chapter explains why this distinction is important. While you may spend much time perusing job boards and talking with fellow job seekers, reading their posts on LinkedIn - I’d expect most employers have little awareness outside of their own sphere of what happens in the job seeker community. They’ll advertise how they advertise, instruct agencies how they instruct agencies and run their process how they run their process. I wonder how many great employers use Workday as an ATS, fill their jobs suitably, and have no knowledge of how Workday is viewed by job seekers who have dozens of Workday accounts, one per application? It’s true terrible employers might do the same. In one of my job advert consultations I had a detailed conversation with a Talent Acquisition Manager of a local technology consultancy. I can say that they are a jewel in the crown of technology development in the UK, have top 1% compensation, offer career development, and are a fantastic place to work. I know this because I have spoken to many people who have worked there. All speak highly of them. Yet the advert we reviewed had a number of red flags: £Competitive salary Generic company first text Confusion around job titles If you were an ideal candidate who decided not to apply because of these red flags you’d have missed out. There are two considerations in how an advert might be put together. The first is whether it is a product of a transactional process or whether the hiring team recognises potential candidates are driven by selfish reasons and seek to understand ‘what’s in it for them.’ (I’ve mentioned WIIFM (What’s in it for me) a few times now - answering that is key to good marketing) The second is the direction of travel - are you reading a job board advert or have you been contacted proactively about the vacancy? A transactional process is defined by information transactions with a focus on speed and volume. It places less emphasis on qualitative measures such as accuracy, specificity, relationships, and empathy. Instead you can define the process by a series of information transactions and exchanges: Job description Advert Suitable number of relevant applications Suitable number of interviews Offer Starter The goal is to fill a vacancy. A non-transactional process recognises the importance of relationships and that to build trust the right information needs to be put forward. Though the steps are much the same, at each stage the question is asked: ‘Does this give the candidate the right information to make an informed decision?’ Here a candidate is everyone who interacts with the vacancy outside of the hiring end - even a reader who chooses not to apply. The goal is to create a process that draws the right person forward while leaving everyone with a good experience. It’s not just about decency - it’s about long-term commercial outcomes. If you want the right person to thrive over the long term the process has to reflect this goal. While all the ‘nos’ might be commercial opportunity in future - future candidates, future customers - who knows? These are the archetypes. In reality, recruitment falls somewhere along this spectrum, often changing at different stages in the process. Intent matters even if the execution is flawed. Why does it matter ? Because a healthy rule of thumb is to reciprocate the level of care you experience. If you come across a transactional process - treat it transactionally. This isn’t inherently bad - it’s just the way of the process. The employers may still be good to work for. When and whether to apply Irrespective of how a role is recruited, there will be non-negotiable essential criteria that inform whether or not you are suitable. If you can establish these criteria you can confirm whether to apply. The problem is these criteria aren’t always stated. Sometimes they are implicit to the context - if the role is employed by a rapidly growing scale-up, it’s likely they’ll need someone with that experience. Hopefully this context is alluded to in the advert. It will need critical thinking to parse. Sometimes these aren’t defined at the outset and become mandatory when there are too many candidates in view. Sometimes these are hidden by Goldilocks or illegal discrimination - not too experienced, not too inexperienced, not too old. Sometimes the employer can’t divulge essential criteria. The other problem is that some essential criteria aren’t essential, such as when a company writes unrealistic shopping lists. Yes, it’s a FUBAR situation given it’s pretty hard to tell whether you’re a suitable candidate or whether you should even apply. Nonetheless - if you choose to apply your application must show how you can meet any essential criteria you can identify. If that’s the only thing your application does - it must do this. In my experience, transactional processes are the hardest to unpick, with adverts going something like: Here at genericorp we are proud to be recruiting for a in our market leading innovative environment. You’ll be doing You’ll need In return you can expect a £competitive salary. Apply with a full cover letter and updated CV. Only successful candidates will be contacted. Familiar? Whereas the rare non-transactional adverts give more of a narrative about why the right person might think to apply or give you avenues for finding more information. A note on inbound enquiries. With automation allowing volume outreach the effort to produce transactional DMs, emails and messages is pretty low. You might think when you receive such a message that you are already in the running - in many situations you are a transactional prospect. I’ve even heard some recruiters InMail #OpenToWork profiles only to improve their response rates. While not all messages are this way these are potential reasons you might not hear back when you reply to a recruiter. It’s not quite the case with phone calls which have yet to be executed through automation (some platforms promise AI call automation already). Again, you can separate transactional from non-transactional straightforwardly. Transactional leads with selling the job. Non-transactional seeks to explore if you are the right candidate. If the vacancy isn’t right it’s best to find that out as early as possible and save everyone time. Inbound enquiries are still adverts, in a different medium. Try not to treat your job search transactionally by default. Your goal isn’t to apply for hundreds of jobs. Your goal is to start conversations that count. By prioritising adverts in the right way you’ll improve your odds with high stakes applications. You’ll gain time and energy for other activities, including taking time away from your job search to recharge.

