Insights
Your industry lost a third of its capacity. Nobody counted where it went.
01 · Capacity
The desks disappeared before the work did.
34%
fewer consultants at Hays than at its 2023 peak
7.3%
headcount reduction at PageGroup during 2025
-5.3%
real change in UK recruitment gross value added, 2025
+4.4%
forecast growth in recruitment activity, 2026
That is the problem in two numbers. The industry cut desks into a downturn and is now forecast to need them back. Both firms also reported productivity per head rising as headcount fell: +5% at Hays over the year, +3% at PageGroup in the fourth quarter. Fewer desks, each doing more.
Most agencies cannot absorb the risk of getting the next hire wrong. 79.5% of the 30,035 recruitment agencies in the UK employ fewer than ten people, and 35% of member firms reported bad debt in the past year.
Sources: Hays plc and PageGroup FY2025 results; Recruitment & Employment Confederation, Industry Status Report 2024/25. Checked 2026-08-25.
02 · The desk
A recruiter is not a salary. Here is the arithmetic.
Hays
Year ended 30 June 2025
£972.4m
Net fees
6,070
consultants
£160,200
per consultant, per year
Hays plc, preliminary results FY2025
Hays reported £972.4m of net fees from 6070 consultants, which is about £160200 each.PageGroup
Year ended 31 December 2025
£768.2m
Gross profit
4,968
fee earners
£154,600
per fee earner, per year
PageGroup, Q4 2025 trading update
PageGroup reported £768.2m of gross profit from 4968 fee earners, which is about £154600 each.Two separately managed businesses, different year-ends, different mixes of permanent and contract work, landing within four per cent of each other. Both were contracting over the period covered, so these are trough figures rather than flattering ones.
What one desk does over a year
A new recruiter in a new market does not reach a listed firm’s average in year one. The middle case below is not our estimate: it is what those two firms actually reported. The others sit either side to show the shape of the range.
Illustrative model · not a forecast
£90k
Conservative
A desk still ramping, or one running delivery against business development someone else owns.
About 56% of the listed-firm average.
£155k
Mid-range
What Hays and PageGroup actually reported per head, in a year when both were contracting.
Two independent sets of audited accounts agree here.
£250k+
Strong performer
An established specialist desk with a live client base and a mature network.
Above the listed average. Achievable, not typical.
03 · The market
150,000 South Africans already work for companies in other countries.
Offshore services workforce
65,000
2019
150,000
2024
The sector added 115,000 roles serving international clients between 2019 and 2024, and a further 26,346 in 2025, its strongest year since 2018.
Read the unemployment rate properly
31.4%
official unemployment rate, Q4 2025
10.3%
for graduates
Those two figures describe different countries, and only the second one is relevant to an agency owner. There are 1.36 million students in South African higher education and more than 1.7 million across post-school education overall.
10x
Workers with a degree are around ten times more likely to work hybrid than those with no qualifications. Remote work is not a concession granted to junior staff. It is concentrated among exactly the people an agency wants to hire: 28% of workers in Great Britain worked hybrid and 14% fully remotely in early 2025.
Sources: Business Process Enabling South Africa (BPESA); Statistics South Africa, Quarterly Labour Force Survey Q4 2025; Department of Higher Education and Training; Office for National Statistics.
04 · Pay
What the published benchmarks say, and why we don’t lead with them.
United Kingdom
- Published salary guide£27,000
- Job board data£30,177
- Employee-reported£32,451
South Africa
- Employee-reportedR175,978 · ~£8,100
- Compiled salary surveyR312,897 · ~£14,300
Read this carefully. These are advertised and self-reported base salaries for a recruitment consultant, before commission, which in this profession is most of the earnings, and which nobody publishes reliably. The sources disagree with one another, particularly in South Africa. Each is shown separately rather than averaged, because a single figure would look more certain than the data behind it.
They also describe two different labour markets with two different costs of living, not two different standards of recruiter. If the reason you are considering South Africa is the size of the gap in that chart, this will probably not work out. The agencies that do this well hire for capacity and capability they cannot get at home, pay competitively for the market they are hiring in, and keep people for years.
Figures checked 2026-08-23. Converted at GBP/ZAR 21.86 on 2026-08-23 (Published exchange rate). Exchange rates move; treat the sterling equivalents as indicative.
05 · Language
602
Very high proficiency · 13th globally · highest in Africa
English is the working language, not a second one.
