I’ve been at Cox Purtell a bit over two years now, still a relative newbie by this place’s standards, and I recently went back through my own placement record rather than just going on gut feel about how it’s gone. Turns out the gut feel was right. It’s been a good two years, and looking at it properly only confirmed that, and left me with a clearer view of what’s actually worth asking when you’re choosing a recruitment agency.
A broad book, built quickly
Across two years I’ve placed into a good spread of clients, a genuine mix of permanent and contract roles, not a book propped up by one or two accounts carrying all the volume. More than half of those relationships are ones I’d call strong today, the kind I’d happily pick up the phone to right now. For a book this age, that’s a good sign the relationships are built to last well beyond any single placement.
The relationships that followed me
A good number of my strongest current clients didn’t actually start when I joined Cox Purtell. They were relationships I’d already built before the move, and they simply came with me and kept growing. Alongside those, some of my most active relationships today were built entirely in the last two years, which tells you the same thing from the other direction.
Both point to the same conclusion, and it’s one I believe more firmly the longer I do this. A client relationship in recruitment is where you really earn your keep, and it’s built on understanding the brief, finding the right people, and being straight with a client when a search isn’t going well. That’s the part that travels with you, and the part worth backing over anything else.
Retention that holds up
The permanent placements from this period are still overwhelmingly in role. It’s early days for the newest of them, so I’d call that a strong start rather than a final verdict, but a strong start is still worth something. Looking further back, across my full time in Australia, retention comes in well ahead of typical benchmarks for the industry, and that’s honestly the number I’m most pleased with, because it’s the one that’s actually had time to be tested properly.
What two years has taught me
None of this happens in isolation, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s happened here. I’m still one of the newer faces at Cox Purtell, two years in, and most of the people around me have been here a good while longer, four, five, six years and up, with a couple of decades-long exceptions at the top end. People don’t tend to stick around somewhere for that long unless the place is actually good at what it does.
So if you’re choosing a recruitment agency, that’s the question I’d actually ask, not how big the firm is or how long it’s existed, but how long the people inside it tend to stay. My numbers over these two years are one data point. The tenure of the people I work alongside is another, and honestly the more telling one.
