Benchmark
How UK recruitment agencies sound
Forty agencies, six pages each. The most evidence of any sector, and three in four cannot stop a sentence.
Forty UK recruitment agencies, read by the same code on the same day, six pages each. A trade that sells people with words came out mid-table, with the best evidence of any sector measured and one agency at 96, second only to an accountant who scored 100. It also has the worst case yet of the fault every sector shares.
What was measured
Six pages an agency, nobody named
Fifty agencies were listed, from the listed groups to the specialists. Five block automated readers; two sites answered and then never finished sending a page, and were given up on after ninety seconds; two failed without saying why; one had too little continuous prose to score. Forty remain. That is the largest sample of the five sectors so far.
Each was read the way a Wordprint reads a customer: the homepage and up to five of its own about, sectors and candidate pages as one body of prose, 3,600 words for the median agency, the most of any sector. The published method scores four things and reports eighteen more. No agency is named and no page text was kept.
Same code, same day, nobody the subject.
The headline
A median of 73.5, and one agency at 96
The sector averages 72.7 and the median agency scores 73.5. The bottom tenth is at 61, the top tenth clears 87, and one agency reaches 95.8, the established band, and the second-highest total this method has recorded on any site, behind one accountancy firm at 100. Twenty-three agencies are in the seventies and eighties, sixteen are in the middle band where a voice exists and is buried, and none falls below 40.
That puts recruitment level with accountancy on both sides of the Atlantic, well above the AI consultancies at 56, and below the agencies who sell voice at 81. Rhythm is sound. Variance runs at 8.6 on sentences of seventeen words, and only one agency is flat. Seven in ten words on the page are prose rather than furniture.
Evidence is where recruitment leads every sector measured. The median agency puts 505 figures, dates, names or results into every ten thousand words. Accountancy manages 345, the AI consultancies 423. Salaries, placements, years and offices are numbers. Recruiters use them.
The failure
Nothing lands: thirty agencies out of forty
Three in four cannot finish a sentence early, the worst share of any sector. Landing is the proportion of sentences at five words or fewer, the ones that carry the point after the long sentence has done the explaining. Real voices measured between 15% and 29%. The median agency manages 4.4%. The bottom tenth manages 1.1%, which is a page with one short sentence on it, and it is usually the address.
The top tenth lands one sentence in five. That is the whole distance between an agency at 73 and one at 87, and it is a fault a recruiter can hear: every consultant on the phone says "Done." and "Not this one." and "He is worth it." The website says none of those things. The phone voice is gone.
Recruiters speak in short sentences and publish in long ones.
The shared phrasebook
The words twenty-five of forty agencies share
Fourteen agencies of forty cross the line of sixty phrasebook terms per ten thousand words, and the median is 49, milder than the trade's reputation. What the count shows is how many reach for the same words. These are the phrases used by a fifth or more of the agencies measured, counted as agencies rather than occurrences.
| Phrase | Agencies using it |
|---|---|
| excellence | 25 of 40 |
| empower | 22 of 40 |
| journey | 21 of 40 |
| landscape | 19 of 40 |
| at the heart of | 18 of 40 |
| seamless | 14 of 40 |
| streamline | 13 of 40 |
| trusted partner | 13 of 40 |
| unlock | 12 of 40 |
| robust | 12 of 40 |
| high-performing | 11 of 40 |
| reach out | 10 of 40 |
| best practice | 10 of 40 |
| passionate about | 10 of 40 |
| leverage | 9 of 40 |
Two of these belong to recruitment in a way they belong to no other sector on the list, and both are about people: the one that puts them at the centre and the one that declares a feeling for them. A buyer reading three shortlisted agencies will find both on two of them, and the agency at 96 uses neither. It names the placements.
Who is speaking
The agency, on thirty-four sites out of forty, and thirteen people
On thirty-four of the forty sites the agency outnumbers the reader: "we" and "our" at a median of 516 per ten thousand words, the highest of the five sectors, against "you" and "your" at 210. The product is other people. That is a lot of talking about itself.
The other number is the one worth copying. Thirteen agencies let a person speak as "I" somewhere in six pages, more than any other sector: consultants' profiles, founders' notes, a director explaining why the firm exists. Accountancy managed seven of thirty-one. The sites where a person speaks sit in the upper half. They did elsewhere too. Long dashes are rare, a median of none, with nineteen sites using one somewhere; British business English behaving normally.
What the top decile does
Three habits that separate 87 from 73
- It stops. The top tenth lands one sentence in five. The median lands one in twenty-three. No other measure moves this sector's score as far.
- It talks about the candidate and the client, not the agency. The sites near the top run "you" closest to "we". The middle is the agency describing its own values.
- It keeps the numbers and cuts the adjectives. The evidence is already there on every site. The top agencies let it do the work that the phrasebook is doing everywhere else.
None of that needs a rebrand. Read the about page aloud in the phone voice. Cut what it would not say.
Limits
What this benchmark is not
Not a ranking, and no agency is named here or in the data behind it, which stores numbers only. Not a judgement on the placements: an agency at 53 here may fill more roles than the one at 96. Not an AI detector. And the largest groups are absent by their own choice, so what is measured is the sector that lets itself be read.
Measured 9 September 2026. Forty agencies, six pages each, numbers only.
Where does your agency sit?
Paste a page you have published into the free test, choose the sector, and get the same four measures beside the sector median in about a minute. A Wordprint turns the result into rules every consultant, and every tool they draft in, can follow, which is the point for a business where twenty people write in its name.
Written by Ian, with Claude assisting, and scored by the smarticulate method at 99.4 out of 100 before it went up. Ian spent twenty-odd years turning thinking, his own and other people's, into something a board would act on, and built smarticulate to put numbers on it. His practice is ConsultingPartner.io: enterprise experience, right-sized. Who is he? →
More guides: the UK accountancy benchmark, the US CPA benchmark, the AI consultancy benchmark.