How a recruitment agency gets recommended by AI

A recruitment agency gets recommended when an assistant can see a narrow, provable specialism and cannot see a wall of bad candidate reviews. This trade is unusual: two audiences write about you in public, clients and candidates, and the candidate side writes far more. An assistant reading about you does not separate the two.

What buyers of a recruitment agency actually ask an assistant

The buyer is a talent acquisition lead, an HR head or a founder doing their first serious hiring.

• "recruitment agency for embedded systems engineers in Bangalore"
• "what do staffing agencies charge in India and is it negotiable"
• "difference between contingency hiring, RPO and a retained search"
• "agency for bulk hiring of field sales staff in tier two cities"
• "how long should an agency take to close a mid level role"
• "do agencies give a replacement if the candidate leaves"
• "which agency can hire for us in the Gulf and handle the paperwork"

The function and the city are almost always in the question. A general "we hire across all industries" positioning cannot be the answer to any of them.

The five buyers, and what each one is checking

• The talent acquisition lead. Has an in house team and needs help on roles they cannot fill. Checks whether you genuinely place that function and whether you will duplicate CVs they already have.
• The HR head at a mid sized company. Buys a relationship across several roles and cares about the commercial terms, the replacement position and invoicing.
• The founder hiring seriously for the first time. Does not know the difference between contingency and retained, and is comparing your fee against posting on a job board.
• The plant or operations head. Needs volume hiring at short notice in a specific location, and cares about how fast you can put people at a gate.
• Procurement or finance. Wants your entity details, your GSTIN, your labour licences if contract staffing is involved, your insurance position and your payment terms.

The fifth one is the buyer most agencies never write for, and it is the one who can stop a deal.

Which sources the assistants read for this trade

On the client side: Clutch and GoodFirms profiles, your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn company page and your recruiters' own LinkedIn activity, and membership listings such as the Indian Staffing Federation for staffing firms and the Executive Recruiters Association for search firms.

On the candidate side, which is the part agencies forget, the following four matter most: Google reviews, AmbitionBox, Glassdoor and public threads where candidates discuss recruiters by name. If those are full of complaints about ghosting or fake job posts, an assistant asked to recommend an agency has read that too, and a cautious answer will simply leave you out.

Your presence on the hiring platforms themselves, Naukri, LinkedIn, Hirist and IIMJobs for technology and management roles, mostly reaches candidates rather than clients, but a consistent, honest job posting history is part of the public record about you.

The licences and registrations that decide what you can legally do

Most agencies present themselves as if recruitment were unregulated. Parts of it are, and parts of it are not, and the parts that are not are exactly where a buyer wants proof.

• A licence under the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, if you supply contract labour above the applicable threshold. The client also needs to be registered as a principal employer. A staffing firm that explains this properly is doing the client a favour and demonstrating competence at the same time.
• EPF and ESIC registration, because for contract staffing you are the employer on record and those contributions are yours to make and to evidence.
• Shops and establishment registration in each state where you have an office, and state professional tax where it applies.
• A Recruiting Agent licence from the Ministry of External Affairs under the Emigration Act, 1983, and registration on the eMigrate system, if you place Indian workers overseas. This one is not optional and is checkable, and an unlicensed overseas placement is a serious matter, so a licensed agency should state its registration number plainly.
• GSTIN and, where relevant, Udyam registration, both of which procurement asks for.
• A POSH policy and an internal committee under the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, which applies to you as an employer and which clients increasingly ask about in a vendor questionnaire.

There is also a rule worth stating on a page because candidates ask about it constantly: a recruitment agency charging a jobseeker a fee is a red flag in most respects, and in overseas recruitment the permissible charges are regulated. Publishing a clear statement that you do not charge candidates is a small paragraph with a large effect on the candidate reviews that clients read.

The three fixes that matter most here

Pick the niche and publish it. One page per function and level you genuinely place: what the market looks like, which skills are hard to find, what compensation bands depend on, how you source. A page like that cannot be written by an agency that does not do the work, which is exactly why it is good evidence.

Publish your commercial terms in plain language. How you charge, what the replacement period is, what happens if a candidate is already in the client's system, when the invoice is raised. Buyers ask these questions of an assistant precisely because agencies will not put them in writing.

Treat candidate experience as public relations. Reply to reviews, close the loop with rejected candidates, and stop posting roles you do not have. This is the one fix in this trade that is not content work, and it is often the one holding you back.

What the fee actually depends on

You can describe the structure fully without publishing your percentage.

• The model: contingency, where you are paid on a joining, retained, where the fee is split into stages and paid whether or not you close, or a flat fee per hire.
• What the percentage is calculated on: fixed salary only, or total cost to company including variable pay and allowances. This single definition is the most common cause of a billing dispute in the trade.
• Whether the role is exclusive or being worked by three agencies at once.
• Seniority and scarcity, since a niche senior role takes a different kind of work from a volume role.
• Volume commitments, which change the rate.
• For contract staffing, a markup on the cost to company rather than a one time fee, and what that markup covers: statutory contributions, insurance, payroll processing, compliance filings and your margin.
• The replacement or guarantee period, the trigger for payment, and whether any part is refundable.

