Start a Recruitment Agency
Build a permanent-placement recruiting agency from a laptop. Fee math, client acquisition, candidate pipelines, and the honest cash-flow reality of working on contingency.
This course walks you through starting a permanent-placement recruitment agency: a solo B2B business where companies pay you a percentage of a new hire's first-year salary when you fill their role. You will learn how the fee model works and what it realistically pays, how to set up the business legally in your state, how to pick a niche where your background gives you an edge, and how to run the two pipelines that make the whole thing function: finding companies with open roles, and finding the people to fill them.
The honest-money promise: a single placement typically earns a fee of 15 to 30 percent of first-year salary (Pin.com), and experienced solo recruiters place a candidate or two a month in a healthy market, the pace working agency recruiters themselves report (r/recruiting thread). The catch is the timeline. You work unpaid until a placement sticks, professional roles commonly take one to three months to fill, and new agency owners on r/recruiting report months before their first fee lands. This course treats that gap as the central problem to plan around, not a footnote. Every money figure in these lessons is sourced, and the failure modes get their own lesson instead of a paragraph.
This course is not about temp or contract staffing, where you become the worker's employer, float weekly payroll, and carry workers' comp. That is a working-capital business with different economics, and it is deliberately out of scope for a course in the under-$1,000 capital band. It is also not about becoming a career coach, running HR consulting projects, or building an audience. If you want a B2B service you can run from a laptop with no inventory and no payroll, keep reading.
The Placement Economy
What a recruitment agency actually sells
The business model in plain terms: who pays, what they pay for, and where permanent placement sits among the four kinds of recruiting firms.
The fee model and the math on one placement
Contingency fees, retained fees, flat-fee traps, guarantee windows, and worked examples of what a single placement actually pays at different salary levels.
Working for free: the cash-flow truth
Why the first fee takes months, what recruiters actually report earning and when, and the runway math to plan before you quit anything.
Fit check: who this business fits
An honest self-assessment before you spend anything: the tolerance for rejection, the organizational habits, the niche knowledge, and the disposition this work demands.
Open for Business
The lean stack: opening for under $1,000
Every purchase a new permanent-placement agency actually needs, in order, with prices, plus the upgrades to defer until revenue demands them.
Licenses, contracts, and the law
There is no federal recruiting license, but a set of states regulate employment agencies. What to check, where, and the legal documents that actually protect you.
Picking your niche
A niche is an income model, not a vibe. How salary bands, your background, and hiring volume combine into a defensible specialty, with the fee math for each.
The Two Pipelines
Finding your first clients
Building the biz-dev machine: where open roles hide, how to build a weekly outreach list, the messages that get replies, and how long the first client really takes.
The fee agreement
The contract that decides whether your placements pay: fee percentage and basis, guarantee structure, payment terms, ownership windows, and the negotiation for each.
Sourcing candidates who aren't applying
Where to find passive candidates, the search basics, the outreach volume metrics that predict placements, and how AI tools fit without doing your job for you.
The thirty-minute screen
The phone call that converts a profile into a placeable candidate: the question flow, the follow-ups that get truth, the red flags, and the write-up your client pays for.
Closing and the fall-off zone
Offer negotiation, counteroffer defense, the dangerous weeks between acceptance and start date, and what to do when a placement falls off.
Staying Power
A real week
The actual shape of a solo recruiter's week: sourcing blocks, screen calls, client updates, and the Friday metrics review that keeps the machine honest.
Failure modes and hard truths
The ways recruitment agencies actually die: the runway gap, fee disputes, one-client dependency, guarantee clawbacks, burnout, and niche collapse. Read this before the launch plan.
Launch
Your first ninety days
The launch plan, week by week, with honest checkpoints: what should exist by day 30, 60, and 90, and what to change when a checkpoint fails.
Scaling, splits, and going deeper
What grows from a working agency: split placements, hiring your first recruiter, the expansion lanes this course deliberately leaves out, and where to keep learning.