This week’s post and podcast are about recruitment pricing strategies and how to communicate the real value of your services. This podcast is one of our expert interviews, where I got an opportunity to speak to Jon Brooks, who has a unique position in our industry. He’s the only person in the world who specialises exclusively in helping recruitment companies with pricing strategies.

We covered everything from why 66% of recruitment work goes unpaid on contingent models to the surprising truth about winning retained business. If you’ve ever struggled to justify your fees or wondered how to move away from contingent work, this conversation is packed with practical insights you can use immediately.

Understanding The Value Problem in Recruitment

Jon started his career at Reed, one of the UK’s biggest recruitment brands, working directly with founder Sir Alec Reed. That experience taught him something fundamental about business: when you create different services, you need to price them differently.

If you price everything the same way, it looks the same to your clients.

Here’s the thing: Price isn’t just a number. It’s a signal.

It positions what you do. If you launch a new service and charge the same as your existing offering, clients will think it’s just fancy words with no real difference. But when your price reflects genuine value, it helps define and position what you’re actually selling.

Jon worked with a management consultancy that specialised in value and pricing. The consultants had never worked in recruitment before. They came from law firms, global engineering companies, and manufacturing businesses.

That outside perspective was gold. It showed him how other industries think about pricing and how those principles could work for recruitment consultants sitting with clients.

He left Reed about six or seven years ago to build his consultancy. The timing was questionable (just before COVID), but he’s been helping recruitment owners ever since.

Interestingly, every agency must get pricing right, yet hardly anyone focuses on it properly. We all learn on the job, but research and knowledge from other sectors can make a huge difference.

Why Recruitment Has a Future Despite AI

We talked about AI and technology and whether recruitment has a future. It’s a fair question. LinkedIn allows anyone to find anyone, yet recruitment and search businesses have become more valuable since it became mainstream.

Fees have increased, and we are more important than ever.

AI is bringing massive change, that’s certain. We’re already seeing AI-generated applications overwhelm hiring managers. However, recruitment companies have always adapted to technology shifts. Think about the journey from motorbike couriers driving CVs around London to digital databases, job boards, and LinkedIn. People predicted the end of recruiters; companies found new ways to add value each time.

Here’s Jon’s prediction: AI tools that help manage candidate applications won’t be cheap. Individual hiring managers in most companies won’t get access to the best solutions because they only recruit occasionally.

It’s too expensive to give every manager premium AI tools. However, a smart recruitment company can invest in these solutions and spread the cost across hundreds of clients.

That’s what companies have always done brilliantly. You invest in LinkedIn licences because you use them constantly across multiple clients.

The same principle will apply to AI recruitment tools.

Companies will have access to better technology, processes, and ways to cut through the noise. Your value will be in helping clients through the complexity that AI is creating.

The Real Difference Between Contingent and Retained

Let’s discuss the truth of contingent recruitment. Jon laid it out clearly: with a typical success rate of 33%, you’re not getting paid for your work 66% of the time. That’s devastating for your business and your self-worth. It affects how you value yourself and your services.

But here’s the mistake most companies make when trying to move to retained work: They sell the retainer and list all the benefits of retained recruitment. They’re doing the right thing, tactically focusing on benefits rather than features, but strategically, they’re getting it completely wrong.

A retainer is just a payment schedule. There’s no intrinsic value in when money gets paid. The value is in your service, not in the timing of payments. If you explain why retention is better for you, clients will immediately see through it. They’re not interested in what’s better for your business.

So, what’s the answer? Create demand for your service, not for the retainer. When clients desperately want to work with you, they’ll pay whatever you ask. They’ll work to your terms. It becomes a non-issue.

Jon gave a brilliant example. When he was putting together his book, he’d seen a designer whose work he loved online. He thought, “If I ever make a book, that’s the person I want.”

When the time came, he was willing to pay pretty much anything within his budget. He would have paid upfront, in instalments, however the designer wanted. The demand was so high that payment terms didn’t matter.

That’s what you need to create with your clients. Get them to the point where they say, “Yes, I really want to work with you. How can I work with you?” Then it’s easy to say: “You pay some fee now, some more later, and here’s how it works.” They’ll say yes because they’ve already decided they want to work with you.

Think about any supplier you’ve desperately wanted to work with. Maybe it was a particular consultant, a software provider, or a service you’d heard brilliant things about. When you finally got to work with them, did you quibble about payment terms? Probably not. You were just pleased they had space for you. That’s the position you want to be in with your clients.

How To Actually Demonstrate Your Value

Most recruitment companies already have huge value within them. The problem isn’t that the value doesn’t exist. The problem is that clients can’t see it. You’re not presenting it in a way that makes it obvious.

Jon broke this down into a simple framework. First, you need to understand your value. What do you do that’s genuinely different and better?

Then, you need to map that value to your clients’ concerns.

What keeps them awake at night? What problems are they trying to solve? Finally, and this is the crucial bit, you must present it so that clients can immediately understand and recognise that value.

Think about your typical client conversation. You might be brilliant at finding passive candidates, understanding company culture, and managing complex stakeholder processes. But they won’t see the value if you’re not articulating those capabilities in language that resonates with your client’s situation. They’ll see another recruiter offering to find them people.

Here’s what changes everything: specificity. Instead of saying, “We have a great network,” say, “We placed three finance directors in your sector in the last six months, including one who increased their company’s profitability by 40% in the first year.” Instead of saying, “We understand your market,” say, “We’ve tracked salary movements in your region for five years and can show you exactly why you’re losing candidates at the offer stage.”

Value is always in the client’s eye. What matters to them? What outcomes are they trying to achieve? When you can draw a direct line from what you do to outcomes they care about, pricing conversations become completely different.

This is where most companies fall. They know they’re good at their work, and their clients tell them they’re happy. But can they articulate exactly why they’re better than the five companies the client could call? Can they explain their value in concrete, measurable terms? Usually not. And that’s why they compete on price or get pushed into contingent terms.

Let’s get practical about this.

Say you specialise in engineering recruitment. You don’t just say “we know the engineering market.” You say: “We’ve placed 47 engineers in the last 18 months with an average time to hire of 32 days, compared to the industry average of 58 days. That means your projects start faster, you beat competitors to market, and you save roughly £15,000 per hire in lost productivity.”

See the difference? One is vague. The other is concrete, specific, and directly tied to business outcomes the client cares about. That second version makes it easy for a client to justify your fee because they can see exactly what they’re getting and why it matters.

Building Your Value Proposition Step by Step

Jon emphasised that this isn’t about making things up or exaggerating what you do. It’s about being honest and clear about the value you deliver. Start with what you know. Look at your last ten placements. How long did they take? What happened next? Did those people perform well? What feedback did you get?

Then think about your process. What do you do that other companies don’t? Maybe you interview every candidate face-to-face. Perhaps you do reference checks that go beyond the standard questions. Maybe you provide market intelligence reports with every search. Possibly you have a 12-month guarantee. These things all have value, but only if you articulate them clearly.

Now consider your relationships.

Do you have access to passive candidates who aren’t on job boards?

Do you understand the culture of companies in your sector well enough to predict who’ll fit? Have you built trust with candidates so they tell you th