UK recruiters are told time and time again how difficult it is to crack the US market. Why? Because the US market is very different from the UK in terms of contingency recruitment. The contingent market is highly fragmented and not particularly specialist. And because being a recruitment consultant isn’t really viewed as a profession.

From my experience opening our New York office recently, here’s what I see: the whole market tends to be lead-based rather than specialist or relationship driven. Those recruiters who handle all aspects of the recruitment process tend to work an entire industry rather than verticals. So someone working in financial services will be trying to source a PA at the same time as a director of product control and an equities IT project manager and then they’ll also dabble in other random areas such as pharmaceutical or architectural. Consequently there’s no real depth of knowledge and obviously no real value-add to the client.

(Hint: larger employers tend to build in-house recruitment teams. So prove that you can add value to them, and you’re halfway there.)

Don’t let anyone tell you that a UK recruiter can’t make it in the US - the opportunity is huge, the demand for a better service is massive, but you must be bold enough to attack the market and prepared to make a genuine effort

Also, SME recruitment firms are typically run by people with little discipline; commission rates tend to be random, and form a high percentage of the net fee income generated, leaving local companies very fragile due to the thin profit margin. Recruiters are often paid a draw rather than salary, and there is little management structure, so consequently staff churn is astronomical.

Recruitment business failures are therefore common, and any good specialist recruiter is likely to work from his or her back bedroom as a sole trader.

The upshot is, if you are trying to staff an office with good local recruiters, then you have to kiss an awful lot of frogs. One comment that particularly sticks in my mind is: “I have a twin brother who’s also a recruiter would you consider hiring both of us as one person? One could work early mornings and the other late afternoons without telling anyone we were different people and everyone will think we are a recruitment machine.” You couldn’t make it up: UK recruiters are not perfect, but the US guys push the boundaries.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the quality of service that clients expect is very low which means that there is a real opportunity for us Brits to raise the bar. We’ve already found that it is easy to deliver above expectations and therefore make a mark quickly.

However, you do have to work hard on the culture and branding to mark the business out as a new product in a very fragmented market. And there is real need to educate the market about what recruitment can be.

Don’t let anyone tell you that a UK recruiter can’t make it in the US the opportunity is huge, the demand for a better service is massive, but you must be bold enough to attack the market and prepared to make a genuine effort to understand the cultural and business differences.

There are easier geographies to crack where the prevailing model is far more similar to the UK market. But the scalability and profitability make the US an incredibly exciting adventure. And as the song goes if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere!