Choosing a recruiter
Can I hire without using a recruitment agency?
Yes, and for a lot of roles you should. Four routes avoid an agency percentage: advertise direct with a job board, buy a flat-fee multi-board advert from £99 to £599, buy a flat-fee managed search from about £850 to £6,000, or hire through your own network. The choice comes down to two things — what the role pays, and whether anyone in your business genuinely has evenings free to work roughly 26 candidates per hire.
The four routes
| Route | Cost | What you still do |
|---|---|---|
| Direct with one job board | Whatever you negotiate — none publish a rate | Everything |
| Flat-fee multi-board advert | £99 – £599 | Everything after the advert |
| Flat-fee managed search | £850 – £6,000 | Interview and decide |
| Your own network | Free | Everything, plus the risk of hiring narrow |
The question that decides it
Not "what does it cost" but "who is doing the screening, by name?"
Across 46 vacancies we filled it took a median of 26 candidates worked per hire, and about 15% of those screened were worth presenting. Most of those calls happen after 6pm.
If you can name the person and point at the hours in their week, buy the cheapest advert that reaches the right boards and keep the difference. If you cannot, the advert is the cheaper purchase and the more expensive outcome — the applications sit unread, the good candidates accept elsewhere, and you buy a second advert six weeks later.
Where doing it yourself works well
Roles with a deep pool of active candidates: administration, warehouse, customer service, most junior finance, office management in any decent-sized city. An advert genuinely produces applicants for these.
Where it usually does not
Anything where the person you need is employed, content, and not looking. Engineering at a 60-day median and manufacturing at 74 are the clear examples in our own data — those are not advert problems, they are search problems.
One thing worth keeping about agencies
Contingency means you pay nothing if they never fill it. If you genuinely doubt the role is fillable at that salary, that risk transfer is worth paying for, and a flat fee without a refund is the wrong instrument for that bet.
Sources
Want the fixed price for your role?
Advertise it yourself from £399 +VAT, or hand the whole search to a dedicated recruiter — a flat fee by salary band with a 100% refund if the role is not filled.
See Guaranteed Hire Advertise a job
Or call 0161 327 2895.