Written by Ruth
4 of 15 in our We Love Recruitment Series
You can get paid very well in recruitment, very well indeed (i.e. £100k +++), as well as any other industry, profession or job you can think of, literally!
This is one of the things that makes it a "salesey" profession. Your results dictate how much you earn. That said, it's not a 100% commission sales job, with no basic salary like some sales jobs are. In Recruitment you do mostly get the security of a basic salary, which can also be fairly decent; but the majority of your earnings come from commission and sometimes bonuses; and because it's a job which comes with the responsibility of generating the agency's revenue, it comes with revenue targets designed to make the agency profitable.
So fundamentally, you eat what you kill! Yes, that's a terrible turn of phrase, isn't it, but there's some realism in it because, if you don't get results and earn commissions and develop your skills to the level of at least an established Recruitment Consultant, then and you won't earn anything special.
You can probably earn the national average without setting the world on fire, but if that's what you're happy with then you're not likely to have a very stable career in recruitment; because recruitment agencies generally can't afford to put up with that level of attainment for too long.
That is unless your recruitment agency operates a production line style business model and they are happy with you just doing one part of the job. i.e. a resourcing role, where all you do is find candidates all day, every day, forever. Don't get me wrong, that can be perfectly nice, but it's not where the real money is.
Recruiters in the UK make fantastic money, some of the best in the world because we have one of the best-developed recruitment sectors in the world.
Many UK agencies service international clients covering different time zones in the whole variety of industry specialisms you can think of. From the boom and bust industry specialisms like Oil and Gas Engineers, (where the fees the clients pay can be huge but a drop in the price of a barrel of oil can immediately halt numerous multi-million dollar projects globally), to Call Centre staff (where the fees can be minuscule but the demand is very high because staff turnover is also very high).
The UK has it all in terms of Recruitment Agencies and the pay scales to match.
More locally, Greater Manchester is the 2nd biggest economy in the UK and consequently has some excellent (and many not so excellent) recruitment agencies.
Generally speaking, there is a lot of money to be made in the recruitment industry in Greater Manchester for anyone with conviction, motivation and a lifestyle that can allow for a bit of juggling in order to maintain a degree of dedication. Consequently, recruitment can be quite a "young" industry in terms of the age of your average Recruitment Consultant and the culture, or it suits people who are already dedicated workers who are used to putting work first quite a lot of the time.
Now that’s the nitty gritty taken care of but is recruitment life fun!? Take a look at our answer here.