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Information about recruitment companies

What is recruitment?

Recruitment is the process of selecting qualified individuals for a position at a company or public body, medium and large size companies often have their own "in-house" recruitment professionals working permanently for the organisation they work for.

There are four main types of organisations involved in the recruitment industry today: employment agencies, recruitment companies, websites and search engines and headhunters (executive search).

What types of agency are there?

Recruitment agencies have historically had a physical location where candidates visit for a short interview and possibly an assessment prior being taken onto the agency's books. The recruitment consultant will then work to match their pool of candidates to available positions. Suitable candidates are shot-listed and presented to the client for consideration of an interview. The client will then interview the candidate and make their own decision on whether to hire the candidate. Very often in the temporary work force, all interviews are conducted by the recruitment consultant and candidates (effectively employees of the recruitment/employment agency) are then sent on assignments without prior interview by the client.

Agencies are paid by several methods, some of the most popular are:

- A contingency fee - paid by the client when a candidate from the recruitment agency accepts a position with the client. Contingency fees vary but are often between 20%-30% of the first-years salary of the employee. If the employee leaves the position within a designated time-frame, some of the fee can will be returned to the client on a sliding scale.

- A lot of executive search (headhunters) work on a retainer where the client pays the agency before a suitable candidate has been found and the balance once the new recruit takes up the position. Such retainers are most commonly found at the higher-end of the job market.

- For temporary workers, the agency will charge the client company an hourly rate and then pay a proportion of this to the employee, taking the balance as the agency's profit. Sometimes the client will want to take on a temporary worker as permanent and in these cases a "temp to perm" fee will be charged.

Temporary recruitment (employment agencies)

In the United Kingdom, a temporary recruitment worker is technically self employed and seconded by the agency to work for the client. The agency is solely responsible for payment of the temporary recruitment worker (usually by an hourly rate) - plus also being responsible for employer's national insurance and compensating the worker for holiday pay.

Temporary recruitment workers are usually paid an hourly rate incorporating all of this, and the temporary recruitment agency then charges the client company a rate including their profit margin (sometimes 40%-50% of the actual rate paid to the worker).

The temporary recruitment worker will need to complete a time sheet and hand this in to the temporary recruitment agency at the end of the week, who are then paid by the client company.

Certain types of temporary recruitment agencies are heavily regulated by "gangmaster" regulations.

Headhunters

"Headhunter" is an industry term for a recruitment consultant that actively seeks out candidates that are currently working in positions elsewhere. Extensively working on existing contacts within the industry they are recruiting they use a multitude of techniques to seek the client's desired candidate. They will often prepare the candidate for the interview, negotiate the salary on the candidate's behalf, and conduct closure to the search.

Headhunters draw extensively on contacts and networks within their industry and will often attend trade shows and other meetings that are attended by potential recruitment candidates. They are essentially working as their own individual organisation and salaries for headhunters are very heavily based on commission.

Headhunters remuneration can be considerable and they are therefore usually used to recruit very specialised individuals such as solicitors/accountants/financial services candidates.

In-house recruitment

For large organisations and government departments, in-house recruitment is often a more economic option conducted by the company's human resources department.

In addition to using their own marketing methods such as advertising on the company's website, these in house recruitment teams can work with recruitment companies if they are finding the search for candidates particularly difficult. Networking however is by far the most significant approach used when an in-house recruitment consultant is conducting a search.

Internet recruitment/websites

There are two main types internet recruitment/websites; job boards and cv databases.

Job boards allow companies and recruitment consultants to advertise a position and receive applications by email (most often with a profile and cv of the candidate attached). A fee is charged to the poster of the position (recruitment companies are usually to obtain substantial discounts when posting a job compared to a company recruiting for themself).

Alternatively candidates can upload a CV to a database whereby recruitment consultants and employers can search for suitable candidates with keywords and using other criteria.

Online recruitment has evolved a lot since the 1990s when the internet was first used for recruitment and key players in the sector provide e-cruitment software and services to all sizes of organisation within a wide range of industry sectors who want to take full control of their online recruitment process.

Online recruitment websites are extremely useful and well used by recruitment candidates looking for jobs - known in the industry as "active job seekers" - but less well used by "passive" candidates who are in employment and not looking for re-employment elsewhere (typically these individuals are the target of executive search agencies).

Many potential recruitment candidates are reluctant to place their CV on a CV database for fear of it being discovered by their current employer, so such databases are not really utilised by passive candidates.

Job search engines

A new technology has emerged in recent years allowing recruitment candidates to search for a position across multiple job boards with one website. Such sites aim to be a one-stop-shop for recruitment candidates. A number of these one-stop-shops have emerged in recent years, some of which choose to actively ignore job-boards and focus solely on company recruitment pages.

Recruitment around the UK

Recruitment agencies work throughout out the UK, some of the major cities they work in are listed below: