UK Risk and Compliance recruitment agencies typically charge between 15% and 25% of a new hire's first year salary for a standard permanent placement, rising to 25% to 33% for retained executive role. On a £45,000 salary position, that is anywhere between £6,750 to £11,250 paid out for the job alone, and thats before any of the advertising, screening or interview time on top of it is counted. With hiring budgets under more scrutiny in 2026 than they have been in years, more employers are asking a fair question: what does that fee actually buy me.
What does a job board actually do?
A job board lists live vacancies from many employers in one place and lets candidates apply straight to the company advertising the role. There is no consultant sitting between the two sides taking their cut for deciding who gets seen and who doesn't. The employer sees every applicant who chooses to apply, not a pre-filtered shortlist. We showcase a variety of live roles: Risk Analyst, NBI Analyst, KYC, AML, Financial Crime, and more, all from junior through to head of level.
How do job boards differ from recruitment agencies?
A recruitment agency is a paid intermediary. It sources candidates from its own database and network, screens them, and puts forward a shortlist, usually three to five people, in exchange for a fee charged as a percentage of the successful candidate's salary. A job board is a marketplace. Employers pay a flat fee to list a role, unrelated to what that role pays, and anyone who meets the advertised criteria can apply directly.
What are the advantages of using a job board when hiring?
Real cost efficiency. The average cost per hire across all recruitment channels sits at around $4,700, according to SHRM's benchmarking data. A single agency placement, charged as a percentage of salary, routinely runs well past that on a mid-level role and considerably further on a senior one. A job board's flat listing fee doesn't move with the salary attached to the role, which means the more a company pays someone, the more a percentage-based agency fee is worth doing without.
A genuinely open process. Research from the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business, has found that hiring through personal networks and referral-style pipelines tends to reproduce the existing workforce rather than diversify it. An agency's own candidate database works on much the same logic: consultants return to people they already know and have placed before. A job board removes that gatekeeping step. Anyone who meets the criteria can apply, not just the handful of people already known to one consultant.
A faster, more direct pipeline. The average UK vacancy still takes around 42 days to fill through traditional channels, and national time-to-fill benchmarks moved out further, to 63 to 68 days, heading into 2026. Every day a role sits with a recruiter before being shortlisted and submitted is a day added to that number. A candidate applying through a job board reaches the hiring manager the same day, with no consultant call, screening step or submission process standing between the application and the inbox it needs to land in.
A bigger pool that converts to more hires, not fewer. Job boards generate 61% of all job applications and 42% of all actual hires, more than any other single recruitment channel, according to National University's 2026 hiring research. An agency typically puts forward three to five candidates per role, drawn from whoever is already active in its own network. An employer choosing from five people is not looking at the same market as one choosing from fifty or a hundred applicants, and a larger pool is simply more likely to contain the best person for the role.
Fewer places for the process to break down. 53% of candidates report being ghosted at some point in a hiring process, and 65% say they haven't received consistent communication throughout one, according to recruitment industry surveys collated by RecruitBPM. Every extra party in a hiring chain is another place a message can get delayed, dropped or lost in translation between consultant and candidate. A direct application to the employer has one fewer link in that chain.
Retention that isn't built on a placement fee. Employ's 2025-2026 hiring benchmarks show that as average time to fill fell from 67.7 to 63.5 days, 90-day retention fell alongside it, from 93.9% to 84.6%. Agencies are paid when a candidate accepts, which rewards speed over fit. A candidate who found a role themselves on a job board, read about the employer, and applied without anyone pushing them toward it has already self-selected in a way a fast agency placement hasn't had the chance to.
What are the signs it's time to use a job board?
If agency fees are taking up a growing share of the hiring budget without a shorter time to fill to show for it, that's worth a second look. If the same names keep coming back from every agency a company approaches, the pool isn't actually widening, it's just being re-presented. And if a hiring manager wants to see who's genuinely applying for a role rather than reviewing a shortlist someone else has already narrowed down, a job board gives them that visibility directly.
Direct Compliance was built around this exact argument: UK risk and compliance vacancies, listed for employers to fill directly, with every application going straight to them and no percentage-of-salary fee attached at any point. Browse live risk and compliance roles to see it in practice.
Read next: Compliance Recruitment Agencies vs Applying Direct: Which Gets You Hired?, Remove the Bottlenecks Costing You Your Best Compliance Candidates and How to Hire for AML Analyst Vacancies (Without Losing the Best Candidates).