Businesses that have spent years handing over eye-watering placement fees to traditional recruitment agencies are starting to ask a very reasonable question: why are we paying this much? The answer, more often than not, is simply: habit. The traditional agency model has been the default for so long that most businesses have never stopped to question whether there's a better way. There is - and it's paying by the hour.
The problem with the traditional agency model
Let's be direct about how traditional recruitment agencies work. You instruct them to fill a role, they source and present candidates, and when you make a hire, you pay a fee - typically 20 to 25% of the candidate's first-year salary. For a mid-to-senior hire, that's a significant sum of money leaving your business in a single transaction.
And here's what makes it particularly frustrating: the fee is the same regardless of how straightforward or complex the search turns out to be. A hire that comes together quickly and cleanly costs you exactly the same as one that takes months and requires extensive headhunting. There's no relationship between the effort involved and what you pay.
Worse still, the financial structure of the traditional model creates a subtle but real misalignment of incentives. An agency being paid on placement has a commercial interest in getting a candidate over the line - not necessarily in finding you the absolute best person for the role. That's not to say agencies act in bad faith, but the incentive structure simply doesn't put your interests first.
A different approach: pay for the time, not the transaction
Hourly recruitment works differently from the ground up. Rather than paying a percentage fee when a hire is made, you pay for the actual time spent managing your recruitment process - at a straightforward hourly rate.
With Time to Hire, this isn't a pick-and-mix or modular service. There's no choosing between "just the job advert" or "a bit of CV sifting." Our hourly model covers your entire recruitment process from start to finish - briefing, job advert, sourcing, screening, shortlisting, interview coordination, offer management, and everything in between. You get the full service. You just pay us for the hours it takes, not a percentage of the salary.
That single change in how the fee is structured makes an enormous difference - to your costs, to the quality of the process, and to the integrity of the advice you receive.
The numbers don't lie
Let's put some real figures on this, because the difference is stark. Imagine you're hiring a Head of Marketing at a salary of £75,000.With a traditional recruitment agency charging their standard fee, you're looking at:
20 - 25% placement fee = £15,000 to £18,750
That money leaves your business shortly after the candidate signs. You've had no visibility into what it paid for, and you have very little recourse if things don't work out. Now consider the hourly model. A hire at this level - a thorough, well-managed end-to-end process might take around 50 hours of recruiter time. At our hourly rate of £125, that comes to: 50 hours = £6,250
That's a saving of anywhere between £8,750 and £12,500 on a single hire.
For businesses making multiple hires a year, those savings compound quickly. Hire five people at a similar level and you could be saving over £60,000 annually - money that's far better invested in your team, your product, or your growth.
When recruiting with us, you can see a full breakdown of how time is typically allocated across the recruitment process in our process tracker.
The same rigour. A fraction of the cost.
It's worth being clear about what you're getting - because the lower cost doesn't mean a lesser service. 
The hourly model delivers a thorough, professionally managed recruitment process. Every stage is handled with the same level of care and expertise you'd expect from any experienced recruiter. What changes is the fee structure, not the standard of work. You benefit from proper candidate sourcing, rigorous screening, structured interviews, and honest, un-conflicted advice throughout - because the recruiter working with you has no financial incentive to push a candidate through. Their job is simply to help you make the best hire possible, as efficiently as possible.
That alignment of incentives is, frankly, how recruitment should always have worked.
Transparency you can actually work with
One of the most common frustrations businesses have with traditional agencies is the lack of visibility. You instruct them, you wait, candidates appear - and somewhere at the end of the process, a large invoice arrives. What happened in between? How many hours were really spent? What exactly are you paying for? It's often impossible to know.
With hourly recruitment, you have complete transparency. You can see how time is being used, track progress against the process, and have meaningful conversations about what's working. There are no surprises at the end, and no feeling that you're paying for margin you can't account for.
Better for growing businesses
For businesses that are scaling and hiring regularly, the hourly model is particularly powerful. Traditional agency fees can become a significant and unpredictable line item in your budget - a cost that spikes every time you need to grow your team. Hourly recruitment turns that into a far more manageable and foreseeable expense.
It also means you can afford to run a genuinely good process for every hire, including roles where you might have previously cut corners due to cost. A thorough recruitment process for every position - not just the most senior ones - leads to better hires across the board, stronger teams, and lower turnover over time.
The bottom line
The traditional agency model made sense in a world where recruitment expertise was hard to access and the percentage fee was simply the cost of doing business. That world has changed. Businesses now expect more transparency, better value, and services that are genuinely structured around their interests.
Hourly recruitment delivers all of that. You get a complete, professionally managed process for every hire - without the inflated fees, without the conflict of interest, and without the guesswork. Just clear, honest, expert support for the time it actually takes.
For a Head of Marketing role alone, the saving could be up to £12,500. 
Multiply that across your hiring plans for the year, and the case for switching couldn't be clearer.