Recruiters near you

With a recruiter, the placed person becomes your employee on your contract, and the recruiter's involvement ends at start date apart from a guarantee period. You set the award classification, run the payroll, pay superannuation and carry the dismissal risk.

With a staffing or labour hire agency, the agency employs or engages the worker and supplies them to you. The Fair Work Commission explains the structure plainly: the agency has a contract with the worker and pays them, the agency has a contract with a host firm to supply workers, and the host firm pays the agency rather than the worker. A labour hire worker cannot apply for unfair dismissal against the host firm, but may apply against the agency.

With executive search, the firm is retained, paid in instalments regardless of outcome, and does original mapping rather than working a database. It suits roles where the best candidates are employed and not looking. It is the most expensive of the three and the wrong tool for volume hiring.

business.gov.au sets out the sequence: review your current staff structure, create a position description, find candidates, evaluate applications, organise and run interviews, then make an offer. It points out that you should write position descriptions from scratch, because another business's role with the same title may want a completely different person.

The brief a recruiter needs goes beyond the position description: the two or three things the person must be able to do in the first six months, what you will trade off, the salary range you can actually approve, who interviews and when they are available, and the award classification if an award applies. Recruiters lose good candidates to slow scheduling more often than to money.

business.gov.au also notes that the job you advertise must comply with current legislation, including offering at least the minimum pay and conditions and meeting anti-discrimination and equal opportunity requirements. The Fair Work Act separately prohibits advertising employment at a rate of pay that would contravene the Act or a fair work instrument.

Candidate information is personal information. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner describes the thirteen Australian Privacy Principles as the cornerstone of the privacy framework in the Privacy Act 1988, governing collection, use and disclosure of personal information, governance and accountability, integrity and correction, and individuals' rights to access their own information. A breach of an Australian Privacy Principle is an interference with the privacy of an individual and can lead to regulatory action and penalties.

In practice that means a recruiter should collect only what is needed, tell candidates how their information will be used and who it will be given to, hold it securely, and have a retention position rather than an indefinite database. Ask what happens to unsuccessful candidates' records.

Work rights need checking for non-citizens before employment starts, using the Department of Home Affairs visa entitlement verification service. Agree in the terms of business whether the recruiter performs that check or you do, and keep the evidence either way.

Candidate ownership is the most common. Two agencies introduce the same person, or the person had already applied directly six months earlier, and both claim the fee. The fix is procedural: an introduction is only effective if it is made in writing, is acknowledged, and is the first introduction, with a stated period after which it lapses. Keep your own record of direct applicants.

The second is the package base for the fee. Agree whether the percentage applies to base salary, or to base plus superannuation, bonus, car allowance and other components, and whether it is calculated on the offer or on actual first-year earnings.

The third is a mismatch between what the recruiter told the candidate and what the contract says. Hours, flexibility, review timing and bonus eligibility are the usual culprits. Give the recruiter the real terms and ask them to confirm in writing what they represented.