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.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
New recruiters join, struggle with targets and leave within months, while the firm keeps paying to train replacements.
If pay depends only on closures, recruiters chase easy roles, hoard clients and neglect the longer work that builds the business.
When a recruiter leaves, relationships and candidate lists can leave with them, and the firm has no hold on either.
Juniors learn by listening to a busy senior, so skills and standards vary from desk to desk.
A recruiter on a rare technical skill and one on easy volume roles carry similar numbers, and the unfairness is obvious.
Teams guard candidates and clients, which costs placements the firm could have made together.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Onboarding and Probation; Performance Management; Retention and Attrition Management. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for professional services, not in general.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a recruitment and staffing firms business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A planned programme of sourcing, screening and client-handling practice with realistic early targets.
What this coversHideA planned programme of sourcing, screening and client-handling practice with realistic early targets. The onboarding and probation work builds it.
Targets that reflect the type of requirement, seniority and market, with incentive rules that reward quality and retention of placements as well as closures.
What this coversHideTargets that reflect the type of requirement, seniority and market, with incentive rules that reward quality and retention of placements as well as closures.
All contacts, conversations and candidate data kept in a shared system, not on personal phones.
What this coversHideAll contacts, conversations and candidate data kept in a shared system, not on personal phones. GullyHR software can illustrate what that looks like.
Notice, handover, data return and conduct terms in every contract and checked at exit.
What this coversHideNotice, handover, data return and conduct terms in every contract and checked at exit. The HR policies and governance work covers them.
Routes to senior recruiter, account manager, desk lead and business head, with what each needs to show.
What this coversHideRoutes to senior recruiter, account manager, desk lead and business head, with what each needs to show. The career and succession work lays it out.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm 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.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
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.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
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.
6 min readRead article
A practical joining checklist covering documents, assets, system access and statutory enrolments, with owners and timings, so nobody's first salary is wrong.
8 min readRead article
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.
5 min readRead article
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.
5 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
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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