Published: January 16, 2023 · By Roger Olofsson
This article is about what is fundamentally broken in traditional recruitment — and what a better model actually looks like. It covers commercial integrity, candidate networks, deep industry knowledge, and the role of technology in modern executive search. At Olofsson & Company, we combine specialist consultants who carry genuine intellectual depth with a proprietary AI platform that identifies and engages senior tech leadership at a speed and precision that legacy search simply cannot match. This is not a manifesto. It is a description of what good looks like — and a frank assessment of how far short most firms fall.
The State of the Industry
Come on Recruitment Firms, it's time to up your game.
We've seen your LinkedIn adverts, simply echoing the client's requirements with little value-add. You know the ones — "I am currently searching for an Actuary in the Insurance sector" — or the carousel of twelve roles posted simultaneously, liked immediately by the firm's own Director, which only confirms they condone this behaviour. Perhaps even worse: the video. The hipster recruiter, shaky camera, earnestly asking their network to help fill a role they clearly know nothing about. Just stop it.
The client is not paying you to advertise on LinkedIn. If you do not have the cadre and depth of candidates in your network, do not take the work. And clients — if you see your roles simply dropped on LinkedIn the day after briefing your recruiter, it is time to find a new recruitment firm.
Recruitment is not a complex business model, far from it. Yet the old-collar firms seem to have forgotten the original objective, and at one extreme have brought the industry into disrepute. Many operate like estate agents: bring in inexperienced graduates, motivate them by volume — CVs out the door, calls per day, fees regardless of outcome. This infuriates clients. It also reveals that the individual recruiter is incentivised to chase the quick win rather than build anything sustainable.
In fairness, this is often not the individual recruiter's fault. The blame sits squarely with the firms themselves — built over twenty years on a model that no longer fits the market. Disruption is coming to the industry and those still trapped in historic business models better be ready for a painful demise. We are not a lone voice here. There is a growing body of evidence: fee revenue at the five largest global staffing firms grew an average of just 2.1% annually between 2018 and 2022,1 while specialist boutiques consistently outperformed on client retention and placement quality. The market is already voting with its feet.
Old Model vs. New Model
| Old Model | New Model |
|---|---|
| Post on LinkedIn, blast job boards | Network-led search, proactive outreach to passive candidates |
| CV volume targets for consultants | Outcome-based performance — quality placements, long-term retention |
| Fee charged on placement, regardless of quality | Risk/reward commercial models tied to client success |
| Junior generalists with keyword searches | Specialist consultants with deep domain and industry knowledge |
| Transactional — fill the role, move on | Advisory — strategic partner across search, interim, and consulting |
| Reactive to the brief | Proactive market intelligence delivered before the need arises |
| Human networks only, slow and shallow | AI-augmented search — speed, precision, passive candidate reach |
Be Customer Obsessed
Simple words. Far more difficult to implement properly.
Too often recruiters are trying to convince the wrong candidate to take the wrong job because they are motivated by the fee and not by the client's success. This never leads to a good outcome for the client. It rarely leads to one for the candidate either. And it certainly does not build the kind of repeat business that sustains a firm long-term.
Everything must point toward exceptional outcomes for clients. Not adequate placements. Not CVs delivered on time. Outcomes — leaders who stay, perform, and contribute to the business strategy they were hired to advance. That means understanding the client's culture, their leadership gaps, their competitive position. It means being honest when the brief is wrong. Customer obsession is not a service level — it is a commercial philosophy.
Change Commercial Models
Link your success directly to the client's success. If you are confident in your ability to deliver, prove it through the commercial structure of the engagement.
Risk/reward models must become the default, not the exception. Extend where it makes sense — equity participation, milestone-based fees, retained advisory relationships that reflect ongoing value rather than one-time placement. These structures give clients absolute clarity about your commitment to mutual success. They also concentrate the mind of the recruiter in a way that a straightforward contingency fee never will.
The firms still charging a full percentage-of-package fee for passing a CV they sourced off a job board are not partners. They are vendors. And the market will increasingly treat them as such.
Absolute Integrity
Only charge fees where you have actually delivered great work.
This is the hardest pill for most recruiters to swallow. The instinct is to charge regardless — percentage of package, invoice raised, move on. But if your contribution was placing a LinkedIn advert and forwarding applications, that is not recruitment. That is advertising, and the client should not pay a recruitment fee for it.
Be open. If you do not have the expertise or the candidate quality for a particular brief, say so. Turning down work you cannot do well is one of the clearest signals of integrity a firm can send — and one of the most powerful ways to build a reputation that generates inbound mandates. Scarcity of honest advice is the recruitment industry's most persistent problem. Fix that, and everything else follows.
