What a Career in Recruitment Is Actually Like
Recruitment takes on a lot of people who did not plan to be in it, which is unusual for a career and worth knowing before you join. It advertises heavily, it hires on attitude rather than background, and it is one of the few office jobs you can walk into at 22 with no relevant experience at all.
That accessibility is genuine. It also means a lot of people arrive without a clear picture of the job. This is the ordinary version.
Agency and in-house are two different jobs
This is the first thing to sort out, because almost everything else follows from it, and job adverts blur the two constantly.
Agency recruitment means you work for a recruitment company that several client businesses pay to find people. You are paid a basic salary plus commission on what you place, you have targets, and a substantial part of the job is winning new clients as well as finding candidates. It is a sales role, and the field is honest about that internally even when the adverts are not.
In-house recruitment, often called talent acquisition, means you work for one organisation hiring for itself. No commission in most cases, no business development, and your stakeholders are the hiring managers down the corridor rather than paying clients. The pace is usually steadier, the process work is heavier, and the job is closer to HR than to sales.
People move between the two, most often from agency into in-house after a few years. It is far rarer in the other direction, which tells you something about the relative pressure. What in-house talent acquisition is actually like covers that side on its own terms.
What the job actually involves
On the agency side, the week is phone-heavy in a way that surprises people. Taking a brief from a client, searching a database and LinkedIn, ringing candidates who were not expecting the call and are frequently not looking, reformatting CVs, writing the summary that goes with them, arranging interviews around three diaries, and chasing feedback that does not come.
Threaded through it is business development, which means ringing companies who have not asked to hear from you. And underneath all of it is measurement: calls, CVs sent, interviews arranged, placements closed, usually visible to the whole office.
Could I work in Recruitment? goes into the texture in more detail, including the situations that define the job rather than describe it.
The main specialisms
Within agency work, the desk you sit on changes the job significantly.
Permanent recruitment, sometimes called contingency. You are paid a fee when someone you introduced starts a permanent job. Fewer, larger wins, and long gaps between them.
Temporary and contract. You place people on shorter assignments and earn a margin for as long as they are working. Higher volume, more day-to-day admin, more predictable income once a desk is established.
Executive search, often called headhunting. Senior roles, retained rather than contingent, much longer timelines, far more research and far fewer calls.
Resourcing or sourcing. A split role where you find and screen candidates but do not manage the client relationship. Common as an entry point, and the closest agency work gets to being non-sales.
A "360" role means you do the whole cycle yourself, business development and candidate delivery both. It is the term you will see in adverts and the fullest version of the agency job.
On the in-house side the splits are different again: talent acquisition partners aligned to parts of the business, sourcers who find people, and recruitment operations who own the systems and the reporting.
How people get in
There is no licence and no required qualification. The National Careers Service lists five routes into recruitment consultancy: a degree in any subject, with human resources, marketing, public relations or business development preferred; a college qualification in business studies or business administration, or a T Level in Management and Administration; the Recruiter Level 3 Advanced Apprenticeship, which it says takes up to two years; starting as an admin assistant in an agency and training on the job; or applying directly with relevant experience from a field like HR or business development.
In practice the direct and admin-assistant routes are the common ones, and agencies hire far more on how you come across on a call than on what you studied. What jobs do not require a degree puts recruitment in context alongside other fields where a degree is common but not required, and how to change careers with no experience covers building evidence when your CV does not yet show it.
What it asks of you
Resilience at volume, the ability to sell without becoming a nuisance, and enough judgement to tell a good match from a convenient one. The skills a recruitment career actually asks for goes through them properly, including the ones that never appear on job adverts.
The part people underestimate is not the rejection itself. It is that most of the rejection is impersonal and arrives constantly, and you have to keep making the next call at the same energy.
What it pays
Recruitment is the field where published salary figures are least useful on their own, because so much of the money is commission and almost no published source says whether it is counting that. Recruitment salaries in the UK sets out what two named sources say and, more importantly, what neither of them tells you.
How to find out whether it suits you
Recruitment is unusually hard to judge from the outside, because the thing that decides whether you last is not whether you can do the tasks. It is how you feel on a Thursday when the week has not worked, and no amount of reading tells you that.
If HR is the other career you are weighing, what a career in HR is actually like covers the ordinary version of that one. And if you are already further along here, recruitment interview questions and what they are really testing is the next step.