A large share of senior UK hiring never appears on any job board. It goes through search firms on retained mandates, or through agencies working a shortlist for one client. If you only read boards — including this one — you are seeing a slice of the market.
The four routes, and who pays
Worth knowing because the route determines how a recruiter behaves towards you, and none of them involves you paying.
- · Retained executive search. The employer pays a fee in instalments for the search itself, usually exclusively. The firm is working one mandate and is paid whether or not you specifically are placed, so it has reason to map a market rather than push candidates at it.
- · Contingency agency. The employer pays only on a placement, often competing with other agencies for the same role. Faster, and the incentive is volume of submissions.
- · Interim and locum providers. Day rates rather than salary — this board’s contract track. The provider bills the client and pays you, so engagement route and IR35 status matter.
- · Direct. The employer advertises on its own site. This is most of what this board carries, for a reason given below.
You never pay to be found work
Section 6(1)(a) of the Employment Agencies Act 1973 provides that an employment agency must not
“request or directly or indirectly receive any fee from any person”
for finding, or trying to find, that person work. Contravening it is a criminal offence under section 6(2).
There are narrow exceptions, set out in regulation 26 of the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 and limited to the occupations in its Schedule 3 — performers, models and similar. No professional role of the kind this board lists falls within them. So for anything you would find here: a fee asked of you to find you work, to register you, or to carry out checks or references, is not a grey area.
How to check a firm, properly
The Recruitment and Employment Confederation runs a public member directory, searchable by sector, location and placement type. Membership is not a badge a firm buys and keeps:
- · Members are bound by the REC Code of Professional Practice, which also binds their subsidiaries.
- · They must pass a compliance test at 80%, with three attempts in each two-year period. A member that does not pass cannot renew.
- · A new member has three months from applying to pass, and is an Unqualified Corporate Member until it does.
- · There is a complaints and disciplinary process, with serious or persistent failures referred to the REC’s Professional Standards Committee.
That is a real test administered by someone other than us, which is why this page points at it rather than substituting our own opinion. Search the REC member directory, or read their own guidance for jobseekers.
Why there is no list of recruiters on this page
We set out to publish one and stopped, for a reason worth being open about. We cannot read the REC directory automatically — it is served behind bot protection — and firms’ own sites are unevenly reachable: some return a page, others refuse. A list built from whichever firms happen to be readable would be a sample shaped by their bot policies, presented to you as a considered selection. This site has made that mistake once already, on an early measurement that read 59% when the real figure was 10.1%, and the lesson was that the sample is where the error hides.
There is a second reason, and it bears on how much weight any page like this deserves. We intend to sell sponsored job postings, and recruiters are the likely buyers. A page ranking our own prospective customers would not be worth your trust however carefully we wrote it. The REC’s directory has no such problem.
If a recruiter has told you they are listed, featured or endorsed here, they are not. Nothing on this site can be bought except a clearly labelled sponsored posting, which must disclose its salary.
What this board carries instead
Almost entirely direct employers, and that is a fact about our sources rather than a preference. The private-sector half comes from employers’ own applicant-tracking systems, which are by definition not agencies, and agencies advertise mostly on aggregators we do not ingest. Of 1,898 live listings, only 11 come from an employer whose name reads as a recruiter or staffing provider.
So the two things complement each other rather than compete: we show you what is advertised openly, with the pay where an employer states it (42 of 829 private-sector listings do), and a recruiter can reach the roles that were never advertised. Browse by profession to see which employers are hiring in your field right now — useful to have in hand before a recruiter call.
Where we stand
We are a jobs board rather than a recruiter: we take no applications, hold no CVs and put nobody forward. In law a jobs board is nonetheless treated as an employment agency, so the rules above bind us too — we have never charged a work-seeker anything and never will, in any form. Our terms set out the position and carry the route for complaints.
Sources
The law on this page was last read against the primary sources on 16 October 2026. The listing figures recompute on every build. Legislation changes; if you are reading this much later, check the source.
- · Employment Agencies Act 1973, section 6 — fees
- · Conduct Regulations 2003, regulation 26 — when a fee may be charged
- · gov.uk — Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate
- · REC — choosing a recruitment agency, and its member directory
- · Listing figures: this board’s own data, recounted on each build