What Is Contract Recruitment?

Contract recruitment is the side of recruitment where an agency supplies people to work for a client for a set period or a specific piece of work, rather than finding them a permanent job. The worker keeps working through the agency, or through their own company or an umbrella company, for as long as the assignment lasts, and the agency bills the client for the hours or days worked. Permanent recruitment is the opposite model: the agency introduces a candidate, the client employs them directly, and the agency is usually paid a one-off placement fee.

The difference is more than commercial. Under the Employment Agencies Act 1973, finding people jobs directly with employers makes a firm an employment agency, while supplying people to work under a hirer's control makes it an employment business (see employment business vs employment agency). Contract recruitment is employment business work, and it brings duties that permanent placements do not:

• a Key Information Document for each temporary work-seeker before terms are agreed;
• the Agency Workers Regulations, which give many contract workers equal pay and conditions after 12 weeks with the same hirer;
• the off-payroll working rules, IR35, where a contractor works through their own limited company and the client decides their tax status;
• from 6 April 2026, responsibility for making sure PAYE is operated correctly where an umbrella company employs the workers (gov.uk).

It also changes the day-to-day work. A contract desk runs on weekly or monthly timesheets, client approval of hours, invoices to the client and pay to the worker or their company, repeated for every live placement. That recurring cycle is what separates running contractors from making permanent placements, and it is where most of the admin in a contract recruitment business sits.