A real hiring story, from "I'll just put it on LinkedIn myself" to a placement neither side saw coming....

TL;DR: A business owner who was reluctant to use a recruitment agency worked out that hiring on his own, writing the advert, reading roughly 150 CVs, chasing candidates, interviewing, giving feedback actually cost far more in his own time than the agency fee did. The recruiter he eventually used found a candidate whose CV, on paper, was easy to overlook: her most recent role was driving for Amazon. She's now a Customer Success Manager, and the client now recommends the agency to everyone he knows. Below is the maths, the CV story, and what it says about how hiring actually works in 2026.

"Why can't I just put it on LinkedIn?"

It's the first objection almost every founder raises, and David Monkhouse, friend of Love, previous guest on Love Your Career, industry legend and owner of Active Insights, a leading business in the active leisure and fitness sector, raised it too, on a recent catch-up call with Helen Horton.

"I'm a consummate networker," he said. "That's my job. Why can't I just put an advert on LinkedIn? I've got loads of followers. People know who I am. It's simple."

He's not wrong that it's possible. He's also not alone in thinking it. Nearly every small business owner who's ever avoided a recruiter has made exactly this calculation. The problem is what happens next because posting the advert is the easy 5% of the job. It's everything after that gets expensive.

Why business owners hesitate to use a recruitment agency

David's hesitation wasn't unusual, and it wasn't irrational either. He'd used a local recruitment agency before and it hadn't gone well: "We just got masses and masses of CVs, and it didn't really help us too much." On top of that, agency fees can feel daunting when you're weighing them against a LinkedIn post that's free.

He's in good company. According to CIPD's Resourcing and Talent Planning research, 41% of UK employers made at least one hiring decision in the past 12 months that they went on to regret and the industry-wide mishire rate sits somewhere between 10–25% in a candidate's first year. A bad recruitment experience once is often enough to put a founder off agencies for good.

The maths nobody does before they hire it themselves

Here's where the conversation shifted. Instead of debating whether an agency fee was "worth it" in the abstract, David worked backwards through everything DIY hiring actually involves:

As David put it: "What I don't think we do as founders and directors of small organisations is actually work out how much our time is worth."

That's not a rhetorical flourish, the external data backs it up. Totaljobs' 2025 hiring research found that average time-to-hire in the UK rose to eight weeks in 2025 (up from 4.8 weeks in 2024), with the average vacancy attracting 22 applications that someone still has to read, sift, and respond to properly. Multiply that by a founder's hourly value, the thing most business owners never actually calculate and the "free" option starts to look considerably more expensive than the invoice.

And that's before you factor in the cost of getting it wrong. CIPD and REC data puts the cost of a failed hire at a minimum of £8,000–£12,000 for a junior role, rising to an estimated £132,000 average impact for a mismatched management-level hire once lost productivity, management time, and team disruption are factored in. Hiring cheaply and hiring wrongly are not the same thing as hiring cheaply and hiring well.

Before a single CV was sent: the groundwork that actually made it work

Ask David what made the real difference, and he doesn't point to the final shortlist first. He points to Helen, who ran the process, and the work she did before any candidate was ever put in front of him.

"The most important bit was the time you spent to get to know us," he said. "You spent some time with Jules trying to find out what was the role about, what did we actually need, who were we looking for, what was the culture of the organisation, what was the aspiration of the organisation."

That's easy to skim past as a nice-to-have. It isn't. A recruiter who doesn't take the time to properly understand the culture, the team, and where the business is actually trying to go will hand over CVs that match the job title on paper and still miss the mark. Helen's approach was the opposite, she went deep with both David and Jules on the brief before she ever went looking for candidates.

And she didn't hand off once the search started, either. Helen owned the entire process end to end, the shortlisting, structuring the interviews, and, critically, the support given to the final two candidates in the run-up to meeting David and Jules. As David described it, both candidates arrived at their final interview genuinely prepared: "they understood us, they knew who we were, they knew what we were trying to do." That was down to conversations Helen had with them "outside of the process," in his words, "to give them some confidence, to give them some coaching, to support them to be the best people they could be."

David was explicit about what that added up to: "That's down to your research and that's down to the effort you put in. And again, that's all part of that return on investment." The candidates weren't just sourced, they were properly understood, prepared, and guided through every stage by someone who'd taken the time to get the brief right in the first place. That, as much as any single placement, is what turned a reluctant client into an advocate.

The CV that almost got binned

The candidate David's business eventually hired, is the part of this story that makes the ROI argument feel almost secondary.

At the time she applied, her current role was driving delivery vans for Amazon. Not, on the face of it, the obvious background for a Customer Success Manager role at a business-to-business software platform. David was honest about what would have happened if that CV had landed cold, through a job board, with no context attached: "We'd have probably dismissed it a little bit too quickly. And that's a fault on ours."

What changed the outcome was that Helen thoroughly interviewed her, knowing her background in the fitness industry, her experience with software-as-a-service platforms in a previous role and overcoming challenges and knowing her personality traits.

His conclusion: "Those are all characteristics I can't train. That's their ethos. That's their culture."

She got the role. In an unplanned twist, she also turned out to have previously worked at an organisation David himself had once been a non-exec director of and has since gone on to become one of her own first customers in the new job. Neither side saw that coming when the CV first landed.

What this actually says about hiring well

Take away the specifics of this one placement, and there's a pattern here that applies well beyond the fitness and active leisure sector David operates in:

The best candidates are frequently not the ones with the cleanest, most obvious CV. Algorithms and quick scans reward candidates who already look like the job spec. People who've changed direction, taken an unglamorous role to get through a hard patch, or come from an adjacent industry get filtered out, not because they're wrong for the role, but because nobody had time to read past line one.

That's the actual value a great recruitment partner adds. Not just running the process, but reading the CV that a tired hiring manager with 150 in their inbox would understandably skip and knowing enough about both the candidate and the business to see why it's a match.

The result

David's own words sum up the shift better than any pitch could: "I did go from 'I don't think I could ever use a recruitment agency' to you know, if anybody talks to me, you are recommended."

That's not a testimonial written for a website. It's what someone says on a catch-up call when they've genuinely changed their mind.

FAQ: Recruitment agencies, ROI, and hiring in the fitness and active leisure sector

Is it actually worth paying for a recruitment agency instead of hiring myself? For most small and mid-sized businesses, yes once you account for your own time. Between writing the advert, reading applications (22 on average per UK vacancy in 2025, per Totaljobs), replying to candidates, shortlisting, interviewing, and giving feedback, DIY hiring routinely takes far more founder or manager time than the fee for a recruiter who will handle all these things superbly.

How much does a bad hire actually cost a UK business? CIPD estimates a minimum of £8,000–£12,000 for a failed junior hire, once recruitment and training costs are written off. REC research puts the average cost of a mismatched management-level hire at around £132,000 once lost productivity, management time, and team disruption are included.

How long does it typically take to hire someone in the UK right now? Average time-to-hire rose to around eight weeks in 2025, up from 4.8 weeks the year before, according to Totaljobs research and larger organisations can take up to nine weeks to reach a decision.

What does a recruitment agency for the fitness and active leisure sector actually do differently? A sector-specialist recruiter understands the culture, jargon, and day-to-day reality of the industry, so they can properly assess whether a candidate's experience (even from an unrelated-looking role) will translate, and can represent the business accurately to candidates who've never worked in it before.  They also handle the challenges and twists and turns a recruitment process inevitably takes.

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