Should you advertise the role yourself or use a recruiter?

The honest version of the trade

Advertising buys reach. A managed search buys reach plus the work that comes after it — the screening, the calls, the chasing, the scheduling and the offer management.

The fee gap between them is not really a price difference. It is the price of that work. Whether it is worth paying depends almost entirely on one question: does somebody in your business genuinely have the hours?

What "the work" actually amounts to

From our own filled roles:

Twenty-six is the median. On harder roles it runs into the hundreds — one role in our set needed 152 candidates worked. Those conversations happen on the phone, in the evening, with people who are at work during the day.

If that sounds like something a manager can absorb around their job, advertising is the right call and the cheapest sensible option. If it sounds like a fortnight of someone's life, the fee is buying back a fortnight.

Advertise it yourself when

• The title is one people search for. Management Accountant, HGV Driver, Care Assistant, 2nd Line Support. There is an active market typing those words into job boards this week.
• The salary is at or above the market. An advert only converts if the offer is competitive; it cannot argue.
• The location works. Local, commutable, or genuinely remote.
• Somebody owns the screening. A named person, with time blocked out, who will reply within 48 hours.
• You have filled this role before from an advert. The best predictor there is.

Use a recruiter when

• The people you want are employed and content. They are not on job boards. This is the single clearest case, and no advertising budget fixes it.
• The title is a description, not a job. If the role needs someone who can do three things that rarely appear together, no one has it as a job title, and the search is a hunt through adjacent industries.
• The advert has already failed. Three weeks live, applications arriving, nobody reaching a second interview. Reposting the same advert is the most expensive form of hoping.
• Nobody has the hours. The failure mode here is specific and costly: applications arrive, sit for ten days, and the good candidates accept other offers. You paid for the advert and lost the candidates.
• The role is confidential. You cannot advertise a replacement for someone still in the seat.
• The cost of the vacancy is high. If an empty desk costs you a week's revenue, the fee is a rounding error against the delay.

The middle option most people miss

You do not have to choose per company — you choose per role. Advertise the roles with active markets, and hand over the ones that have already failed or that you know are searches. The mistake is using one route for everything because it is what you have always done.

What each route costs

The comparison worth making is not advertising against a managed search. It is a managed search against a percentage fee for the same service — because that is where the money actually is. More on that in what recruitment agencies charge.

One test that settles it

Ask the person who would do the screening to block the hours in their calendar this week. If they can, advertise. If they cannot, you have your answer — and it is better to know now than after three weeks of unread applications.

The cost that never appears on the invoice

The comparison above is the visible one. The expensive part of doing it yourself is rarely the advert — it is what happens to good candidates while nobody has time.

A strong candidate applying to three roles will typically hear back from one within 48 hours, one within a week, and one not at all. The first employer gets the interview. That is the whole mechanism, and it does not care how good your job is.

So the real question is not "can we screen this ourselves" but "can we reply within two days, every day, for three weeks". If applications land in a shared inbox that someone opens on Friday, the answer is no, and the advert will be blamed for a process problem.

Two things make self-managed advertising work:

1. A named owner with blocked time. Not "the team" — a person, with an hour a day in the diary while the role is live.
2. A two-day reply standard, including to the people you are turning down. It costs nothing and it is the single biggest difference between a role that fills and one that stalls.

If you can commit to both, advertise. You will save several thousand pounds and lose nothing.

If you cannot — and for most small teams in a busy month the honest answer is that you cannot — then the fee is not buying candidates. It is buying the certainty that somebody rings them back on Tuesday.

Frequently asked questions