How to get clients as a freelance recruiter with no track record

You have left the agency, or you never joined one. You have a laptop, a network, and no case studies you are allowed to name. Somewhere out there is a company that will pay you a five-figure fee on the word of a person they have never met.

Most of what is written about this problem is asserted rather than measured. Percentages appear with no source, get quoted by the next blog, and calcify. So this piece is built only on what someone actually published: what the work pays according to the one body that surveyed it, how big the market is according to the trade body that counts it, and one thing that is documented in writing by the companies themselves and that nobody warns a new solo recruiter about.

What the work pays, from the one body that measured it

Fee percentages get repeated as a range everybody agrees on and almost nobody sourced. There is one survey behind it.

Staffing Industry Analysts' North America Staffing Company Survey found that the most common direct hire fee is 20% of salary, reported by 42% of staffing firms. The midranges it gives differ by segment: 15% to 20% for commercial staffing, 18% to 22% for professional, and 20% to 25% for firms specialising in direct hire.

Three caveats to carry with those numbers, and the third is the one that matters most to you.

The data is from 2021. The public excerpt does not state a sample size, so you know 42% of respondents without knowing how many respondents there were. And the survey measures staffing firms in North America. Nobody surveys what individual independent recruiters charge, anywhere. So this is the closest available proxy for your fee rather than an answer to your question, and a firm-level North American benchmark is not your price list.

That is the state of the evidence, and it is thin. If you were expecting a trade body to have measured this recently, they have not. The Recruitment and Employment Confederation's guidance on choosing an agency carries no direct-hire fee percentage data; its only public statement about fees is that its members do not charge jobseekers. The American Staffing Association's published statistics cover temporary and contract work only: 2.2 million temporary and contract employees in an average week in 2024, 12.7 million hired across 2023, and nothing on permanent placement fees. Neither body breaks out independent or freelance recruiters as a category.

Our piece on what agencies charge and what gets published about it goes through the rest of what is on the record.

How big this market is, and which direction it is moving

The REC does count the industry, and the count is worth knowing before you plan a year.

Its Recruitment Industry Status Report, published on 8 December 2025, puts the UK at 31,345 recruitment enterprises in 2025, up from 31,225 in 2024 and 29,635 in 2023. Sector gross value added was £40.6bn in 2024, down from £44.4bn in 2023. The figures come from REC's annual survey of its members.

Read those two series carefully, because they end in different years. The firm count runs to 2025 and rose again. The revenue figure runs only to 2024, and no 2025 figure exists yet. So what is on the record is that firm numbers kept climbing in 2025 after sector revenue had already fallen the year before, which is a market getting more crowded rather than more generous. That is the honest context for anything you read about how easy this is. The full report sits behind REC membership, so the fee and margin detail inside it is not publicly checkable.

Start counting before you start selling

Because none of those numbers exist, the first eight weeks of doing this are the only benchmark you will ever have, and they are worth capturing from day one rather than reconstructing later.

Four numbers, one line each. How many companies you approached. How many replied at all. How many took a call. How many gave you a role to work on.

After two months you know your own conversion rate, which is more than the industry knows about itself. After four you can tell whether a channel is working before it has cost you a quarter. This is the one piece of advice in this article that costs nothing and that nobody can take away from you.

The policy nobody warns you about

Here is the finding that changed how this article was written.

A great deal of advice for new recruiters amounts to going around the gatekeeper: get to the hiring manager, bypass HR, talk to the person with the actual problem. That advice is given as though the only obstacle is your nerve.

For a meaningful number of companies it is a written policy, published on their own website, with a stated penalty.

Devon Energy states that it "strictly prohibits staffing vendors from directly contacting hiring managers or any other employees about soliciting candidates or inquiring about becoming a staffing vendor." Note the second half. Asking to become a supplier is covered by the same prohibition as pitching a candidate.

Accenture states that recruiting vendors "are not authorized to send resumes or candidate data or otherwise directly or indirectly contact Accenture employees for the purposes of presenting candidates," and requires a signed Procurement agreement plus an explicit invitation from its recruiting team before any submission.

Whitman, Requardt & Associates is the bluntest, in a policy document whose filename dates it to 2022 although the document itself carries no date: "Directly contacting WRA employees or hiring managers for any reason is strictly prohibited and a violation of WRA's vendor policy." The stated consequence is immediate termination of the vendor relationship and forfeiture of placement fees. You could make the placement and not get paid for it.

MHA requires that CVs and approaches from agencies not on its preferred supplier list do not go directly to partners or staff, and that even agencies on the list route everything through a central recruitment team. Non-compliance risks removal from the list.

Four companies, four different sizes. These are not obscure clauses buried in a supplier agreement. They are public pages written specifically so that recruiters read them before making contact.

