TRUSTED PARTNER OR JOB SHOP: Has Your Recruitment Agency Lost Its Purpose? Smart Employers Know the Difference

Nowadays, it’s common for candidates to be bombarded with calls from different recruitment agencies who are desperate to fire off a CV before their competitors do. But frequently these conversations are rarely lasting longer than 5 minutes… There’s no real interview, no proper registration, and no genuine attempt to understand who the candidate is and what they’re looking for.

And yet the client is still charged a full recruitment fee. For what, exactly? For a recruiter who has invested less time vetting a candidate than you’d spend choosing a bottle of wine.

That isn’t recruitment consultancy. It’s an unacceptable shortcut more akin to a job shop. And shortcuts don’t save time, they create bigger problems: frustrated candidates, shallow shortlists, and clients exposed to the very risks they thought they were paying an agency to avoid.

Clients, often without realising it, are fuelling the problem. They issue briefs that are painfully prescriptive – Russell Group graduate, niche skillsets, three years in a near-identical role in a similar company, all for an entry-level salary. Recruitment agencies, knowing they are in competition, scramble to be the first to tick those boxes.

And in the process, entire groups of excellent candidates never get a look in, let alone making it onto the shortlist. Candidates with the right attitude, adaptability, and loyalty, are filtered out before they’ve had a chance to be seen. The client ends up with a narrow, formulaic pool of applicants who may look perfect on paper but aren’t the right long-term fit.

Because the reality is, success (especially in a PA or EA role) is so much more than qualifications on a CV. It’s personality, judgement, and chemistry with their Principal. And none of those qualities are revealed in a five-minute phone call or a cursory skim of a CV. They only surface when an agency invests time to sit down with a candidate and investigates their motivations, ambitions, what’s important to them and understands how they operate under pressure. Without that, what clients are getting is a gamble or .... a needle in a haystack approach to recruitment.

But beneath the surface, they couldn’t be further apart. One is little more than a job shop - forwarding CVs after a five-minute call. The other is a true consultancy, investing hours into interviews, testing for cultural fit, and building long-term relationships with candidates and their clients based on trust.

The issue is, clients rarely see the difference upfront. It only becomes obvious months later – when the “perfect” hire walks out or proves to be a toxic mismatch. By then, the time and money lost far outweigh the “savings” made by choosing the cheapest or fastest agency, and the damage is done.

The best recruitment agencies don’t play the numbers game. They don’t measure success in how fast they can fire off a CV. They slow down where it matters. They spend time with every candidate, interrogating their motivations, listening for subtleties, and understanding not just what they’ve done, but how they think and operate.

That’s how you discover the candidate who will stay five, even ten years. That’s how you find the PA who can be trusted to guard their Principal’s time, reputation, and peace of mind. That’s how you secure an EA who doesn’t just “fit the job” but transforms the way their Principal works.

That kind of recruitment isn’t reckless. It isn’t rushed. It’s intelligent. And it’s worth every penny.

At Knightsbridge Recruitment, we meet every candidate and client face-to-face, taking the time to understand their work experience, their motivations and values, even their interests outside work, because the small details are often what makes the biggest difference in a successful long-term match. Our team brings a variety of perspectives and approaches to every search, but what unites us is a genuine love of working with people - and the satisfaction of knowing we’ve found the right role for the candidate, and the right person for the client.

Recruitment isn’t an arms race. The fastest agency doesn’t win. The agency that digs deeper, challenges the brief, and discovers the right candidate wins - for the client, for the candidate, and for the long-term success of the hire.

Because when it comes to hiring, speed doesn’t protect you. Fit does. And fit only comes from recruitment done properly.