If recruitment is the centre of your world, you may do well to remember that not everybody shares this perspective.

For some City analysts, for example, recruitment does not merit much attention. They see most of the companies as too small. The volume of shares traded simply doesn't make it worthwhile to cover them. For some companies, you will find it hard to find any coverage beyond that of the house broker. Empresaria is a case in point. A recent fundraising and a boost to the share price have taken its value on the stock market to more than £50m. That's still not massive by the overall standard of the stock market. To put it in perspective, a company needs to be worth about £3bn to get into the FTSE 100. Yet Empresaria's recent spate of deals means it is interesting to the corporate finance teams of the City. Last month it announced it was spending £9.9m acquiring 60% of German firm Headway. Simultaneously, it raised £12m, by selling new shares.

With bigger players such as Merrill Lynch unlikely to be interested, due to the aforementioned scale problem, some investment banks with the necessary expertise have been able to command a big share of the recruitment market in deals. Empresaria used investment bank Bridgewell for this deal. Bridgewell assists many other recruiters in their deals, such as Quantica and Hat Pin. Empresaria's growth means it may attract more interest from rival advisers.

It's already attracting more interest from analysts. Kean Marden of Kaupthing Singer Friedlander has written an extensive note on Empresaria. The former Merrill analyst has initiated his coverage with a "buy" recommendation and a target price of 210p. The shares are currently trading at about 170p. Marden says Empresaria has evolved into a rare investment proposition, "a UK quoted staffing agency with meaningful exposure to the industry's emerging markets". He adds: "The transformation is incomplete and additional transactions seem likely."

Analyst notes are a tricky subject. Brewin Dolphin (BD) recently initiated coverage on Hexagon, for which it is the house broker. It had to make the standard admission, which is quite candid: "Investors should be aware that BD does, and may seek to do, business with companies covered in this report and may, as a result, have a conflict of interest that could affect the objectivity of this report."

In other words, you have to take into account that the analyst may come under pressure from his corporate finance colleagues in the same institution not to upset a client, or potential client, by having a 'sell' recommendation.

Inevitably, 'buy' notes outnumber 'sell' notes. Kaupthing is more candid than most about this. It says that 49% of its recommendations in the past 12 months have been 'buy', with 11% a 'sell' and 34% rated 'fair value'. In the remainder of the notes, the stock in question is not rated. In other institutions, the sell 'ratio' is even lower. Caveat emptor.

Brian Gorman