South Africa scores 602 on the published 2025 proficiency index, against a global average of 488. English is the language of business, law and higher education, and the majority of professional work is conducted in it.
The honest caveat: the EF index is built from people who chose to take a free online English test, not from a representative sample of the population. It is a good directional measure and a poor substitute for a phone call. Interview for it anyway, as you would for a domestic hire.
Source: Published proficiency index, 2025, checked 2026-08-23.
06 · The day
The strongest argument is also the dullest one.
South Africa runs on UTC+2 and does not observe daylight saving. Johannesburg sits between Sydney’s working day and New York’s, and overlaps London’s almost entirely. There is no interpretation involved. It is arithmetic on a timezone offset, and it decides more about whether a remote hire works than anything else on this page.
Johannesburg
SAST
09:00–17:30
London
GMT / BST
10:00–18:30
7.5h sharedNew York
EST / EDT
15:00–23:30
2.5h sharedSydney
AEST / AEDT
01:00–09:30
0.5h shared
A 09:00–17:30 working day in each city, plotted in Johannesburg time, with northern-hemisphere summer time in effect. South Africa does not observe daylight saving, so the gap to London is one hour for part of the year and two for the rest. Offsets from the Public timezone database.
07 · The year
An hour a day is a fortnight a year. Six hours is a job.
London
6.5–7.5h a day
London: about 1800 shared working hours a year.1,800h
New York
1.5–2.5h a day
New York: about 545 shared working hours a year.545h
Sydney
0–0.5h a day
Sydney: about 65 shared working hours a year.65h
Clock changes a year
2
United Kingdom
2
United States
2
Australia
0
South Africa
Arithmetic on the offsets above, not a survey. A 09:00–17:30 day at both ends, 253 working days a year, and standard daylight-saving periods apportioned by week. Rounded, because assumptions of this kind do not support a figure to the hour. Sydney is the southern-hemisphere case: its summer time falls in the northern winter and removes the overlap altogether.
08 · What nobody has counted
The first question everyone asks has no published answer.
01
How many UK agencies employ South African recruiters?
There is no published figure.
Why not
Companies House records where a company is registered, not where its people sit. The industry status report counts agencies, not the nationality of their staff. The national statistics office counts people employed in South Africa by industry, not who their employer is abroad.
What could be built
A floor could be established from professional-network data: recruiters located in South Africa whose current employer is a UK-registered recruitment business. That is a count rather than an estimate. If we build it, the method gets published with the number.
02
How many recruiters work in South Africa?
There is no published figure.
Why not
The industry body reports more than 1,100 member companies and individuals, but membership is voluntary and is not a workforce count. The labour force survey does not publish occupation tables at this level of detail.
What could be built
Nothing credible without primary survey work. We do not have it, so we do not claim it.
What can be measured instead is this. The offshore services sector roughly tripled in five years. The graduate labour market holds far more capacity than the headline rate implies. The UK industry has removed a third of its desks. Draw your own conclusion. We would rather you drew it from data you can check.
09 · Failure modes
Six ways agencies get this wrong.
None of these are about South Africa. They are about how the hire was set up, which is the part you control.
- 01
Hiring a 360 when the desk needs a resourcer
The most common and most expensive error. A stretched 360 does not need a peer, they need the twelve hours a week of sourcing and admin taken off them. Agencies hire another biller, split the desk, and end up with two people doing three-quarters of a job each.
- 02
Treating the first international hire as an experiment
One hire, no onboarding plan, no named manager, judged at ninety days against a domestic ramp. It fails, and the conclusion drawn is about the country rather than about the setup.
- 03
Paying to a local benchmark instead of a market one
Anchor an offer to the bottom of a published range and you hire someone who leaves in eight months. The agency that read the same chart more carefully gets them.
- 04
Skipping the hours conversation
A UK desk is close to a normal South African day. A US desk is not. Agencies that leave this vague at offer stage discover the disagreement in month two, when it is a retention problem rather than a negotiation.
- 05
Buying a CV instead of interviewing a recruiter
Recruitment is a phone job. Twenty minutes on a call tells you more than any document, and it is the single cheapest step in the whole process.
- 06
No plan for month four
Most remote hires do not fail at the start. The start has attention. They fail once the novelty goes and nobody has replaced the informal contact an office provides by accident.
Every figure above is checkable. The next step is a conversation.
45 minutes · No obligation · Bring the numbers you have been quoted elsewhere and we will go through them.