Where recruitment consultant roles are actually advertised

Why your own trade behaves differently when you're the candidate

You spend your working week finding people for other people's vacancies. Finding a vacancy for yourself in commercial recruitment turns out to work by different rules than the roles you fill for clients, and that's worth naming before anything else. Recruitment agencies are unusually reluctant to advertise their own consultant vacancies publicly. A firm that pushes client roles onto every board it can reach will often fill its own 360 desk or account manager opening through a specialist intermediary, an internal move, or a direct approach — and never post it on Indeed or Totaljobs at all.

That's not a conspiracy. It's because the skill they're buying — desk management, billings history, sector knowledge, a book of candidates or clients you can bring — is hard to verify from a CV and easy to misjudge from an open advert flooded with applicants who've never run a desk. Agencies would rather pay a fee to someone who pre-screens for exactly that than sort a general board themselves.

Recruitment-to-recruitment firms are the main channel, and they're not a secret

The mechanism specific to this occupation is recruitment-to-recruitment, usually shortened to rec2rec. These are agencies that exist solely to place recruitment consultants, resourcers, and managers into other recruitment agencies. Firms operating in this space include Zebra People (strong on creative and marketing recruitment), Recruit121, In-house Recruitment, Bright Purple, and Star — there are others, and the roster changes as consultancies merge or rebrand, so treat any list as a starting point rather than the full market.

Rec2rec consultants work the same way you work with your own candidates: they hold live vacancies that never touch a public board, they know which agencies are hiring before the agency has decided to advertise, and they can tell you what a firm's billing targets, commission structure, and desk split actually look like before you get to interview. If you've been sending speculative applications into a void, registering with two or three rec2rec consultants and giving them an honest account of your billings and sector experience will usually surface more live opportunities than a job board search, because that's where the roles concentrate.

The obvious asymmetry is worth naming: you're now the candidate in a market you understand from the other side. Use that. Ask the rec2rec consultant the questions you'd expect a good candidate to ask — desk composition, temp-to-perm ratio, whether the vacancy is a backfill or a growth hire, what happened to the last person in the role.

Trade press and specialist boards, where they exist

Commercial recruitment has its own trade press, and some of it carries a jobs section: Recruiter magazine (recruiter.co.uk) runs a jobs board alongside its news coverage, and Onrec (the Online Recruitment Resource) covers industry moves and occasionally hosts vacancy listings aimed at people already inside the sector. Recruitment International and Global Recruiter cover industry news, awards (the TIARA Recruitment Industry Awards, the RAD Awards) and market commentary rather than functioning as jobs boards in the way you'd expect, but they're worth reading regularly because senior moves and agency launches get reported there before they generate a public vacancy — a new office opening or a management buyout is often the trigger for a hiring round.

APSCo, the trade body for professional staffing companies, is membership-focused rather than a jobs board, but its member directory is a reasonable way to identify which agencies are active and expanding in your specialism, which matters more than it sounds because a direct, cold approach to an agency you've identified as growing often gets a faster response than an application to an advertised role.

Beyond that, general boards do carry some recruitment consultant vacancies — LinkedIn's own job listings and, less often, Totaljobs and Indeed — but what you'll typically see there is either a high-volume trainee scheme (the kind that recruits inexperienced people on a training contract and expects heavy attrition) or a role that's already been informally filled and is being advertised to satisfy an internal process. Neither is a reliable route if you're an experienced consultant with a billings track record looking for a lateral or senior move.

Internal movement and direct poaching

A large share of hiring at consultant and senior consultant level in commercial recruitment happens without any advert at all. Agencies headhunt from competitors — sometimes called a lift-out when it's a whole desk or team moving together — because a proven biller with an existing client base is worth more than an unknown quantity from an open market. If you've built billings in a specific vertical (say, supply chain or finance & accountancy within commercial), expect direct approaches from competing agencies' internal talent teams or their managing directors, particularly if your name has come up at industry events or in league table results.

This cuts both ways: it means your visibility inside the industry — attendance at REC (Recruitment and Employment Confederation) events, sector-specific conferences, LinkedIn activity under your own name rather than a generic profile — does more work than a polished CV sitting on a board. It also means that if you've had a quiet run of billings, or you're between roles after redundancy, you're working against a market that's primarily built to reward people who are visibly still performing, which is worth knowing rather than pretending isn't true.

Internal promotion is the other half of this. Most agencies run a defined career ladder — resourcer to consultant to senior consultant to principal or managing consultant — and fill the upper rungs from within wherever possible, because it's cheaper than an external hire and the person already knows the desk. If you're looking to move up rather than sideways, the honest comparison is: how long is the internal queue at your current firm versus what a lateral move elsewhere would cost you in notice period and restrictive covenants (many recruitment contracts carry non-compete or non-solicitation clauses — check yours before you start conversations with a competitor).

Timing: why the calendar matters more here than in most sectors

Recruitment agency hiring has a seasonal rhythm tied to the agency's own billing cycle, not just the general new-year job market surge. January and early February tend to bring a wave of hiring as agencies set new financial-year targets and want desks staffed before Q1 client demand picks up, particularly in permanent commercial recruitment. September brings a second wave, after the summer lull and before the pre-Christmas slowdown — agencies want experienced billers in place ahead of Q4, historically a strong period for permanent placements in many commercial sectors.

July and August are typically quiet: client-side hiring slows for summer holidays, so agencies have less incentive to add headcount, and decision-makers are often away themselves. Late November through December is similarly slow for new consultant hires, even though it can be a busy billing period, because firms are reluctant to onboard someone who then has weeks of reduced client activity before they've built a pipeline. If your agency's or the wider market's financial year runs to April (common among UK-based consultancies), expect a further short window of hiring activity around March and April as budgets are confirmed for the new year.

None of this means don't apply outside those windows — vacancies open for other reasons, a resignation or a lift-out creates an immediate gap — but if you're planning a move rather than reacting to one, timing your rec2rec registration and direct approaches to land in January or September gives you a better chance of hitting agencies that are actively budgeted to hire rather than ones humouring a speculative CV.

What to do with this

Register with two or three rec2rec consultancies relevant to your sector and be specific with them about your billings, desk type (360, resourcing-only, account management) and target sectors — vague briefs get vague results, same as when you're the one taking the brief. Read Recruiter and Recruitment International regularly for agency launches and senior moves, since those precede vacancies. Identify three or four agencies actively growing in your specialism via APSCo's directory or trade press and approach them directly rather than waiting for an advert. And if you're short on time to do all of that consistently while still working your own desk, jobmarket.pro is an agent that reads adverts and prepares applications from one profile it can't invent experience into, and can run that search in parallel with your own direct approaches.