A friend of mine in the recruiting business brought up this fact to me in a convesation the other day. Her reasoning on why it may be a better thing to use an individual recruiter (or VERY small firm) over a medium to large firm was this: Firms are all about the dollar....the dollar follows volume. Churn and burn, baby! What is one of the biggest complaints you hear about corporate America? They only care about the dollar....vis a vie the massive outsourcing we see to other countries. I am not saying that ALL outsourcing is bad, but in my opinion it is definitely overused by many companies who just want an easy fix to their cash flow problems. This is my experience in corporate IT recruiting. 1. Go find tons of requisitions/job orders to fill. 2. Bring them back to the office to be sorted by (in descending order of importance): - Fee Percentage (highest get the most attention). - Ease of skillset to locate. - How well the customer communicates and reacts to resumes. Ok, all of this is fair and we ALL use this to some extent. HOWEVER, when a truly productive customer (or hiring manager with whom you have placed many candidates over the years) comes to you with a "purple squirrel", OR due to market conditions their fee structure is not as high as newly signed contracts.....he/she is SOL. The "machine" does not take into account loyalty. Ok, we all are guilty of this to some degree, but the larger the firm, the more ingrained the processes and the less that cusomer loyalty is taken into consideration. You can pretty much say that is intensified with size. I guess my point is that back in 2005 when I got into the business, we had fewer active clients and fewer employees. When we had a job that was imperfect with a customer who was giving us job orders when nobody else was, we found candidates that fit the description. Period. It was all we had. Sure we grumbled and complained to ourselves, but we did it. Now that things are going well, the the less than desireable ( but not bad) jobs are hardly even given a cursory glance.....even for customers who got you through hard times. If given a spare moment a recruiter may give a quick glance through a job board. Anybody can do that. The main point of this is to say that individual recruiters are far more likely to give every job order a thorough, hear-felt search, and you can be confident that they used all of their available resources. You cannot be sure of that with a firm....and they will ALWAYS tell you that they searched and 1.) found some candidates they were tracking down OR 2) found some candidates, tracked them down but were unavailable or not right for some reason. Very, very few will tell you that it is just not worth their time, because they know you expect their loyalty. If they don't give you their loyalty, then the customer is not likely to return the favor when the better jobs come along. Unfortunately, the customer really can't ask for the resumes of folks the firm is tracking down. Many firms will just throw a bunch of garbage together and say this is who they are tracking. There is no way to be sure. If you want relationships, loyalty, and teamwork - try an individual recruiter. You might like the results!