Full Desk Recruiter Meaning: Full Desk vs 360 vs 180 vs Split Desk, in Plain Terms
What a full desk recruiter is, how it differs from 360, 180, split desk and split fee, what each model costs an agency, and a third option.
A full desk recruiter wins the client and finds the candidate. One person takes the job brief, sources and screens the people, sends the shortlist, and negotiates both the offer and the agency's fee.
That is the whole definition. The confusion starts with the other names: 360, 180, split desk, split fee and full cycle. This post puts them in one place, explains why agencies split the desk, what each model costs you, and a third option we built PlacementFlow around.
What a full desk recruiter does
The UK government's job profile for a recruitment consultant reads like a full desk job description. Its day-to-day tasks include "contact companies and organisations to generate new business", "interview, test and match candidates to suitable jobs" and "negotiate your agency's fees" (National Careers Service).
That is two jobs in one seat:
- The client side. Finding companies that hire, winning the job, taking the brief, agreeing terms, keeping the account.
- The candidate side. Sourcing, screening, interviewing, preparing people for interviews, managing the offer.
A full desk recruiter does both, for the same roles, with the same clients. Many agencies call the same job a 360 role, because the recruiter goes all the way round the circle.
Full desk vs 360 vs 180 vs split desk vs split fee
| Term | Who does what | Where it happens |
|---|---|---|
| Full desk | One recruiter owns both the client and the candidate side | Inside one agency |
| 360 | Another name for full desk | Inside one agency |
| 180 | One recruiter owns one half, usually the candidate side (often called a resourcer or delivery consultant) | Inside one agency |
| Split desk | The two halves are split between people: an account manager on the client side, a recruiter on the candidate side | Inside one agency |
| Split fee | Two agencies share one placement: one has the job, the other has the candidate | Between two agencies |
The last two get mixed up all the time. A split fee is "when two recruitment agencies fill one vacancy together and share the placement fee". One split-fee marketplace even warns that the words overlap: "split desk", it says, "inside a single agency it can also mean a 360 role divided into separate candidate and client desks" (Split Fee). In this post, split desk always means the inside-one-agency version.
Full desk vs full cycle
"Full cycle recruiting" is a different thing. It usually describes an in-house recruiter who runs a hiring process from the job opening to the start date for their own employer. There is no client to win, because the client is the company they work for. A full desk recruiter has that whole cycle plus the business development on top.
Why agencies split the desk
Splitting is common. Bullhorn found that "More than 60 percent of staffing firms run a split-desk model, according to the 2017 North American Staffing & Recruiting Trends Report" (Bullhorn). That figure is from 2017, so treat it as a sign that splitting is normal, not as today's exact share.
The reasons are practical. Selling and delivering are different skills and different days. A split lets each person do one of them well, and it lets a growing agency hire for one half without finding someone who is good at both.
What splitting costs you
The price of a split desk is the handoff. The person who heard the client describe the role is not the person describing it to candidates. Detail gets lost, and someone has to keep the two halves pointing the same way.
The same Bullhorn survey asked split-desk firms how they handle this. "Regular meetings were by far the most popular method for creating alignment at split-desk firms." Some firms tie pay together: "Commission is paid to both the recruiter and the salesperson so there is an incentive to work together" (Bullhorn).
Meetings and shared commission work. They are also overhead that exists only because the work was split.
What a full desk costs you
The price of a full desk is the load. One practitioner wrote on ERE that "running a full recruitment desk is tough", and that "Full desk recruiters these days need to be marketers, personal brand specialists, salespeople, hostage negotiators" (ERE), plus personal assistants, headhunters and community builders. That was 2018. The list has not got shorter.
Survey data shows where the hours go. For its GRID 2025 report, Bullhorn "surveyed more than 1,500 recruitment industry professionals". Asked what they would most like to automate, agencies picked search and match first, and "A close second was winning new business" (Bullhorn GRID 2025). Search was also the biggest time sink: "Recruiters currently spend an average of 14.6 hours each week searching for the right candidates to fill roles" (Bullhorn).
Read that together and it is the full desk problem in two lines. The two halves of the job that take the most time are the two halves a full desk recruiter carries alone. Bullhorn is an ATS vendor and these are survey answers, so take them as what agencies report, not as a measurement.
A third option: keep one person, move the repetitive work
There is a model between "one person does everything" and "split the people". Keep both relationships with one recruiter, and move the repetitive part of both halves to software.
That is the shape we built PlacementFlow around. The person who takes the client's brief should be the one talking to the candidate. So one PlacementFlow desk runs a candidate lane and a client lane side by side. Every desk belongs to one recruiter, and once someone is interested, the conversation moves to that recruiter's own mailbox.
On that desk, PlacementFlow runs the repetitive top of both halves: outreach, reply sorting, screening, scheduling. The discovery call, the submission and the offer stay with the recruiter.
In practice:
- The candidate lane. A sourcing campaign is either a role campaign or a talent-pool campaign. A role campaign names a live search: the recruiter fills in typed fields (the job title, and optionally the area, the kind of client and a pay band) and the platform writes one sentence about the role from them. A talent-pool campaign names no role. Our cold sourcing emails reach candidates in the United States only.
- The client lane. Business development campaigns reach decision-makers with an email sequence the recruiter writes. Sends stop when someone replies, and an interested reply is handed to the recruiter, who takes the conversation to a discovery call.
- Screening. Candidates who reply are usually sent a private link with a few questions, answered in a web chat. The questions marked as must-knows are asked first. A wrong or missing answer puts a flag on the response for the recruiter to read. It never rejects anyone on its own.
- The human calls. No submission goes to a client without the recruiter's approval, and counter-offers always go to a person.
The honest way to describe the gain is throughput, not headcount. A recruiter working this way can handle roughly two to three times the operational volume of a recruiter doing all of it by hand. The recruiter still makes every judgment call. What the AI does and never does is listed surface by surface in What the AI Does, and Never Does.
Which model fits your agency
- You are on your own or a team of a few. A full desk is the default, because there is nobody to split with. The question is how much of the repetitive work you can take off your own plate.
- You have one strong seller and one strong delivery person. A split desk plays to both, as long as you budget for the alignment work: the meetings, the shared notes, the shared commission.
- You work a narrow niche. The client and candidate conversations overlap heavily, so keeping both with one person tends to pay off.
- You are growing fast. Splitting lets you hire for one skill at a time. Expect the handoff cost to grow with the team.
Who we built PlacementFlow for: full-desk recruiters at small specialist agencies first. A split team can use it too, but each desk belongs to one person.
If you want to see how the two lanes are set up in practice, Create Your First AI Desk, How Sourcing Campaigns Work and BD Campaigns: Prospecting New Clients walk through each one.
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