As my business specialises in setting up new recruitment businesses, you won’t be surprised to read the most common subjects I am questioned on are, “how do you set up a recruitment agency?” and “how much does it cost to set up a recruitment business?” 

The first question, ‘how to set up a recruitment business,’ I can answer. But ‘how much it costs to set up a recruitment business,’ is very much like asking how long is a piece of string! There are so many variables that it’s impossible to give a cost for every individual scenario. Every recruitment start-up is different, and your budget will be influenced by how much you can afford to, need to, and want to invest in getting the business going. Even how quickly you want your business to go live will have an impact on your costs.

For the first question on how to set up a recruitment business I have written a series of blogs, this series doesn’t cover in isolation the question of how much it costs to set up a recruitment agency, so that’s the reason for this blog. We’ll look at how you can plan for what you will need to raise before you start your own recruitment business and what you will need to sustain it over those first critical months.

Each new recruitment start up is different. Even if you work in the same sector as other recruitment agencies, you will have an individual business plan, different client and candidate attraction strategies and different ideas on how and when you want to scale and grow your recruitment business. But, before starting, there are some basic things you will need to plan for, like how much you’ll need to live off, what those initial outlays are, and how long it’ll take you to start getting cash to land. This initial analysis will give you some insight into how much it costs to set up a recruitment business.

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