Recruitment agencies are good at one thing that is genuinely hard: finding people who are not looking. That is why companies keep paying placement fees, even when they have perfectly capable recruiters in house. The question is not whether agency work has value. It is whether a placement fee is the right way to pay for it, especially for roles you hire for every quarter.
What a placement fee actually buys
A typical agency placement costs somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000. For that fee you usually get:
- A shortlist. Most agencies submit 5 to 10 candidates per role. You see the people they chose to show you, not the market they searched.
- One hire. The fee covers a single placement. The next time the same role opens, the meter starts again.
- No pipeline left behind. The other candidates the agency spoke to stay in the agency’s database, not yours.
For a one-off senior hire that may be a fair trade. For a sales team, a support function or an engineering group that grows every quarter, you are paying full price, repeatedly, for work that looks almost identical each time.
Where the value sits in agency work
If you break an agency search down, most of the effort happens before the first conversation with a candidate: defining the profile, searching, finding contact details, writing outreach, following up and getting a response. The interview itself, the assessment and the offer are things most in-house teams already do well.
That is the gap a pipeline model fills. You buy the part your team does not have capacity for, the outbound sourcing and engagement, and keep the part it is already good at.
How pipeline pricing works
With Peopleflow Talent Engine, we do the same work an agency does up to the first call. We source passive candidates against your brief, reach them by email, LinkedIn, text and voice notes, and the interested ones book a call directly with your recruiters. Pricing starts from £1,999 (USD 2,499) per job, for as little as 150 candidates monthly per job.
The difference shows up in three places:
- Cost. Compared with a typical placement fee, clients can save up to 80% per hire.
- Ownership. The pipeline is yours. Candidates who are not right today are still in your system for the next opening.
- Visibility. You see every candidate and every conversation through our client portal, rather than a curated shortlist.
When an agency is still the better choice
Pipeline pricing is built for recurring and high volume roles. For a leadership hire, a confidential replacement or a role where the right person needs to be persuaded over several conversations, a hands-on search is still the right tool. That is why Talent Engine clients also get 20% off our fees for senior level searches: outbound for volume, headhunting for leadership.
A simple test
Look at the last twelve months of agency invoices and group them by role. Any role that appears more than once is a candidate for a pipeline instead of a placement. If that list is long, the savings usually are too.
Want to see what a live pipeline would look like for your recurring roles? Book a discovery call.