A recruitment firm earns from placements, so its own people are on targets, commissions and constant movement. Because income follows placements, targets and incentives shape behaviour, so how you set them decides who stays and how they treat clients.
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Share your requirementsA recruitment or staffing firm sells candidates and placements to employers. Inside the firm are recruiters, sourcers and account managers organised by client, role family or location, working to monthly or quarterly targets with incentives tied to placements. New recruiters are often fresh graduates trained on the job, and the firm's value sits in the client relationships and candidate networks they build. Leavers can take both, and sometimes join a competitor or start their own agency. Targets, desks and incentives shape the culture more than any statement of values does. See also HR for professional services.
Who does the work
Turnover among recruiters is constant
New recruiters join, struggle with targets and leave within months, while the firm keeps paying to train replacements.
Incentives drive behaviour
If pay depends only on closures, recruiters chase easy roles, hoard clients and neglect the longer work that builds the business.
Clients and candidates follow the recruiter
When a recruiter leaves, relationships and candidate lists can leave with them, and the firm has no hold on either.
Training is shadowing
Juniors learn by listening to a busy senior, so skills and standards vary from desk to desk.
Targets look the same for everyone
A recruiter on a rare technical skill and one on easy volume roles carry similar numbers, and the unfairness is obvious.
Desks compete instead of cooperating
Teams guard candidates and clients, which costs placements the firm could have made together.
Structure the first ninety days for new recruiters
A planned programme of sourcing, screening and client-handling practice with realistic early targets. The onboarding and probation work builds it.
Set targets by role difficulty
Targets that reflect the type of requirement, seniority and market, with incentive rules that reward quality and retention of placements as well as closures.
Record clients and candidates in firm systems
All contacts, conversations and candidate data kept in a shared system, not on personal phones. GullyHR software can illustrate what that looks like.
Write exit and conduct terms clearly
Notice, handover, data return and conduct terms in every contract and checked at exit. The HR policies and governance work covers them.
Create a path beyond the recruiter desk
Routes to senior recruiter, account manager, desk lead and business head, with what each needs to show. The career and succession work lays it out.
Confirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
A structured first three months so new recruiters ramp up quickly and fairly.
Targets and incentives that reflect role difficulty and reward quality, not only volume.
A view of who leaves, at what stage and what it costs to replace them.
Clear conduct, data and exit rules that protect client and candidate relationships.
Every engagement starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes. Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in professional services, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Why associates and managers leave consulting, accounting, legal and advisory firms, and how to ask about progression, workload and partners at exit.
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A practical joining checklist covering documents, assets, system access and statutory enrolments, with owners and timings, so nobody's first salary is wrong.
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A review can only judge what was agreed beforehand. How to set expectations that are specific, written and revisited, so the review stops being a surprise.
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How to spot an unmanageable workload before it becomes an exit or an error, what to look at, how to talk about it and what to change, without guessing.
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Often because targets arrive before skills do. A structured first three months with realistic goals improves the odds.
Combine a steady base with variable pay linked to closures, role difficulty and how long placements last. Closure-only incentives distort behaviour.
Keep them in a firm system, share ownership between people and write clear exit terms. Confirm the enforceability of any restriction with a qualified professional.
Reward shared placements, set rules for how clients and candidates are shared and review the cases that went wrong. Competition without rules hurts everyone.
Routes towards senior recruiter, account manager, desk lead or business head. People who see one stay longer.
The discussion would cover how many recruiters joined and left in the past year, how targets differ between desks against how hard each role is, and where client and candidate records actually live. A structured first ninety days for new recruiters might be the opening task. We agree the scope in writing once we have talked it through.
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