How Do I Get Clients For My Recruitment Agency?

Work through these in order. The sector pages come first because they are where the employers you do not already know come from, and the client side comes second because it decides whether those employers brief you or ring the next agency.

A hiring manager types ‘engineering recruitment agency’ and the county. An operations director types ‘temp staff agency’ and the town. A founder types ‘how do I choose a recruitment agency’. Those are the people who pay the fee, and most agency websites answer all of them with a vacancy search, an about page and a list of sectors in the footer.

The vacancies cannot do this job. Every role you advertise already has a better page on the job boards and the aggregators, and yours dies when the role fills, taking whatever Google learned about it. Worse, the expired ones often stay live saying ‘this role has closed’, so the site fills up with dead pages that outnumber the real ones.

Take expired roles down properly, keep job posting structured data on the live ones, and build the permanent pages: the sectors you place in, the types of hire you do and the consultants who do it. Those are what an employer searches for, and they are still there next year.

A care home operator, a manufacturing MD, a finance director and a head of IT all want the same thing before they ring: proof you have placed people like the one they need, in a business like theirs, and that you understand what makes their hiring awkward. Shift patterns, compliance checks, a niche skill, a role that has been open for four months.

Give each sector you want more briefs from its own page, written for the employer rather than the candidate. The roles you fill in it, how you find the people who are not on the boards, the compliance points that come with the sector, the consultant who covers it and what a brief looks like from first call to start date. Link the consultant’s page and any live roles in that sector to it.

A ‘sectors we cover’ list of twelve industries does none of this. A sector page with real roles, a real consultant and a paragraph on the thing that makes hiring in that sector hard does all of it.

‘Upload your CV’ is the biggest button on most agency websites, the menu says ‘Jobs’ before it says anything else, and the employer who arrives with a role to fill is left with a contact form and a generic phone number.

Build the client side as its own section. How you take a brief. How you screen and what you check. Whether you do permanent, temp, contract or all three. What happens if the hire does not work out. How you handle right-to-work checks, referencing and, for temps, the payroll and compliance side. How quickly a shortlist usually arrives, phrased as what usually happens rather than a promise.

An employer who has read that briefs you. An employer who found a CV upload button rings the agency that explained itself.

Employers search ‘recruitment agency fees UK’ and ‘what percentage do recruitment agencies charge’ before they invite anyone in, and they will find an answer whether or not it is yours. If your site says ‘contact us to discuss’, they assume you are the expensive one and they arrive at the first call negotiating.

Explain the model in plain text. Contingency, retained or a temp margin, what triggers the fee, when it is invoiced, the rebate or replacement terms and what is included. You do not have to publish a percentage if you do not want to. You have to be the site that explained how it works when the others said ‘it depends’.

That page is also what AI tools cite when someone asks what an agency should charge, so it earns its place twice.

An employer briefs a person, not a logo, and a hiring manager choosing between three agencies will look for the consultant who will actually be working the role. Most agency websites have a team grid with headshots and ‘Senior Consultant’ under each one, which tells the employer nothing.

Give each consultant a page: the sector they cover, the roles they have filled, how long they have done it, how they work and a direct way to reach them. Link it from the sector page. Then fix the reviews. Most agency Business Profiles carry reviews from candidates who were placed and none from the clients who paid, so ask the client at the end of every successful hire, with the link, and ask them to mention the role.

A review that says ‘filled a maintenance engineer role we had open for five months’ does more than ten that say ‘great agency’.

A recruitment website can double its visits and win no new clients, usually because the visits are candidates browsing vacancies, people applying for jobs at the agency itself, or students looking for a placement.

Put a tracked phone number on the client side, give the employer enquiry its own short form that asks the sector, the role and the type of hire, and record where each brief came from. In Search Console, look at which searches you appear for and whether they are the sector and type-of-hire searches you want. If your biggest searches are job titles, the vacancies are doing the ranking and the sector pages are not.

Once you can see briefs by sector and type of hire, you know which sector page to write next and which consultant the website is actually feeding. Report that to the directors instead of the CV count.