How South African IT recruitment firms make their money
A recruitment business in Johannesburg or Cape Town usually runs two desks. The permanent desk sells placements to banks, insurers, retailers and the growing number of global capability centres. The contract desk places developers, engineers and project specialists on assignments that run for months and renew, and its margin arrives quietly every month for as long as the assignment continues.
Those two desks reward opposite behaviour. Permanent work rewards urgency. Contract work rewards attention to what is already running. A CRM for it recruitment agencies South Africa that puts both on one board will produce an agency that is busy on permanent roles and losing renewals it never had to lose.
Renewals are lost by silence, not by price
A contractor assignment ends on a known date. If the renewal conversation starts a fortnight before, the client has usually already made plans. If it starts six weeks before, it is a normal commercial discussion. The date is on the record from day one, so the only reason to miss it is that nobody was reminded.
