About our respondents
The UK Recruitment Index is based on the responses of APSCo member firms and other recruitment businesses.
Size of firms
Net fee income for 2021-2022 full financial year
For the 2021/22 financial year, 40% of firms had net fee income less than £2 million, 38% between £2 million and £10 million, with 21% earning greater than £10 million.
Sector focus
Main sectors that firms specialise in
Just over half the firms (55%) are active in the IT sector, while 30% are involved in engineering and technical placements – a distribution that is perhaps unsurprising given the UK economy’s shift to greater use of technology, further accelerated by the pandemic.
Although the number of recruitment firms specialising in IT has increased from 36% to 55% over the past three years, the 2019 and 2022 results are otherwise broadly similar. Professional services, business admin, support and HR, and accounting and finance are also popular sectors with more than a quarter of firms operating in each of these three.
Recruitment in the health and social care sector has the potential for significant growth given the pressures on the NHS, but there remains a big challenge for all recruitment firms in finding people with the rights skills in this sector – a situation that continues to be exacerbated by a shortage of overseas workers since Brexit.
Looking forward, we expect the makeup of this chart to remain broadly the same over the next 12 months.
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