The band, the team's last two failures, and a straight answer either way.

No, and it never will. The employer pays our fee — 20% of the first-year base salary on a permanent hire. No candidate has ever paid us anything, and any recruiter who asks you to should be reported rather than paid.

It biases us toward a higher offer, which happens to be aligned with you — but you're right that it isn't a neutral position, so here's the check on it. We publish our band data, so you can see whether the number we're pushing you toward is the market or just our invoice. And we've advised eleven people to turn down a role, which earned us exactly nothing. Ask us for that number again on a call; it's the one we're proudest of.

Not from us. Your CV moves only with your named permission, for a named company, every single time. You can also list companies you'd rather we never approach — including your own — and that list is honoured permanently, not just for this search.

Register anyway and tell us the number you'd move for. We'll contact you when something clears it, which for most people is once or twice a year rather than once a week. About a third of our placements are people who weren't looking when we first spoke to them.

Twenty-one days is our median from a client's brief to a signed offer, and you'd typically enter around day nine. From your first call to an offer is more often two to three weeks. If a client drags past two weeks between stages we'll tell you, because it's usually a signal about how they operate.

The real reason, within two working days, in the client's words where they've given them. If they refuse to give a reason, we tell you that they refused rather than inventing a kinder one. We also tell you whether we'd put you forward for something similar, honestly.

Yes, and not with generic advice. You get the format, the names and job titles of everyone in the room, what the last person who did well said, and what the team is genuinely worried about. Marcus will do a technical dry run with engineering candidates if you want one.

Take it seriously and tell us. Roughly half the counter-offers we've seen were the employer buying time, and roughly half were a genuine correction of an underpayment. We'll help you work out which one you've got, even where the honest answer means we lose the fee — that has happened four times.

Yes — 38 assignments since 2019, average length 5.4 months. Your day rate and our margin are both printed on the timesheet, so you always know the difference between what the client pays and what you take. Our margin is 18% of the client rate and doesn't change.

It sits in our system until you ask us to delete it, and then it's gone within five working days including from backups. We don't sell it, we don't share it with other agencies, and we don't add you to a mailing list you didn't ask for. Email the address in the footer and one of four people will action it.