The questions buyers ask that agencies will not answer publicly

• What is the percentage, and is it on fixed pay or cost to company?
• What is the replacement period, and is it a free replacement or a refund?
• Do you approach our employees for other clients?
• How many roles is one recruiter carrying?
• What happens if we already have the candidate in our system?
• Which of your placements in my function are still in the job after a year?

The third one is the question every client wants to ask and almost none does. A written non solicitation position is a page worth having.

A worked example

A twelve person agency in Coimbatore places mechanical and production engineers for manufacturers across Tamil Nadu. Its website says it recruits across IT, non IT, BFSI and manufacturing. Its AmbitionBox page carries several complaints from candidates about no response after an interview.

They make four changes. The website drops three of the four sectors and becomes an agency that places engineering and production roles in Tamil Nadu, with one page per function: production, quality, maintenance, design, and plant level supervisory hiring. Each page says where those people currently work, what makes an offer fall through, and what a realistic timeline looks like. They publish a terms page covering the fee basis, the replacement period, the duplicate candidate rule and the non solicitation position. They publish a page on contract staffing compliance naming their labour licence position, EPF and ESIC registration. And they start replying to every candidate who applies, even with a template, and answering every review.

The narrowing is the part that feels like a loss and is not. An assistant asked for an agency that hires production engineers in Tamil Nadu now has something specific to match, where before it had a list of four sectors that matched nothing in particular.

How to measure it

Build a question set by function and city, ask it blind on more than one assistant, and record both the agencies named and what the answer says about agencies in general. Also run a small separate set naming your own agency, kept out of your main count, because that is how you find out whether the assistants are repeating a candidate complaint or an old fee claim about you. Keep the two sets apart and look at direction over several readings.

What this does not cover

Content cannot outrun a candidate reputation problem. If the public record about you is complaints, the most useful work is operational, and no amount of publishing will change what an assistant has already read. Fix the operations first and the writing second.

It also will not win volume hiring on price. If a client is choosing on the lowest markup for a hundred field staff, the decision is commercial and being named by an assistant changes little.

And it cannot help an agency that does not actually have a specialism. The whole mechanism here depends on being matchable to a narrow question. An agency that genuinely does everything at a shallow level has nothing an assistant can match, and the answer is a business decision rather than a content one. Nobody can guarantee a placement in any answer, including us.

Common questions

How are recruitment fees calculated in India?

Usually as a percentage of the selected candidate's annual pay for permanent roles, sometimes as a flat fee per hire, and as a markup on cost to company for contract staffing. The part to settle in writing is what the percentage applies to, because fixed salary and total cost to company are different numbers, and that difference is the most common source of a disputed invoice.

Should we choose retained or contingency?

Contingency suits roles where several agencies can search in parallel and the client pays only on a joining. Retained suits a senior or confidential role where you need a firm to invest weeks in mapping a market, and where paying in stages buys you that commitment. The honest test is whether you would be comfortable with the agency spending a month on this role and being paid for it even if you hire nobody.

What is a reasonable replacement guarantee?

It varies, and the words matter more than the length. Ask whether it is a free replacement or a refund, whether it applies if the candidate is terminated as well as if they resign, whether it applies once or repeatedly, and whether it survives a change in the role. An agency that has written this down is easier to trust than one that offers a longer period verbally.

Do agencies charge candidates?

A legitimate agency placing candidates with Indian employers is paid by the employer. In overseas recruitment, what a licensed recruiting agent may charge a worker is regulated under the emigration framework, and anything outside that is a warning sign. If you do not charge candidates, say so on your site in one plain sentence, because it is the thing candidates most want to know and it shows up in the reviews your clients read.

How do we prove a specialism rather than claim one?

By writing what only a practitioner knows. Where those candidates currently work, which companies are the usual source and which the usual destination, what the counter offer pattern looks like, which certifications actually matter and which do not, what makes offers fall through in that function. A competitor can copy a claim in five minutes and cannot copy that.

Does contract staffing need different pages from permanent hiring?

Yes, because it is a different purchase with a compliance question at its centre. The client needs to understand who is the employer on record, how statutory contributions are made and evidenced, what the principal employer's own obligations are, and what happens at the end of an assignment. A page that answers those is read by a finance head and a compliance officer, not by an HR manager.

What to do first

This week, look at your own AmbitionBox, Glassdoor and Google reviews as a client would, and decide whether the first fix is operational. If it is, do that first.

Then publish three pages: your commercial terms including the replacement position and the non solicitation position, one function page for your strongest desk written with real market knowledge, and one page on your licences and registrations if you do contract staffing or overseas placement. Then add a function page each month.