Building the first anti-recruitment recruitment agency: SplitHire.

Hi,

I’m Jason, I started SplitHire a couple of weeks ago.

The idea came to me on the bus into Bristol after 28 years of very few good ideas. What happens when you run a recruitment agency without an intense focus on profitability?

Our model actively challenges the profit margins of traditional recruiters. A lot of my friends have not worked with recruitment agencies so let’s make sure we’re on the same page.

Recruitment agencies help people find jobs with employers and 99% of the time work on commission-based structures. They hire people who are motivated by the opportunity to make a lot of money but what comes with that is an intense grind to do so through business development, otherwise known as hassling businesses to work with them.

To cut to the chase - typically recruitment agencies charge 20% of an annual salary as their ‘finder’s fee’, so for a £50k a year salary agencies will take ten grand in commission.

That is a lot of money! And in 2025, there are hundreds of applications per job posting. Yes, a lot of them don’t qualify, but that’s normally because they’re desperately in need of a job so they apply anyway. It’s a really broken system. So it’s not getting any easier to find good people, but agencies do need to adapt to economic changes that make it more expensive to hire people - hence our test of a new business model.

In a nutshell what we’re doing is running an agency where profit margin is not as important as actually helping people. Growth will be slow, it won’t make the team behind SplitHire rich, none of that is the point. The point is finding new ways of working in a broken job market. I’m confident that we can build something better than what is out there and we are ignoring the noise.

You’re welcome to join the journey if you believe in it. This is a ten year strategy for me so I’ll be here. Nearing 40. Older and wiser at the end, hopefully.

Jason