‘Jobs crisis? We haven’t really felt it’: meet the super recruiters making six-figure commissions

MaryLou CostaMon, August 10, 2026 at 1:00 PM UTC

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Jack Hayes, 32, has built an £8.5m recruitment empire in the legal sector - Jeff Gilbert

Jack Hayes’s team closed one of the biggest deals in UK recruitment history last year.

They headhunted one of the most renowned property solicitors and landed him an eight-figure role with their client.

The team’s fee was a cool £2m, with the lead partner on the deal walking away with £600,000 in commission.

It’s all in a day’s work at H&P Executive Search, a specialist legal recruiter, which Hayes, 32, founded six years ago – just three years out of university.

Now Hayes can regularly be seen on LinkedIn handing over giant commission cheques – in terms of both value and the actual size of the cheque – to his top performers, showcasing those earning six-figure commissions.

His top biller last year brought in nearly £2.3m. Each quarter, the firm’s highest earners are treated to all-expenses-paid trips away. In 2025, this included getaways to Cancun and the French Alps. This year, a luxury stay in the Bahamas is up for grabs.

The average fee – 25pc to 30pc of the successful candidate’s salary – is £70,000.

Hayes’s firm often waits months – even years – to successfully place a high-end candidate - Jeff Gilbert

Hayes’s decision to focus on the legal sector, and specialise in roles largely at partner level and above, is clearly paying off. The UK recruitment industry as a whole has shrunk from contributing £44.4bn to the economy in 2023 to £40.6bn in 2025, according to the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, thanks to a lacklustre labour market. But Hayes says he has not felt the impact of the downturn.

“The jobs market has obviously had a hit,” Hayes says. “So if you’re relying on volume and then there’s a dip in job flow, then that’s naturally going to hit your margin and make it very difficult to survive.

“But we’re placing lawyers. We haven’t seen a huge drop-off in that market, so we haven’t really felt it.”

The firm has made over £8.5m in profit over the past 12 months and is about to open its first US office, where Hayes says salaries are higher, as are the fees.

No win no fee

As Hayes acknowledges, his company sits at the top end of the recruitment spectrum. While the fees and commissions are sizeable, the deals are fewer and farther between than those of a typical recruitment agency. Candidate placements often come as the result of months, and sometimes years, of building a relationship to hand-pick them for the perfect high-end role.

Operating at this level also provides some kind of protection against the way the recruitment industry generally works, which favours the employers – the clients.

Typical recruitment firms often work on “contingency”, which means clients don’t pay their fee until the recruiter successfully places a candidate.

Clients can be working with multiple agencies, so the chances of a recruiter losing out are higher than them winning, regardless of how much time they have spent looking for and vetting candidates. High recruitment fees have to account for that lost time.

However, Hayes is able to sign many of his clients to retainers, meaning they pay a regular fee before they pay their candidate placement fee. This covers the team’s time spent on candidates that don’t go anywhere.

Matthew Edge-Wilkins, 50, believes the increasing use of LinkedIn has meant recruiters must work harder to justify their value - Matthew Edge-Wilkins

Matthew Edge-Wilkins, who runs Talent Seeker, a specialist headhunting firm for the marketing, HR and professional football sectors, knows too well the frustration with finding talent without a guaranteed payout.

Edge-Wilkins, 50, charges 20pc of the candidate’s salary, discounting to 15pc if a client agrees to use him exclusively.

“I always say to people that 90pc of the work I do is for free,” Edge-Wilkins, who is based in Hampshire, says. “That’s why when you’re doing contingency recruitment, the placement fees have to be high, because if I’m working on a contingency basis for a client against three or four other recruiters, I’ve only got a 25pc chance of actually making any money.

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“I could give examples where I’ve worked on a role for three or four weeks solidly and the client has made a job offer. Then you get an email from the candidate saying they’ve changed their mind – and that’s cost you 10 grand.”

The problem, he says, is that most companies are used to having the upper hand over recruiters, and baulk at the idea of paying for work that doesn’t result in a job being filled. Recruiters are also now having to justify their value since LinkedIn has become such a dominant platform.

“If you look at it, say 20 or 30 years ago, it was all about your relationships and hanging in certain bars where you knew your target audience was, and there had to be a lot more physical effort. Now we’re all using LinkedIn Recruiter, so everyone’s got access to everyone now,” he adds.

“But companies come to me because I’m going to put candidates in front of them that wouldn’t respond to an advert, that won’t even see an advert.”

The heightened pressure and competition are what cause the bad behaviour recruiters can become known for, such as ghosting candidates – and even sending CVs to companies without the candidate’s permission, as Edge-Wilkins is increasingly seeing – in an attempt to get in first.

‘LinkedIn is eating our lunch’

It’s why Colette Brown, 54, likes to think of working in recruitment as “champagne and razor blades”.

To protect the PR and communications recruitment firm she co-founded 24 years ago, Prospect Resourcing, she’s had to move from paying out commissions monthly to quarterly, as “AI and LinkedIn are eating our lunch”.

Colette Brown says one difficulty is accounting for candidates’ behaviour once they’re in a job

Brown, who is based in London, is also subject to having to refund a portion of the fee if a candidate she’s placed doesn’t pass probation. It happened just last year.

“If you’re doing your job properly and matching people well, then you should be able to minimise that situation, but of course you can’t. You’re working with people, right? So you cannot account for their behaviour,” she says.

“Also, you don’t know the client inside out, so you might think it’s a really nice place to work, but you’ve never worked in that place, so some people go in and say, ‘culturally, this isn’t for me’, and you just can’t legislate for that.”

Working at the opposite end of the spectrum from Hayes is Ashlea Fisher, 41. She runs IRecruit4, specialising in blue collar roles – mainly warehouse, production and logistics – with the occasional managerial role in those businesses.

Fisher, who is based in Wiltshire, typically takes 10 to 20pc of the candidate’s salary as a fee. But with many roles being minimum wage and temporary, this often doesn’t amount to much. She also pays for the advertising costs herself.

Of a typical £2,000 fee, Fisher is lucky to take 30pc. The best-paid job she has placed was a £100,000 finance director role.

“For me to put a warehouse operative out in a factory, I make about £1.20 an hour off of them,” she says.

Fisher, 41, says she lost £87,000 in 2024 after one of her clients went into administration - Barbara Leatham

Fisher’s clients, which tend to be small to medium-sized businesses, are also facing the squeeze of increased costs – related to rises in minimum wage, National Insurance and pension requirements – so are making impossible asks.

“I’ve got a client that said last week, ‘I need a finance administrator, but they also need to be able to go into a warehouse and pack boxes if I need them to’,” she says.

Tricky finances are also a risk for Fisher. If a client goes out of business, she doesn’t get paid.

Homebase was one of her largest clients for temp workers. When it first went into administration two years ago, she lost £87,000 in unpaid fees and wages, as the temp workers’ wages came from iRecruit4, which was reimbursed by the client.

She had no debt recovery insurance at the time. For six months, she didn’t take any profit from placements she made, instead putting all the money towards keeping the business afloat.

“That was through sheer determination not to fail, and believe me, there were some sleepless nights,” she says. “People don’t realise what high risk operations recruitment agencies are.”

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Source: “AOL Money”