12 questions before you hire recruiters

The way to grow a recruitment business is to hire more recruiters, right?

More recruiters = more revenue, right?

Maybe once that was true, but honestly, often it wasn’t.

How many seasoned recruitment agency owners can claim they are not guilty of hiring new recruiters… just to add to the group of mediocre recruiters they already had. (I am most certainly guilty)

For forty years, recruitment agency growth has largely followed a predictable formula.

Win more clients. Get more jobs. Hire more recruiters. Generate more fees.

Rinse and repeat.

It ‘sort of worked’ until it didn’t.

Today, technology, AI, rising employment costs and changing client expectations demand a different approach.

Yet I still see recruitment owners responding to growth opportunities with the same instinctive reaction.

“We need another recruiter.”

Maybe you do.

But before you add another $150,000 to your annual cost base, you should answer a few questions.

It is crucial to get this right. No recruitment company will compete without an appropriate cost base paired with a GP per-recruiter number that makes commercial sense.

The recruitment industry will continue to grow, but revenue will increasingly come from fewer agencies employing fewer, more productive recruiters.

I outlined this idea in a recent blog and shared the Hays strategy, which makes for very interesting reading.

Of course, I am not against hiring new and more recruiters. If it’s based on careful planning and calibration.

You don’t know it’s right to hire until you have asked these 12 key questions.

Don’t hire without examining these in depth. If you don’t know the answer, do not hire until you do

1: Can existing recruiters handle more?

Almost certainly, yes. Especially with automation support – and if they ‘triage’ their jobs and their clients to work on roles that are fillable.

2: Can low-value work be automated?

Yes, and it must be. Do your research. Get great tech that integrates and scales. It is proven that a lot can be automated or semi-automated: CV Parsing, database updates, interview scheduling, interview transactions, candidate matching, job ads and posting, market mapping, interview coordination, meeting summaries, CRM data entry, compliance, and routine candidate follow-up, just to start.

3: Can job quality improve?

Yes! Better job order qualification, closer client partnerships, exclusivity, and more skilled communication during the process.

4: Can client quality improve?

Oh boy. Yes. Double down on hiring managers who value insights, offer repeat business, and who listen and take advice. They will be responsive, share information, give you access, and offer exclusivity. Are we spending disproportionate amounts of time servicing clients who negotiate fees down, provide poor briefs, delay decisions, reject good candidates and ultimately don’t hire? If so, the answer isn’t more recruiters. It’s fewer bad clients.

5: Can conversion improve?

Yes. No doubt. You fill 1 job out of 4 you take? Switch that to 1 out of 2 and your revenue doubles! Exclusivity, job order qualifications, pushback, and triage will help.

6: Can we secure more exclusive work?

You can. And must

7: Can delivery be shared or even changed?

Yes. The way recruitment work gets done is changing. Does every task require an experienced, expensive recruiter? Could researchers, resourcers, shared services, offshore support, or specialist delivery teams let existing consultants focus on high-value advisory and revenue-generating activities?

8: Can we generate more from existing clients?

Yes. If you select the right clients and implement a real account management, cross-selling, and customer care strategy. Are your recruiters maximising their existing relationships? Are they asking for additional vacancies, securing introductions to other hiring managers and expanding into other departments?

9: Can we increase our average fee?

More than you ever dreamed. Read what this recruitment leader did. Better fee negotiation, improved terms, minimum fees and greater specialisation could all improve revenue without increasing headcount.

10: Can we improve candidate utilisation?

Fix your CRM database, which is in truth a candidate graveyard. Work your candidate communication and updating. Better candidate engagement, reverse marketing and systematic redeployment will generate more revenue from relationships.

11: Can we improve recruiter capability?

Yes. The recruiter capability gap is widening! Most recruiters cannot operate at advisory level. AI will expose this, not fix it. Training is no longer optional — it is existential. Sign up for this today for a start.

12: Can we improve our urgency and completion time?

Yes. Faster candidate identification, qualification, submission, and interview coordination will let existing recruiters complete more assignments. Measure how long it takes. Look for roadblocks and delays. Train, automate and measure for improvement.

This isn’t simply a cost-cutting strategy. It requires higher-quality revenue and greater efficiency.

For years in the agency world, we tied success, growth, and more profit to more recruiters.

Hiring great recruiters will remain part of the formula. But now it is better technology, lower delivery costs, higher individual productivity, and better-quality client relationships, generating more profit without proportionate headcount growth.

The next stage of recruitment growth may not come from adding more people. It will likely come from getting much more value from the people you already have.

Once you have done that, sure, then add more people.

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