Blog
Guidance for people running recruitment agencies
Practical writing on the Conduct Regulations, right to work checks and AWR compliance, from the team building AgencyOptix.
Why tracking assignment length matters for AWR compliance
A spreadsheet tracking start dates works fine for a handful of placements. It gets genuinely hard to trust once an agency is running hundreds of assignments across multiple hirers at once.
Spreadsheets vs compliance software: when does an agency actually need to switch?
A spreadsheet isn't wrong for a small agency — it's wrong once nobody can say with confidence who's supposed to be checking it.
What happens if a right to work check gets missed?
A civil penalty is the headline risk, but the practical damage — to a client relationship and to the agency's own standing with the EAS — often outlasts the financial cost.
How much time do recruitment consultants lose to admin?
Every consultant has a strong opinion about this and few can back it with a real number — an invented statistic wouldn't be worth more than the opinion itself.
Reducing no-shows on temporary placements without over-engineering the fix
A worker not turning up costs the agency a hirer relationship, not just one shift — and most of the fixes worth trying are about communication timing, not stricter penalties.
Building an onboarding checklist that's actually compliant
The agencies with the fewest compliance gaps tend to be the ones where onboarding is a fixed sequence, not a set of steps a busy consultant remembers to do in roughly the right order.
What an EAS audit actually looks for, and how to keep your records ready for one
An inspection tends to focus on the paper trail rather than good intentions — and the agencies that come through one smoothly are usually the ones that never had to scramble to reconstruct anything.
Managing timesheets across multiple clients without losing the thread
Every client wants timesheets their own way. The agencies that handle this well don't fight that — they build one clean internal record and adapt the output, not the source of truth.