It’s not the People; It’s the Model
Ask almost any business leader what they think of recruitment agencies, and you’ll get a version of the same answer: a sigh, a story, and a reluctant admission that they don’t like them yet still use them. In nearly three decades of doing this work, the first question we’re asked is rarely, “What do you charge?” but instead, “Are you a recruitment agency? We don’t like agencies.”
That reaction isn’t unfair, but it’s not about the people. There are many good, capable and decent people in recruitment. The problem is that they work within a model that rewards the wrong things. Left unchanged, the model will beat good intentions every time.
“No placement, no fee” contingency recruitment was largely an American invention of the postwar years. It was a sensible response to a genuine crisis: a severe skills shortage left companies unable to reach the talent they needed, and a network of agents who could find talent quickly was a real asset.
It was built for opportunistic hiring. Somewhere along the way, it became the default for every kind of hiring: the graduate intake, the succession-critical engineer, and the sales director who will shape the next five years of the business. The same transactional mechanism, applied indiscriminately to decisions with wildly different consequences.
If you’re paid only when your candidate is hired, and three of your competitors are pursuing the same role, your incentive is brutally simple: get CVs onto the client’s desk faster than anyone else. Not the best-fit CVs, but the fastest ones.
That’s why an agency you engage on Tuesday can send you candidates on Wednesday. It looks like responsiveness, but it’s arithmetic because no one can understand your business, culture, pace, and the role’s requirements in 24 hours. The same handful of profiles goes to every competing client, and the winner is whoever gets read first.
Because buyers have been burned, they protect themselves, and each protective measure worsens the outcome.
They negotiate the fee down, reasoning that if this goes wrong, at least it will be cheap. They demand guarantees expecting the agency to be held to account for a decision they don’t make, and for the performance of a person they don’t manage. They try to control the process: just send me CVs, and I’ll take it from there. Without trust, this is a rational instinct, but it strips away the only part of the process that was ever going to protect them: the assessment.
The market itself tells the story. At least 20,000 recruitment firms in the US compete for the attention of a business population in which approximately 74,000 companies employ 250 or more people. The UK is not so different. The UK has approximately 31,345 recruitment businesses as of the end of 2025 and about 8,335 UK private sector businesses had 250 or more employees at the start of 2025. That’s out of roughly 5.69 million businesses in total, so large firms make up about 0.15% of the business population. They employ about 11.2 million people, around 40% of private sector employment, and generate about 49% of turnover (£2.7 trillion). Employers are weary of being hounded before the conversation even starts.
Strip out the assessment, and the entire hiring decision falls to a hiring manager: someone whose actual job is running a department, for whom recruitment is a distraction from the work they’re measured on.
They’re asked to interview against a job specification that is usually a wish list of responsibilities: no calibration of how well each must be performed, no consideration of the organisation’s pace or support network, and no plan to get someone from day one to full contribution. Then they compare candidates to each other rather than to a benchmark, so the winner is simply the best among whoever happened to apply.
The interview itself is often theatre. The manager sells the role, the candidate nods along, and both leave feeling it went well. Ask the candidate afterward, and they’ll often say they couldn’t get a word in. Then the halo effect finishes the job: same degree, same town, same industry, or, better yet, poached straight from a competitor, on the assumption that they can simply step over the fence and succeed. They usually can’t. Every organisation has a different pace, support network, and values and expectations. None of it gets checked.
Around 46% of hires fail within the first 18 months. When they do, something revealing happens: the internal language shifts. They weren’t very good. Well, you hired them. They weren’t very good when you hired them, either.
That abdication is understandable because the person who makes the decision rarely bears the cost. The company absorbs it: the fee, the salary, the lost momentum, the disruption, the time lost, and the effort required to begin the whole cycle again.
Meanwhile, recruitment remains the single most unpredictable cost for most businesses. You cannot forecast who will resign, retire, relocate, or fall in love and move across the country. Finance budgets a guess, and that guess is usually wrong.
Here’s the uncomfortable part. Once you accept that recruitment is broken by design, not by accident, you start noticing the same pattern everywhere.
A business requests sales training, and three providers cheerfully quote for a sales course without anyone asking why a team that performed adequately for years suddenly can’t deliver under a completely changed commercial model. A company promotes its best technician into management, provides no development, and is then surprised when an accidental manager loses good people. A leadership team crafts a statement of mission, vision, and values, when the real question is whether anyone believes that leadership team has the authority to do so. The effort defaults to the loudest voice in the room, and the result ends up in a drawer.
In each case, the same failure repeats: a symptom is mistaken for a diagnosis. The organisation decides what it needs, goes shopping for it, and a supplier sells it. No one asks why.
That’s the real breaking point: recruitment is simply where it’s most visible because that’s where the invoice arrives fastest. The employment model as a whole, including how businesses attract, develop, lead, and change people, is still largely run on instinct, precedent, and hope, even in organisations that would never dream of buying a £100,000 machine without first studying the performance data.
People are the highest cost and the engine of most businesses. They deserve at least the same level of assessment we apply to machinery.
Ready to Try a Different Approach?
At Discovery, we’ve developed a different process that begins by understanding the role’s underlying circumstances, expectations, and requirements. We don’t just look at a job spec; we ask the questions that provide an objective overview of what is needed to succeed.
We screen candidates for competency, capability, suitability, and fit. We don’t compare them to each other. We measure them against a clear set of competencies and behaviours required to excel in the role.
It’s a meticulous process that can take up to six weeks and includes a series of assessments and interviews. We don’t jump to conclusions; 27+ years of experience have shown us that our approach yields candidates who thrive in their roles and stay in them three years later.
Contact one of our recruitment experts to learn how your business can build a more resilient, higher-performing workforce.
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