Ask most hiring managers about their experience with recruitment agencies, and you’ll likely hear the same complaints. Too expensive. Too transactional. Too focused on their own revenue.

Recruitment should be about helping businesses hire the right people, but the industry has been built around sales, commissions, and speed, often at the expense of quality and long-term hiring success.

So, what frustrates employers the most? Here are five things that make traditional recruitment harder than it should be.

1. It’s More About Closing Deals Than Finding the Right Hires

The traditional recruitment model is sales-driven, not service-driven. Agencies only get paid if they make a placement, which creates a financial incentive to prioritise speed and volume over careful hiring decisions.

This means:

• Employers feel pressured to move quickly before a candidate is taken by another client.

• Agencies push candidates into roles even if they aren’t the perfect fit—because they only get paid if someone is hired.

• The focus is on filling roles, not ensuring long-term hiring success.

Recruitment should be a hiring partnership, not a high-pressure sales transaction.

2. It’s Built on a High-Volume, Low-Quality Approach

The recruitment industry operates on a numbers game, where agencies compete against each other to submit candidates first, rather than taking the time to find the right person.

This results in:

• A flood of resumes rather than carefully matched candidates.

• Multiple agencies sending the same candidates, leading to ownership disputes.

• Employers wasting time screening candidates instead of receiving well-vetted options.

Instead of strategic hiring, businesses are left sorting through resumes that haven’t been properly assessed—which defeats the purpose of using a recruiter in the first place.

3. There’s No Real Commitment to Employers

Recruitment agencies juggle multiple roles at once, knowing that only a small percentage will result in a placement fee. Because of this, employers often feel like:

• Their role isn’t getting full attention.

• Agencies lose interest if a role is hard to fill.

• Once a hire is made, the relationship ends instantly, with no long-term support.

Businesses want real hiring partners—not just recruiters who disappear once the invoice is paid.

4. There’s Little Understanding of the Business or the Role

Many recruitment agencies prioritise filling roles quickly over truly understanding what an employer needs.

That means:

• Generic job descriptions that don’t reflect the real scope of the role.

• A lack of industry knowledge, making it harder to identify the best talent.

• Hiring managers having to explain their needs multiple times because agencies don’t take the time to understand their business.

The best hiring outcomes happen when recruiters act as an extension of the business, rather than just forwarding resumes.

5. The Fees Feel Disproportionate to the Work Done

Recruitment agencies charge 20-25% of a hire’s salary, even if they only send a handful of CVs. The reason fees are so high?

• Agencies work on multiple jobs they never get paid for, so successful placements have to cover lost revenue.

• A large portion of agency fees go toward sales and business development, not actual recruitment work.

• The commission-based structure rewards speed, not depth—so employers often pay a premium for a rushed process.

This model forces businesses to pay high fees for a service that isn’t always delivering real value.

So, What’s the Alternative?

Employers are moving away from traditional agency recruitment in favour of models that:

• Align payment with actual work done, rather than charging high placement fees.

• Focus on quality over speed, giving recruiters time to conduct real searches.

• Encourage long-term hiring success, rather than treating recruitment as a one-time transaction.

The frustration with the recruitment industry isn’t about the concept of recruitment itself—it’s about how the industry is designed.

If financial incentives were realigned, recruitment could actually work the way it should—as a true hiring partnership, not just a sales-driven service.