But it could do better: taking recruiters into the creator economy.
Recruiting is one of the world’s oldest industries. You can trace it back to ancient civilizations — even the Roman Empire had agents who matched workers with employers.
And for good reason: matching people with opportunities is an essential human need. Recruiting businesses have been around for over 2000 years because they provide real value. But like many industries, recruiting is shaped by the technology of its time.
A big market of unscalable businesses
Globally, recruiting services represent a $600+ billion market. There are over 160,000 recruiting agencies worldwide, yet 90% of them cannot scale beyond 8 employees, which are mostly recruiters.
The reason is structural. Traditional recruiting businesses rely on 1-to-1 relationships between recruiters, candidates, and clients. The only way to grow is to add more recruiters — an inherently labor-intensive model.
This leads to a fragmented industry of businesses that are unscalable and therefore localized and inconsistent.
As a company, we may work with a recruiting agency and have a great experience, then work with them again and have the worst experience.
This is because experience and results are driven entirely by the individual recruiter with their network, expertise, and execution - not by the agency. Therefore it doesn’t really matter with what agency a company works, what matters is the recruiter you get to work with.
In fact, 8 out of 10 companies need to rely on agencies at some point but they wish they didn’t.
In short: recruiting works — but the business model has not evolved to match what today’s technology makes possible.
The creator economy: individual > organization
The core unit of value in recruiting is not the agency. It is the individual recruiter — their relationships, expertise, and talent network.
Now ask: what if individual recruiters could scale themselves?
What if they didn’t need to start traditional agencies, hire employees, and get stuck in the same operational traps?
What if they could build scalable businesses as individuals — just like creators do?
This evolution has already happened in other industries:
- Writers used to need publishing houses. Today, they build audiences and monetize directly through Substack.
- Video creators used to need production companies. Today, they scale globally through YouTube and TikTok.
In each case, platforms enabled individuals to:
- Build an audience
- Monetize that audience directly
- Scale their business without employees
Recruiting is ready to follow the same path. The recruiter is the creator. The talent pool is the audience. Clients are the monetization layer.
Why nothing has changed yet
Over the past 20 years, recruiting-tech companies have followed one of two paths:
- Replace recruiters — through talent marketplaces or now AI Recruiters. These companies try to disrupt a $600B market by eliminating its core players. Unsurprisingly, changing an industry with that premise has proven to be impossible.
- Organizational tools — like ATSs and sourcing tools. These are useful, but they don’t change the business model of recruiting. They improve efficiency for companies and their recruiters, but they have little to do with the industry and business of recruitment.
Can you truly disrupt an industry by working against its main actors? Can you disrupt an industry by providing small, incrementally better organizational tools?
As you may have guessed, the answer is no.
Here is a question that hasn’t been answered yet is:
How can we take that recruiter-enterpreneur - the center of the industry, as we have seen - into the future with us?
Our Bet: Workfully
Workfully is building an all-in-one platform for the new recruiter-entrepreneurs. It enables any recruiter who wants to make money to build, grow and monetize their talent pools and scale their business as if they were content creators.
Starting a new kind of recruiting business
Workfully empowers recruiters-enterpreneurs to build 1-person, high-margin, scalable online businesses — just like creators do on Substack or YouTube. It enables individual recruiters to:
- Build & grow a talent audience
Own and scale their candidate network (similar to building a subscriber base or following). Think of it as an evolution of a Talent CRM or ATS, but built with ownership and monetization in mind.
- Monetize the audience in-platform
Let companies on the platform open headhunting subscriptions with recruiters, placements engagements, sponsorships, and premium access to recruiters’ talent pools.
- Automate workflows
AI-powered interviews, talent marketing, client management, invoicing, reporting — so 1 recruiter can do the work of an entire small agency and reach 7 figure revenues.
This paves the way for an all new kind of business for recruiters: scalable by scaling their talent audience. Not through billing more freelancing hours or hiring more recruiters underneath them.
This new model opens the doors to a new category of recruiters or career influencers that can now start a much leaner, scalable and digital business.
Example 1: From Agency Recruiter to Solo Business
A great Product recruiter is working at a traditional agency. They want to break out and build something of their own — but starting an agency means acquiring clients, hiring staff, and running operations. It’s risky, expensive, and hard to scale.
Instead, they join Workfully.
They begin curating a high-quality pool of Product talent across Europe — sourcing, interviewing, and organizing their candidates inside Workfully.
Over time, companies on the platform discover and subscribe to their talent pool. They start earning through:
- Placement fees (just like a traditional recruiter)
- Job slot subscriptions (where companies pay monthly for access)
- Audience sponsorships (premium access to specific candidate segments)
Now, instead of scaling by hiring more recruiters, they scale by growing their audience. Their business grows — without becoming an agency.
Example 2: From In-House Recruiter to Side-Hustle Entrepreneur
A tech recruiter working in-house wants to start a side hustle. They don’t have time to start an agency or take on freelance clients — but they are sourcing and interviewing candidates every day, and have built a valuable network of talent.
So they open a Workfully account.
As they screen candidates, they start saving the strongest ones to their Workfully talent pool — the same work they already do, just now done inside their Workfully profile.
Over time, they build a valuable audience of vetted candidates.
As their profile grows, companies on Workfully start following their pool — and eventually, subscribing to it.
Without quitting their job, they’ve built an asset that can start generating income — and when they’re ready to go full-time, the business is already there, waiting.
What this means for companies
As we’ve seen, 8 out of 10 companies still work with agencies — but most would rather not.
Why? Because agency results are inconsistent, localized, and hard to scale. But more than anything: companies don’t trust them.
There’s no way to verify a recruiter’s expertise, track record, or the quality of their talent pool. It’s a black box — and in hiring, trust matters more than anything.
Workfully changes that. It gives companies a fundamentally better way to access talent:
- Transparent and Trustworthy
Companies can browse verified recruiter profiles — complete with:
- Past client history
- Candidate experience data
- Talent pool composition and depth
- Delivery metrics and placement history
For the first time, companies can actually see who they’re working with — and what they bring to the table.
- Scalable and Flexible
With a single onboarding and one ATS integration, companies gain access to:
- housands of specialized recruiters
- Talent pools across 30+ countries
- Coverage across functions, industries, and seniority levels
This gives companies far more flexibility and scale than building large in-house teams or juggling multiple agency contracts.
- Higher Signal Talent
Every talent pool on Workfully is curated by a real human recruiter — someone who’s built relationships with those candidates, not scraped random profiles from the internet.
That means better-qualified candidates, higher engagement, and ultimately better hires.
Workfully replaces agency guesswork with a transparent, scalable recruiter network — one that companies can actually trust. It also gives access to curated talent audiences in hundreds of different verticals and geos, something that does not exist today outside of influencer marketing.
Conclusion
Recruiting doesn’t need to be disrupted. It needs to evolve — to reflect what today’s technology and labor market now make possible with AI and the creator economy.
At Workfully, we’re co-building that evolution with recruiters and companies around the world. If you want to take part in it as a recruiter or company, join us here.