Pricing Strategies for Recruitment Companies: An Interview With Jon Brooks скачать в хорошем качестве

Pricing Strategies for Recruitment Companies: An Interview With Jon Brooks

This week’s post and podcast are about recruitment pricing strategies and how to communicate the real value of your services. This podcast is one of our expert interviews, where I got an opportunity to speak to Jon Brooks, who has a unique position in our industry. He’s the only person in the world who specialises exclusively in helping recruitment companies with pricing strategies. We covered everything from why 66% of recruitment work goes unpaid on contingent models to the surprising truth about winning retained business. If you’ve ever struggled to justify your fees or wondered how to move away from contingent work, this conversation is packed with practical insights you can use immediately. Understanding The Value Problem in Recruitment Jon started his career at Reed, one of the UK’s biggest recruitment brands, working directly with founder Sir Alec Reed. That experience taught him something fundamental about business: when you create different services, you need to price them differently. If you price everything the same way, it looks the same to your clients. Here’s the thing: Price isn’t just a number. It’s a signal. It positions what you do. If you launch a new service and charge the same as your existing offering, clients will think it’s just fancy words with no real difference. But when your price reflects genuine value, it helps define and position what you’re actually selling. Jon worked with a management consultancy that specialised in value and pricing. The consultants had never worked in recruitment before. They came from law firms, global engineering companies, and manufacturing businesses. That outside perspective was gold. It showed him how other industries think about pricing and how those principles could work for recruitment consultants sitting with clients. He left Reed about six or seven years ago to build his consultancy. The timing was questionable (just before COVID), but he’s been helping recruitment owners ever since. Interestingly, every agency must get pricing right, yet hardly anyone focuses on it properly. We all learn on the job, but research and knowledge from other sectors can make a huge difference. Why Recruitment Has a Future Despite AI We talked about AI and technology and whether recruitment has a future. It’s a fair question. LinkedIn allows anyone to find anyone, yet recruitment and search businesses have become more valuable since it became mainstream. Fees have increased, and we are more important than ever. AI is bringing massive change, that’s certain. We’re already seeing AI-generated applications overwhelm hiring managers. However, recruitment companies have always adapted to technology shifts. Think about the journey from motorbike couriers driving CVs around London to digital databases, job boards, and LinkedIn. People predicted the end of recruiters; companies found new ways to add value each time. Here’s Jon’s prediction: AI tools that help manage candidate applications won’t be cheap. Individual hiring managers in most companies won’t get access to the best solutions because they only recruit occasionally. It’s too expensive to give every manager premium AI tools. However, a smart recruitment company can invest in these solutions and spread the cost across hundreds of clients. That’s what companies have always done brilliantly. You invest in LinkedIn licences because you use them constantly across multiple clients. The same principle will apply to AI recruitment tools. Companies will have access to better technology, processes, and ways to cut through the noise. Your value will be in helping clients through the complexity that AI is creating. The Real Difference Between Contingent and Retained Let’s discuss the truth of contingent recruitment. Jon laid it out clearly: with a typical success rate of 33%, you’re not getting paid for your work 66% of the time. That’s devastating for your business and your self-worth. It affects how you value yourself and your services. But here’s the mistake most companies make when trying to move to retained work: They sell the retainer and list all the benefits of retained recruitment. They’re doing the right thing, tactically focusing on benefits rather than features, but strategically, they’re getting it completely wrong. A retainer is just a payment schedule. There’s no intrinsic value in when money gets paid. The value is in your service, not in the timing of payments. If you explain why retention is better for you, clients will immediately see through it. They’re not interested in what’s better for your business. So, what’s the answer? Create demand for your service, not for the retainer. When clients desperately want to work with you, they’ll pay whatever you ask. They’ll work to your terms. It becomes a non-issue. Jon gave a brilliant example. When he was putting together his book, he’d seen a designer whose work he loved online. He thought, “I...