Why subscription recruitment can work better than per-placement fees

If you are only hiring once in a while, a simple 15% fee is usually fine. You pay when you need a hire, and that is the end of it.

The problem starts when “once in a while” quietly turns into three, five or eight hires a year across Technology and Engineering. At that point, paying 15% every time can feel like a tap that is either fully on or fully off, with little in-between.

What per-placement fees do well

Per-placement fees work best when hiring is genuinely occasional or senior. You get:

• A clear one-off cost tied to a single hire
• Flexibility to use different suppliers if you want to test the market
• No ongoing commitment if your plans change

For a one-off Head of IT at £100k, a 15% fee is often the cleanest option. You know what you are paying for, and the spend is linked directly to a critical, named role.

Where per-placement breaks down

When you are hiring repeatedly in the same year, per-placement starts to create friction:

• Finance teams see several large, unpredictable invoices landing at different times
• Interview feedback loops never really improve, because every search is treated as a new, one-off project
• Hiring managers keep re-explaining the same culture, constraints and trade-offs to new people

On top of that, you may feel pressure from some suppliers to add more roles into the mix simply because their next fee depends on it.

What a subscription changes

A subscription flips the question from “what is the fee for this one hire?” to “what are we trying to achieve across the year?”.

Instead of starting from zero with every vacancy, you agree a rough hiring plan – for example:

• 1–3 hires a year on Starter
• Around 3–6 hires a year on Growth
• Around 6–10 hires a year on Scale

You then pay a fixed monthly amount that covers those hires across 12 months, with a 12-month guarantee on subscription placements.

Why this tends to work better for 3–10 hires a year

When you are in that middle zone of steady but not huge hiring, a subscription can:

• Make budgeting easier – Finance sees a consistent, planned cost rather than spikes
• Encourage better briefs and feedback – because the relationship runs across multiple roles
• Give you priority on shortlists when the market is tight
• Reduce the temptation to cut corners just to “close” a single fee

It also gives you space to hit pause and think if priorities change. You are not stood in front of a fresh 15% invoice each time you want to refine the spec or re-run a search.

How to tell if subscription is worth exploring

A simple way to check is:

• List the Technology, Cyber and Engineering hires you expect in the next 12 months
• Ignore internal moves and hires you would never use an agency for
• Apply a 15% fee to the ones you would realistically brief out

If that number is starting to look like the equivalent of a monthly subscription, it is worth at least running a side-by-side comparison.

We will never push subscription where it does not make sense. There are plenty of scenarios where a simple 15% fee is still the right tool. But if you are quietly moving from “the odd hire” to “a predictable stream of roles”, it is worth checking whether your recruitment model has kept up.