For UK recruitment agencies

Your consultants place. We find the clients.

Camley runs new business development for specialist recruitment agencies. We put meetings with hiring companies into your directors' calendars every week, so nobody has to choose between working a live vacancy and winning the next account.

Book a 20-minute call → See the price

One placement typically covers a long stretch of working with us.

$0Pilot, four weeks
$0A month, from month two
$0Per qualified meeting
0Client cap, deliberate
01 — The problem

Business development is the first thing dropped when the desk gets busy.

Every agency director knows the cycle. A good month of roles on means nobody has time to prospect, and six weeks later the pipeline is thin again. Recruiters are excellent at working a network and considerably less systematic about building one, because the people best placed to win new clients are the same people filling the current ones.

A

Feast and famine

New business arrives in waves because the effort behind it arrives in waves. We run outbound every week, including the weeks your team has no capacity for it.

B

Consultants bill, they do not prospect

An experienced consultant's hour is worth more on a shortlist than in a cold inbox. We keep the top of the funnel full so their time goes where the fee is.

C

Your competitors are doing it

The agencies adding logos in a flat market are almost always the ones running consistent outbound, not the ones waiting for the phone.

02 — Where the market is

The shortage in 2026 is clients, not candidates.

That is not our opinion, it is what the sector's own numbers say. Permanent placements across the UK industry fell by roughly a third in a single year, vacancies have now contracted for thirty-four consecutive months, and candidate supply keeps rising. For a specialist agency this inverts the old problem: there are people to place, and not enough companies to place them with.

806k → 536kUK perm placements, 2023 to 2024
34Consecutive months of falling vacancies
42%Of agencies report cashflow limiting growth
Sept 2026Perm placements rose, first time since 2022

The last of those is the one worth paying attention to. Permanent placements turned positive in August and September 2026 for the first time in four years, and London was one of the regions driving it. Agencies that have client conversations booked when a recovery starts are the ones that take share from the agencies still waiting for the phone to ring.

Sources: REC Industry Status Report (December 2025); KPMG and REC UK Report on Jobs (September 2026); ONS labour market overview (September 2026).

03 — What we do

We only book meetings with companies hiring in your niche.

Specificity is the whole job. We are not introducing you to "companies in London", we are introducing you to businesses that are actively building the kind of team you place into, approached at the moment that is true.

Week 1

We agree what a good meeting looks like

Sector, company size, funding stage, the job titles you place and the titles worth approaching. Plus the disqualifiers: who is on a PSL you cannot break into, and which logos you are already talking to.

Week 1–3

We build separate sending infrastructure

Domains and mailboxes registered in your name, authenticated and warmed. Your agency's main domain carries your candidate and client correspondence and never touches a campaign.

Week 2

You sign off the list and the messaging

You see the companies before we approach them, which also means you can pull anyone already in your CRM or mid-negotiation. Nothing sends without your approval.

Week 3+

Meetings land in your directors' calendars

Every reply is handled the same day by a person. Anyone interested is qualified against the criteria we agreed and booked directly with whoever takes your new business conversations.

Weekly

A five-minute video, every week

What went out, what came back, what is working and what we are changing. No dashboard login, no monthly surprise.

04 — The maths

What is one placement worth to you?

That is the only question that matters here. Set the sliders to your own fee and your own conversion. The cost column includes the per-meeting fee as well as the monthly, so it is the real number rather than a headline.

Return on the arrangement
5×

New business worth roughly £144,000 against £27,900 of fees.

New clients won7.2
Value of that work£144,000
Total cost for a year£27,900

We speak your language

180 or 360, contingency or retained, terms of business, rebate periods, PSLs and preferred supplier reviews. You will not spend the first month explaining how your desk works.

We never contact candidates

Camley works one side of your business only. Every campaign targets hiring companies, never the people you place, so there is no risk of us appearing in a candidate's inbox.

One agency per specialism

If we are working with a technology recruiter in London, we will not take another one. We will tell you plainly on the call if your patch is already spoken for.

05 — Pricing

Start with a four-week pilot.

You sell on results, so it would be strange to ask you to buy on promises. The pilot exists so that your maximum exposure is a known number before anything begins.

PilotStart here
$400one-off
A fixed four-week window. No management fee.
  • Covers your domains and mailboxes, which are yours to keep
  • Full build: target list, copy, infrastructure, sending and replies
  • We agree a meeting target before we start
  • Miss the target and there is nothing further to pay
Start a pilot →
From month two
$2,000/month
Plus $250 per qualified meeting. Monthly, thirty days' notice.
  • The full engine: infrastructure, lists, copy and continuous optimisation
  • You pay per meeting only when one is actually held
  • Same-day reply handling by a person
  • Weekly video update and a monthly review of the numbers
Book a call →

Where the risk sits

The $400 covers hard costs only, the domains and mailboxes built in your name that stay with you whatever happens next. The management fee is the part at risk: miss the meeting target we agreed and you do not pay it. A meeting counts only when the other side actually turns up, and no-shows are ours to rebook rather than yours to absorb.

06 — Questions

What directors usually ask.

We tried a lead generation agency before and it did not work.

Most do not, and usually for one of two reasons: the targeting was too broad, or the mail was quietly going to spam and nobody was checking. Both are measurable rather than matters of opinion. Tell me what happened with yours and I will tell you honestly whether it is fixable.

Our consultants already do their own business development.

Good, then you already know outbound works. The question is whether it survives a busy month. Ours does, because it is not competing with a shortlist deadline for the same hour.

How is this different from us buying a data tool?

A data tool gives you contacts and leaves the hard part to you. What decides whether cold email works is deliverability, sender reputation and the judgement in the follow-up, which is the work rather than the list. We own all of it, and the infrastructure is built in your name so you keep it either way.

Will you contact our candidates?

Never. Camley works the client side only. Every campaign targets hiring companies.

What counts as a qualified meeting?

Whatever we write down in week one, before anything sends. Usually: the right company size and sector, someone with authority over hiring or supplier decisions, and a live or foreseeable need. If a meeting does not meet the written criteria, it does not count and you are not charged for it.

Is cold email to hiring companies legal in the UK?

For business-to-business email to corporate subscribers, yes, provided the sender is identified and every message carries a working opt-out. We screen out the categories that require prior consent, keep a permanent suppression list, and honour objections immediately.

How soon would we see meetings?

First sends go out in week three, once mailboxes are warmed properly. Replies usually start within days of launch and first booked meetings typically land in weeks four to six, which is why the pilot window is set where it is.

See the companies before you spend anything.

Book twenty minutes. I will bring a sample list of hiring companies in your specialism and the exact messages I would send them. If the research is not better than what you would do yourself, do not hire us.

Book a 20-minute call →

Or simply reply to the email that brought you here.