Why five? Innovation from Iteration, pt 1

By Greg Wyatt • February 26, 2026

So here were are, the start of a new series. This series may be around 10 editions, looking at the things other industries do that we can implement into recruitment. These were written 3 years ago, right at the start of the AI zazzle, and in some ways have dated quite a bit. In others, the way in which they haven't dated at all, because the principles of how we live our business lives can be universal. So, I'm not sure yet, how much editing I'll do, whether there will be any inclusions, or whether I'll leave articles intact, as a moment in time. I've learnt all of these notions from candidates and clients, as I came to understand the function of their vacancies. Hearing about the daily practice from people doing jobs, I couldn't help but notice the same relevance in recruitment. So while these articles are hardly comprehensive, perhaps they'll make you look at your candidates differently, in what we can learn from them, and how that might improve our recruitment. Why five? December 2022 Ask anyone involved in active recruitment what their key problems are, and they’ll likely talk about skills shortages and candidate behaviour. On the face of it, problems which are out of our control, worthy of complaint with little opportunity to find improvement. But what if these were issues that weren’t entirely out of our control? What if we could apply a replicable process to understand what’s really going on, and how we can make a difference? Fortunately, we needn’t invent the wheel, as other industries have already done this for us. One such is 5Y, or Five Whys, a problem-solving technique that was developed by Toyota in the 1930s. It's part of the Toyota Management System that has inspired much of my work. Five is the general number of “Why?”s needed to get to the root of a problem. Often you can get to the heart of the issue sooner, sometimes later. Often there are multiple root causes. More than just solving problems, it’s about establishing practical countermeasures to prevent these problems from coming up in future. 5Y is an example of Toyota’s philosophy of “go and see”: working on the shop floor to find out how things work in practice to find ways for iterative improvement. This isn’t a theoretical idea to try out on a whim – it’s based on grounded reality and almost always works. There are two costs – time and accountability. Here’s a practical example, then a recruitment one. (Names have been removed to protect my identity) Problem 1 : The children were late for school. Why? Traffic held us up. Why? We left the house late. Why? The children weren’t ready on time. Why? Their school uniforms weren’t prepared. Why? We hadn’t set them out the night before. Here the countermeasure is to get everything ready the night before, rather than blame traffic for being late. Perhaps we might have gotten to school on time without heavy traffic, but that is an element out of our control. Of course, here there is another root cause – very naughty children – but better to focus on the simple changes. And sometimes traffic is the root cause after all, once you’ve ruled out other elements in your control. (2026 note: my eldest now often drives my youngest to school. A time laden solution I hadn't considered three years ago. Now I don't care if they're late 😆) Problem 2: Candidates keep ghosting us. Why? They weren’t committed to responding. Why? They didn’t accept my requirement for a response. Why? They saw no value in my requirement. Why? I didn’t create an environment where this requirement has value ( root cause 1 ). Or because they are very naughty candidates, with a bad attitude. Why have we allowed someone with a bad attitude in our recruitment process? Because we didn’t prequalify them well enough ( root cause 2 ) The first root cause is something we can work on by giving candidates what they need, building trust, and working to mutual obligations. There are many ways to do this – I’ve already talked about examples in previous newsletters. It comes down to good candidate experience and reciprocity. The second root cause requires us to work harder at understanding candidate needs, aspirations, behaviours and attitudes at the outset of a recruitment process. There’s a reason for their behaviour. We can be accountable for finding it. That’s no mean skill to develop, yet an essential one for anyone whose core responsibility is recruitment. And it’s hard to do in a transactional volume process, so the question then becomes, does your process help more than it hinders? You can apply 5Y to any issue you come across, as long as you are prepared to be accountable. At worst you may find that the things that were out of your control are at fault. In this case, you are at least armed with good information to report to your stakeholders, by ruling out other possibilities. What’s the point of doing all this? For me it’s continually improving how I recruit, with the consequence, in the example above, that I am rarely ghosted at all. And you can 5Y any issue you come across. Are poor agency CV submissions their fault, or in part down to your briefing and process? Are skills genuinely scarce, or is your requirement unrealistic? Is it true that your agency hasn’t listened to you, or do you engage the right partners in the right way? 5Y has the answers. Regards, Greg