Freedom to Work
Give consultants the freedom to do their best work — wherever, whenever, however that looks for them.
At home, at the client's office, at a coffee shop at 6am before the gym. The research on knowledge worker productivity is consistent: autonomy is one of the strongest predictors of performance.2 Professionals do their best work when it does not feel like work. If you need to constrain your teams to fixed hours, rigid call quotas, and being physically present in an office to ensure they are productive — they are not operating as professionals, and you may need to reconsider your hiring strategy before you reconsider your working policy.
The firms that will win the next decade of recruitment talent are the ones building environments that attract people who do not need to be managed. Hire those people. Trust them. Get out of the way.
Outcomes not Outputs
Forcing consultants to send a target number of CVs per week or make a set number of client calls per day does one thing reliably: it destroys the client's confidence in recruitment as a discipline.
Sure, a high-volume approach might get lucky one in ten times. That is not a business model. That is a lottery with a high ticket price and a client who remembers every losing draw.
We hire the best professionals in the market — people who are intrinsically self-motivated and driven to deliver. We give them the platform, the technology, the mentoring, and the access to clients they need to do exceptional work. Then we let them use their skills and judgment. Outputs are what recruiters count. Outcomes are what clients remember.
Candidate Networks — and the AI Advantage
Your candidate network is your ultimate competitive asset. Treat it accordingly.
Every recruiter will tell you they maintain strong candidate relationships. Very few actually do. Candidates remember the recruiters who kept them informed between roles, who reached out with genuine market intelligence rather than a live vacancy, who treated the relationship as having value independent of an immediate transaction. Those relationships compound over time. If you give candidates the service they deserve — not just during an active search, but consistently over years — they will come to you first when they are ready to move, and they will refer people in their network when they are not.
Human networks are necessary but not sufficient. Senior passive candidates — the people who are not actively looking but who would consider the right opportunity — are the most valuable and the hardest to reach through conventional means. This is where our proprietary AI platform changes the equation materially. It identifies passive senior tech leaders across our target markets, analyses behavioural signals to assess likely receptivity, and enables our consultants to make precise, personalised outreach at a scale that would be impossible through manual research alone. The result: shorter search timelines, higher candidate quality, and a material reduction in the number of approaches candidates receive before one lands correctly. Speed and precision are not in tension here. They are the same thing.
Industry Insight
Deep industry insight means something specific. It does not mean keyword research and CV matching led by a consultant who joined the industry eighteen months ago and has never worked inside a technology business.
It means spending real time with market leaders, founders, and functional heads — understanding not just what they are building but why, where the talent bottlenecks are, which leadership profiles succeed in which cultures, and where the market is heading in the next twelve to twenty-four months. It means being able to have a substantive conversation about the technology stack before asking about the role budget. It means knowing, before the client brief arrives, which senior leaders in the market are likely approaching readiness for their next move.
Our consultants carry genuine intellectual muscle — domain expertise that goes well beyond process knowledge. Combined with our AI platform's market mapping capability, we are able to offer clients a quality of intelligence about the senior talent landscape that no generalist firm can replicate. This is the difference between a recruiter and a trusted advisor. We are here to be the latter.
The Shape of What Comes Next
Like never before, the recruitment industry is being reshaped by technology. Job boards, advertising, and elements of candidate screening will continue to be automated. That is not a threat to good recruiters — it is a clearing of the ground. The transactional work that should never have commanded a premium fee will be commoditised. What remains is judgment, relationships, and genuine market knowledge. Those things do not automate.
The firms that will survive and thrive are not the ones with the largest headcount or the widest geographic footprint. They are the ones who have invested in specialist expertise, built proprietary capability, and had the discipline to say no to work they cannot do well. The major firms' revenue has stalled. Their models are broken. Their response — narrowing into shallower niches, cutting costs, rebranding without changing substance — is too little and, for most, too late.
We are building something different. Executive search, interim leadership, and strategic advisory — delivered by specialists, accelerated by technology, structured to align our success with yours. We are headquartered in Singapore with a reach that extends across Asia and globally because the senior leaders our clients need do not sit conveniently in one geography.
The recruitment industry needed this conversation a decade ago. It is not too late to have it now — but firms are running out of time to act on it. If you are ready to work with a firm that operates differently, we are ready to talk.
Sources
- Analysis of annual revenue growth across the five largest global staffing and recruitment firms (Adecco, Manpower, Randstad, Hays, PageGroup), 2018–2022. Based on publicly reported financial results. ↩
- Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The "what" and "why" of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behaviour. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. Autonomy identified as a primary driver of intrinsic motivation and sustained performance. ↩