Money & greed. It really is that simple.
Let's break it down to bare basics. A Recruitment Consultant should be an individual that helps speed up the recruitment process and take a significant workload of your plate. The better Consultants should be well connected and be able to provide you access to strong candidates that would be otherwise impossible to gain access to. The consultant should be transparent, honest and most importantly, non-intrusive. The way the model should work is that you will elicit the services of a consultant, fill them in on your current recruitment needs and the areas you have been struggling with, agree on a defined timeframe and budget, and then let them work their magic whilst you get back to doing what you do best.
If you currently engage a recruiter and they fit the description of the above to the letter then congratulations. What you have found is an individual rarer than a quark.

THE COST
One thing that is unanimously agreed about utilising a recruiter is that it is incredibly expensive. I'm not going to waste my time trying to justify the costs, we all know it's expensive and I'll address the reasons why later.
Here's the bottom line: If you engage a recruiter to source an employee who will cost you an annual salary of Ј50k then in all likelihood you will end up paying said recruiter anywhere between Ј5k and Ј15k depending on what agency you engage. That's a lot of money for an introduction.
The significant sums of money involved have caused a drastic shift in how recruitment companies approach their clients. Most have abandoned the mature, well informed consultative approach and instead replaced it with a high volume, sales orientated approach. If you were to walk the floor of any decent agency it would feel like...