The consequences are not uniform, and it is worth knowing which is which. Devon Energy's stated penalty is losing your place as a vendor. WRA's is losing the fee on a placement you have already made. MHA's is removal from the supplier list. Accenture requires a signed procurement agreement and an invitation before you may submit anything at all.

The practical consequence is not that outreach is pointless. It is that the manoeuvre most advice recommends is, at some companies, the fastest available way to disqualify yourself permanently. Finding out which is a research task, and the research is free: the policy is usually on the careers site.

So who do you approach

If the front door is procurement at a large company, the answer for a solo recruiter is usually a different company.

Two things follow, and only one of them is evidenced.

The evidenced one is free and takes five minutes. All four policies above are public pages on the companies' own sites, written to be found. Before you contact anyone at a company, search its careers or supplier pages for a recruiter or vendor policy. If one exists, it tells you exactly which door is open, and following it is not weakness, it is the only route that does not end in disqualification. If none exists, you have learned that too.

The unevidenced one is the advice everyone gives, including us, so treat it as a hypothesis. The conventional move is to go smaller and newer on the theory that a company without a procurement function has no such policy. It is plausible and it is not measured, and nobody publishes how common these policies are by company size. What is documented is the mechanism rather than the distribution: a company with a preferred supplier list has already decided who it buys from, and getting onto that list is a procurement cycle measured in quarters. Our piece on who actually controls a requisition covers how those arrangements work and how to spot one from outside, and the hiring companies you cannot win covers reading a job posting for signs the work is already committed elsewhere.

So the reasonable target is a company hiring for something its existing arrangements have failed at, which is a condition you can read from a posting rather than a size band you are guessing at. TheRecruiterKit puts it well: clients care that you solve the problem quickly rather than how many years you have been doing it, target startups, and lead with a strong candidate rather than with your credentials.

That last point is the one worth internalising. With no track record, a candidate is your credential. Turning up with a person rather than with a capabilities deck inverts the conversation, because the company can evaluate a candidate and cannot evaluate you.

On the advice you have already read fifty times: post on LinkedIn. It is the single most recommended channel in this category, appearing in ten of the twenty-six pages examined for this article, and not one of them publishes a number for what it produces. That is not an argument against it. It is an argument for treating it as unmeasured, which means running it as an experiment with a stop date rather than as a strategy. Post for six weeks, count the inbound conversations it actually starts, and decide with your own number rather than with the consensus of pages that have none.

Our piece on where recruitment-agency clients actually come from ranks the channels for an established agency. As a solo operator your version is narrower, because most of those channels assume a brand or a budget you do not have yet.

What to charge on your first placement

Across every source examined, not one recommends discounting your first fee.

The honest position, given what the fee section above establishes, is that there is no measured answer for you. The 15% to 25% SIA recorded is what staffing firms in North America reported in 2021, and using it as your own price list is the move this field makes without admitting it. What it is good for is knowing the shape of the conversation you are walking into, because that is the range your prospective client has probably been quoted before.

What the evidence does support is narrower and more useful: nothing in it suggests a first placement belongs at the bottom of any range by default. The reasoning that comes through consistently is that a discount reads as a statement about the quality of your work rather than about your newness, and that the client who chose you on price will leave on price.

What does move is the risk structure rather than the percentage. Staged payments, a shorter guarantee period, a narrower exclusivity window: those are concessions that cost you if you fail and cost you nothing if you deliver. The fee is not the lever.

What nobody publishes, and what to measure yourself

This is the part where the honest answer is that the number does not exist.

There is no published figure for how many calls or emails it takes a recruiter to win a client company. None for the response rate to agency business-development outreach. None for how long a new independent recruiter takes to a first placement. None for a sensible weekly prospecting volume. Trade bodies, industry research firms and the recruiting-software vendors who publish benchmarks for everything else have none of it. What exists is either generic business-to-business sales benchmarking with no recruiting specificity, or recruiter-to-candidate sourcing data, which measures a different activity.

Which is why the four numbers above are worth the thirty seconds a day they cost. They are the only benchmark that will ever describe your desk rather than somebody's staffing firm.

Where the list comes from

Everything above is about what to do once you know which companies to approach. Assembling that list is the other half of the job, and it is the half that eats the week: finding companies that are hiring for something you can fill, working out whether the work is already committed to someone else, and getting a name and a way to reach them.

That is the part we work on. If you want to see the reasoning we apply to it, the hiring companies you cannot win is the piece that overlaps most with a solo recruiter's day.

Figures in this article are from Staffing Industry Analysts' 2021 survey, the American Staffing Association's published statistics, and REC's Recruitment Industry Status Report published 8 December 2025. Corporate policies were read on their publishers' own sites on 1 September 2026.