You may well already be using external help. It might be working; it might just have increased your workload. A contract renewal may have prompted you to consider hiring a recruiter directly. In any event, the central question is who will do the work.

At Alderstone Partners, our network includes recruiters with experience across a wide range of industries and markets. We draw on that experience to determine where to start your search and what to cover in a recommendation.

The Industry Experience Represented in Our Network

As of October 2026, our database shows the most professionals in tech, healthcare, professional services, and financial services.

Each figure represents the proportion of professionals who have worked in that particular industry. There will be considerable overlap, as many people will have experience in more than one sector. The figures are based on self-reported experience and do not represent independently verified specialisms.

For employers, it gives a good initial impression of our network. Tech and healthcare are well represented, as are experience in construction, engineering, logistics, and manufacturing.

The finer details in each profile matter more once you know what role you're trying to fill.

What Industry Experience Means for Your Search

Two recruiters could both have healthcare experience, but their backgrounds could differ significantly. One may have done clinical recruitment; the other may have done corporate recruitment within a healthcare company. Their understanding of the candidate, the screening, and the hiring process may differ.

Keep these differences in mind before you go into the interviews.

If you're recruiting for a clinical role, you need to find out what roles they've actually filled, what they looked for during screening, and how much contact they had with hiring managers. The experience required for a corporate recruiting role will be very different.

The same applies to tech roles. A technical recruiter's past work speaks volumes more than their job title alone. The kind of roles they've filled, the difficulty of the searches they've conducted, and their involvement in the candidate assessment process all tell you whether they're the right fit.

That's why we start with the jobs your business needs to have. Examples of the jobs you'll be hiring for are often a good way to start the conversation, and they can be especially useful if you can tell us where your previous searches have failed.

US Market Experience and Career Backgrounds

Currently, 92.50% of our network say they have experience supporting the US market. For US employers, that's a large pool of people with relevant experience to fill your roles.

We still need to check that their market experience matches what you're after. We track industry and market coverage separately. For example, someone listed as both healthcare and the US may have worked in healthcare in other countries; our assessment.

We also have professionals at various stages of their careers. 63.75% have 6+ years of recruitment experience, and 25% have 10+ years.

Experience helps in the assessment (particularly if the role involves running multiple searches or advising the hiring manager on searches). That said, experience alone doesn't answer all the questions.

We also looked at the recent assignments, the personal responsibilities, and the level of support they had in previous roles. Someone coming from a large recruitment team will have a very different background to someone who worked on their own.

Before you go comparing profiles, decide what tasks you want the recruiter to do.

You may need someone to do the sourcing and screening, with a manager overseeing the process. Another company may want a recruiter to be the face of the process, to be the one to communicate with the candidates, to arrange the interviews, to discuss the feedback, and to be involved in the offer process.

Those are different jobs. Those are different roles (even if they have the same job title). Roles in our network include sourcing, screening, interviewing, candidate management, offer management, and communication with the client/hiring manager. Some of our people have also had experience in leadership, recruiting operations, account management, or business development.

When looking at candidates, ask them to describe a similar search. Ask them what they did themselves, what they did when others helped, and how they would have handled it if the first approach hadn't worked.

These conversations make it much easier to compare the candidates. They also help the recruiter to get a feel for what it would be like to work with your team.

Working With Your Systems and Hiring Managers

Profiles all have some experience with Bullhorn, Workday, Greenhouse, iCIMS, Manatal, and Recruit CRM.

It helps if the recruiter knows your system, but it's important to check what actual work they've done with it. Holding candidate records is very different from managing a pipeline or producing recruiting reports.

The relationship between the recruiter and your managers is just as important. The recruiter needs a clear brief, access to the decision-makers, and prompt feedback. Without that, even the most experienced recruiters can struggle to keep the search on track.

Before you hire someone, agree on who sets the priorities and how you will raise issues. That gives the new employee a clear direction and makes performance conversations much easier. Direct employment can be a good model for an organization with a continuous need to hire and the in-house capacity to run a recruiter. It can also be used alongside external support, with the employee handling regular vacancies and specialist providers stepping in for more ad hoc searches.

Alderstone Partners helps organizations source recruiters directly. Your requirements drive the search and assessments, and your team makes the final hiring decision. We do charge a placement fee, but we don't add any ongoing and increasing staffing markup.

If you're considering this option, let us know which roles you hire for most often and which responsibilities you want covered. Then we can discuss which backgrounds in our network are worth a closer look.