What “Full Desk” Means
A “full desk,” sometimes called a “360-recruiting,” model has one recruiter running the entire cycle: sourcing candidates, screening them, and handling the business-development and client-management side that keeps job orders coming in, all inside a single role. Per RecruiterFlow’s recruiter commission guide, that structure is common at smaller firms and solo desks, where hiring a second, dedicated role for either half of the job is not yet justified by volume.
Full desk is the default most staffing firms start with, not a compromise structure invented to save money, since it requires only one hire per new desk rather than two.
What “Split Desk” Means
A “split desk” divides the same two functions between two people, commonly a dedicated sourcing or delivery recruiter and a separate business-development or account-management role. RecruiterFlow’s guide describes this as the more structured alternative once a firm has enough volume to justify specializing the two jobs rather than asking one person to carry both.
The practical effect is real specialization: a delivery recruiter can go deeper on sourcing and candidate relationships without splitting attention toward new-client prospecting, and a BD or account-management hire can build an actual sales process without also carrying a full candidate pipeline.
How Commission Weighting Changes Once You Split It
The split shows up concretely in commission. When two people are involved in a single placement, the sourcing or delivery recruiter typically takes the heavier weighting, 60% to 70% of the split, on the stated rationale that recruiting itself is more time-consuming than sourcing. When an account manager is involved specifically in winning the client relationship, rather than just delivery, splits of 50-50 or 60-40 are also cited, depending on how much each side contributed to landing the job order.
None of those percentages are fixed law, they are commonly cited practitioner ranges, worth using as a starting anchor for a firm’s own split-desk comp design rather than a number to copy exactly without adjustment.
Why Most Small Staffing Firms Default to Full Desk
Most small staffing firms default to full desk for a simple reason: it requires one hire, not two, to open a new desk. A recruiter who can source and sell, even imperfectly, lets a firm expand into a new niche or territory without committing to a second, dedicated BD role before the desk has proven it can generate enough volume to support one.
That default carries a real cost, though. Staffing-sales trainer Dan Fisher’s well-known critique of the industry’s stagnant sales practice traces directly to this structure: when recruiters are also expected to run BD, with no dedicated, trained function for it, sales execution tends to stay underdeveloped, since nobody’s actual job is to build and refine it.
What Changes in the BD Motion Itself, Beyond the Org Chart
Splitting the desk changes more than the org chart, it changes what each role can specialize in over time. A recruiter freed from prospecting can build deeper sourcing pipelines and candidate relationships. A BD hire freed from candidate delivery can build a real, structured outreach cadence, get coached against it, and improve the way a dedicated salesperson in any other industry would, instead of squeezing outbound calls into whatever time is left after candidate work.
That specialization, more than any tidier commission accounting, is the real argument for splitting. A full desk asks one person to be excellent at two genuinely different skill sets; a split desk asks two people to each be excellent at one.
Choosing Between the Two as You Grow
There is no fixed revenue threshold at which a firm should split, but the underlying question is whether one person’s time is now the limiting factor on both sourcing depth and new-business volume at the same time. If job orders are going unworked because the person who would work them is instead cold-calling for the next one, that is a concrete signal the full-desk structure is now costing more in missed placements than a split-desk hire would cost in salary.
A firm that wants the specialization benefit of a split desk without committing to a full-time BD hire immediately can also route the BD half of that split externally. Human + AI SDRs can run the client-acquisition side of a split desk on a pay-per-meeting model, letting recruiters stay fully focused on sourcing without hiring a dedicated BD role first.
| Split Scenario | Typical Weighting | Stated Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Sourcing/delivery recruiter vs. a second recruiter | 60% to 70% to the delivery recruiter | Recruiting is more time-consuming than sourcing |
| Account manager involved in client acquisition | 50-50 or 60-40 | Split depends on each side’s actual contribution to winning the job order |
Ranges per RecruiterFlow’s recruiter commission guide. These are commonly cited practitioner anchors, not a fixed industry standard, adjust to your own firm’s actual division of labor.
What this means for you
- A full desk model has one recruiter running sourcing and business development together; a split desk divides the two, commonly between a dedicated sourcing/delivery recruiter and a separate BD or account-management role.
- Split-desk commission typically weights 60% to 70% toward the sourcing/delivery recruiter, or 50-50/60-40 when an account manager is involved in client acquisition specifically, per RecruiterFlow.
- Most small firms default to full desk because it requires one hire, not two, but that default is also the structural root of the industry’s well-documented stagnant sales-practice problem.
Sources
The external data in this guide draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- RecruiterFlow, “A Complete Guide to Recruiter Commission Structure”
- Haley Marketing, “Is Cold Calling Still Effective for Staffing Agencies?” (Dan Fisher)