You have a great candidate and no matching vacancy. Or a vacancy you’ve been sitting on for weeks with nobody suitable in your pipeline. You know a split fee placement could solve this. The question is: who do you split with?

Finding a partner agency isn’t the hard part. Finding one you can trust with your candidates, your clients, and your reputation is.

Where agencies look today

Most recruiters start in one of three places:

Personal networks. You call someone you’ve worked with before, or someone a colleague recommends. This is the safest option but the smallest pool. Your network might cover a handful of agencies, and those agencies might not have what you need right now.

LinkedIn and Facebook groups. Recruitment-specific groups where people post candidate and vacancy descriptions. The reach is wider, but the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible. A group with 10,000 members sounds impressive until you realise that 9,950 of them aren’t looking at your post, and the 50 who are might not be relevant. We covered the broader problems with this approach in Why Manual Split Fee Processes Fail.

Industry events and networking meetups. You meet someone at a conference, swap business cards, and promise to stay in touch. Sometimes it leads to a placement. More often the cards end up in a drawer and the conversation is forgotten by the following week.

None of these methods are bad, exactly. They just don’t scale. You’re limited by who you already know, who happens to see your post, or who you bumped into at a networking event. The agencies with the perfect match for your candidate might be out there, but if you don’t already have a connection, you’ll never find them.

What makes a good split fee partner

Not every agency is a good fit for a split, even if they have a matching vacancy or candidate.

Look for complementary specialisms, not identical ones. The best partnerships aren’t between agencies that do exactly the same thing. If you recruit developers in the North West and they recruit developers in London, you cover more ground together than either does alone. If you both recruit the same candidates for the same clients in the same geography, you’re competitors pretending to collaborate.

Speed matters too. Split fee placements move fast, and a partner who takes three days to respond to a match notification or a week to arrange client feedback will cost you placements. You can gauge this early: how quickly did they respond to your initial approach? How organised do they seem?

Ask how they handle split fees. If the answer is “we’ve done a few informally” or “we just sort it out as we go”, be careful. You want a partner who understands that fee splits need written agreements, clear terms, and defined rebate policies before any candidate details change hands. Agencies that wing it cause the disputes you read about in recruitment forums.

And do the basic due diligence. Before sharing anything, look at their online presence. Check Companies House. Ask around. A quick search can save you from partnering with an agency that has a history of disputes or a shelf life measured in months.

How to vet a potential partner

You’ve found an agency that looks promising. Before you share candidate or vacancy details, run through this:

Agree the split upfront. 50/50 is the standard, and deviations should have a clear reason. If they push for 60/40 without justification, that tells you something about how the rest of the partnership will go.
Get a written agreement in place. Fee split, rebate terms, payment timelines, what happens if the placement doesn’t work out. Do this before sharing any candidate or client information. Not after.
Start small. Don’t commit to an exclusive long-term partnership on the first deal. One placement is enough to see how they communicate, how they handle the process, and whether they actually do what they say they’ll do.
Protect your data. Only share anonymised candidate information until the agreement is signed. If they pressure you for names or contact details before terms are agreed, walk away.
Check their terms of business. Do their client contracts allow for split placements? Some agencies have exclusivity clauses that complicate third-party introductions. Better to find out now than after you’ve invested time in a deal that can’t close.

The cold approach

If you need to reach out to an agency you don’t already know, keep it short and specific. Recruiters are busy. Vague messages get ignored.

Compare these two approaches:

“We have a qualified mechanical engineer in Birmingham, 8 years’ experience in automotive. I noticed you recruit engineering roles in the Midlands. Would you be open to a split fee introduction if you have a matching vacancy?”

vs.

“Hi, we’re a recruitment agency looking for split fee partners. Let us know if you’re interested in collaborating.”

The first message gives them something concrete to respond to. The second is a template, and it reads like one. Lead with what you have, not with who you are.

What a platform changes

All of the above assumes you’re doing this manually. And manually, the bottleneck is always the same: you can only split with agencies you already know and trust.

A platform removes that bottleneck. Instead of posting in groups and hoping, every candidate is matched against every vacancy across every agency on the network. If there’s a fit, you find it, whether or not you’ve ever spoken to the other agency.

The trust problem goes away too. Candidate data stays anonymised until both agencies accept the match and terms are agreed. There’s no moment where you have to hand over details and hope for the best.

And the vetting? Agencies on the platform have already agreed to standard terms, fee structures, and rebate policies. The contract negotiation that kills so many manual splits simply doesn’t happen.

Personal relationships still make placements smoother. But you’re no longer limited to the agencies in your phone.

Getting started

If you’re doing split fees manually, invest time in building a shortlist of 5 to 10 agencies you’d want to partner with. Look for complementary specialisms, check their reputation, and approach them with a specific opportunity rather than a generic pitch.

Or, if you’d rather skip the legwork, Split Fee matches your candidates and vacancies across the network automatically. See how it works for agencies and join the waitlist.

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