Placement agencies, and the questions to ask before you sign

A placement agency is paid when a candidate it introduced joins you. The term is used loosely and covers permanent placement, bulk and volume hiring, campus, and contract staffing, and the differences between those matter far more than the label does. This page sets out what you are actually buying in each case, the two questions that tell you most about a placement partner, and where the per-placement model stops being the right shape for the hiring problem in front of you.

The four things sold under this name

The word placement covers four different products with four different economics. Establishing which one you are being sold is the first useful thing you can do.

Permanent placement

A candidate is introduced, joins your payroll, and a fee falls due, usually as a percentage of the package. This is the same commercial shape as contingency recruitment under a different name.

Bulk and volume placement

Many comparable seats filled at once against a rate card, where throughput is the service. Common in support, operations, field and entry-level hiring, and genuinely good at it.

Contract and temp staffing

The person stays on the agency payroll and you pay a marked-up rate for as long as they work. This is a payroll and flexibility product rather than a hiring one.

Campus placement

Access to a cohort at an institution, coordinated as an event. What you buy is the slot and the logistics, not a search.

A placement agency next to a talent acquisition function

Per placement and per month are two different businesses, and they behave differently on the same requirement.

Dimension	Placement agency	A talent acquisition function
What you buy	A placement. Somebody joins and a fee falls due.	The hiring process itself, whether or not any single role closes this month.
Cost structure	Per placement, usually a percentage of the package, or a rate card that falls as volume rises.	Flat, and unmoved by how many people join or by what they are paid.
Incentive alignment	The invoice grows with the offer and with the count, so package and throughput are both revenue. A volume rate card pushes the same way.	A flat fee earns nothing from a larger offer, and nothing extra from a faster one either.
Capacity	Real and elastic. On comparable seats at scale this is the model's genuine strength and it is hard to beat.	Sized to your open roles, with the reading and verifying absorbed rather than passed along.
Continuity	Transactional by design. Rejections do not carry into the next requirement, and the bar is re-explained each time.	Rejections are the input that tightens the next shortlist.
What it structurally cannot do	Show you the difference between a search and a forward. A profile pulled from a job portal you already subscribe to arrives looking identical to one that took a week to find.	Fill thirty comparable seats faster than an operation built for exactly that. On genuine bulk hiring, throughput specialists win.

On volume hiring the arithmetic that matters is not the fee, it is what a wrong hire costs once training, supervision and the replacement cycle are counted. Run your own numbers on a wrong hire before optimising a rate card.

When placement is the right way to buy

The per-placement model exists because it fits several situations well. These are them.

Comparable seats at volume, where the job is the same thirty times over and throughput genuinely is the service.
Contract and temp needs, where the entire point is that the person is not on your payroll.
A geography you do not operate in, where a local partner holds ground presence you would otherwise have to build from nothing.
A one-off need in a discipline you will not hire in again, where the search risk sits with the agency until somebody joins.

What to ask, and what the answers tell you

Two questions separate a placement partner worth having from a forwarding service, and neither of them is about the fee.

Who pays?: Ask whether the candidate is charged anything, at any point, by anyone in the chain. Where a candidate has paid for the introduction, the pressure to place them somewhere competes with the interest in placing them well, and a candidate who has already paid to reach you negotiates differently at offer. It is a fair question and a straight answer is the whole point of asking it.
Where was the last placement first found?: If the answer is a job portal you already subscribe to, you paid a placement fee for a search you could have run from your own login. That is not automatically wrong, because somebody still read the pile. It does tell you what you are buying, and it should change what you expect the fee to cover.
What does the rate card reward?: Volume discounts are a throughput contract. They are correct for thirty comparable seats and wrong for the one seat where variance in fit is the entire risk, because the same commercial pressure applies to both.
What does the replacement period actually cover?: Almost always the fee, occasionally a re-search, never the seat. Check whether it survives a redundancy, a change of role or a change of manager, because those are the exits it is usually written to exclude.
Nothing carries into the next requirement: Placement is transactional by design, so the reasons you rejected eleven people last quarter are not available to whoever works the next requirement. You re-explain the bar every time, and you pay for the misses on the way to being understood.

Volume hiring hides its costs at the offer stage, where dropouts are normal and expensive. The dropout comparison, set against both published market benchmarks is on the proof page with the quotes attached.

What a talent acquisition function does differently

The difference starts with the invoice and ends with what is still true a quarter later.

Nobody is paid when somebody joins, so a month with no joins costs the same as a month with three and nothing in the model rewards pushing a marginal candidate over the line.
The brief becomes a success profile calibrated with the people who will manage the role before sourcing starts, so the bar is written down rather than implied by a job advert.
Candidates are screened on 40+ signals, called and verified, and scored against the role, so what reaches you carries its reasoning with it.
Every rejection is retained and changes the next batch, so the eleventh requirement is screened better than the first.

Continuity1 is not a placement agency. Nobody here is paid when somebody joins, no candidate pays a fee to be introduced to you, and there is no ownership claim over a profile. For thirty comparable seats on a rate card, a volume placement operation is the right partner and this is the wrong page.

How Continuity1 runs this funnel

The screening above is the job. These are the numbers it produces when a function owns it end to end, set against the published benchmarks for the same market.

The offer-band figure is the one a percentage of package has a reason to move. Read it beside the rate card question above.

1 in 3: Shortlisted candidates you meet who become the hire; Aligned engagements run nearer 1 in 2, distant ones nearer 1 in 10. The market takes about 180 applicants to make one hire, and that sifting lands on your team rather than ours.; Continuity1 tracked engagements
95%: Offers that close inside your stated band; 20 of the last 21. A flat fee earns nothing from an inflated offer; a percentage of CTC earns more.; Continuity1 tracked engagements
1 in 9: Accepted offers that ghost before joining; Indian employers report nearly 4 in 10 offers dropped. We lose 1 in 9.; nasscom community
~3: Interviews your team sits in, per hire; Ashby puts technical roles at 17.6 interviews per hire across the whole process, up 52% since 2021. The rest of that load sits with the function, not with you.; Ashby talent-trends report

Every brief becomes a success profile before sourcing starts, calibrated with the people who will manage the role. That calibration is the step most hiring skips, and it is why a shortlist either matches the job or matches the job advert.

You review a scored shortlist and make the calls. The filtering never lands on your calendar.

Share a role See the workings and the citations

Questions buyers ask

Is a placement agency the same as a recruitment agency?

Commercially, usually yes: both are paid when somebody joins. In practice the word placement tends to signal volume and entry to mid-level work against a rate card, while recruitment agency stretches to cover specialist search as well. The label tells you very little. The fee structure, and the answer to where the last placement was first found, tell you a great deal.

Should the candidate ever pay a fee?

You should know either way before you sign, because it changes the incentives on the other side of your offer. Ask directly, ask whether it applies to any part of the chain including subcontracted sourcing, and get the answer in writing.

How do we compare two placement agencies fairly?

Not on fee percentage, which converges anyway. Ask each of them for the last five roles like yours: how many profiles were sent, how many were interviewed, how many joined, and how many were still there a year later. An agency that tracks the fourth number is a different business from one that stops counting at the invoice.

We hire in bulk. Is a function the wrong shape for us?

For genuinely comparable seats at volume, throughput specialists are hard to beat and the honest advice is to use them. The mixed case is the common one: twenty comparable seats plus four specialist ones where variance in fit is the entire risk. Those four rarely get real attention on a volume contract, because the contract is not written to reward it.