Recruitment Agency Sites: 0 of 10 Show a Fee

An employer with a vacancy opens three recruitment agency websites in a row. Each one wants to be hired. On 14 October 2026 we measured ten of them, and not one said what it charges.

The money question is answered by everyone except the agencies. We ran three buyer searches through our own metasearch, kept the Singapore recruitment and employment agencies holding a slot, and measured ten of their sites. None published a fee for its own service. On the search that asks the fee question directly, 3 of the 15 results were an agency's own site; the other 12 were blogs, directories and software companies answering on the trade's behalf.

Half the sites had a second problem, cheaper to fix. Five of the ten never said in their opening paragraph whether the site is for an employer who wants to hire or a person who wants a job.

Key figures

Every number below describes ten Singapore agency websites read on 14 October 2026, through SingRank's self-hosted SearXNG metasearch and our own page fetches. Counts are always shown with their base.

#	What we checked	The number
1	Sites publishing a fee for their own service	0 of 10
2	Opening paragraph says whether the site serves employers, jobseekers or both	5 of 10
3	Sites showing an employment agency licence number on the homepage	8 of 10
4	Of those 8, sites that say the number is MOM's	2 of 8
5	Sites naming the industries or job functions they recruit for	6 of 10
6	Sites stating how long a placement takes	1 of 10
7	Sites with at least one heading phrased as a question	7 of 10
8	Sites using the EmploymentAgency schema type	3 of 10
9	Sites scoring 70 or above on PageSpeed mobile	0 of 10
10	Results on the fee search that were a Singapore agency's own page	3 of 15

Row 1 and row 10 are the same finding seen from two sides.

What we measured, and on which searches

We ran three searches on 14 October 2026: "recruitment agency singapore", "employment agency singapore" and "recruitment agency fees singapore". Our keyword tool confirmed all three are phrasings people type, along with "recruitment agency fee singapore" and "employment agency fees singapore".

From the results we kept Singapore recruitment and employment agencies and dropped the rest: listicles, directories, a resume-writing service, an accounting firm, a corporate-services guide, TikTok and YouTube. That left ten sites, which we fetched and read by hand against seven content checks and ran through our own technical audit.

Does the page say whether it is for employers or jobseekers?

Five of the ten said so in the first substantial paragraph. Three named employers, two named both sides, and five named neither.

This is the only check specific to this trade, and the one we would fix first. A recruitment agency sells to employers and recruits from jobseekers, so its homepage carries two audiences who want opposite things: an employer wants to know you can fill a role, a candidate wants to know you have roles.

The five misses were not bad pages. They opened on a slogan or a company value, then described the firm. One opened by describing how market needs change. Another opened on Singapore being a popular destination for people taking a next step in their career, which points a hiring manager at the wrong door on the way in.

Here is why it matters more than it looks. If your opening paragraph says nothing about who you serve, the paragraph a search engine or an assistant is most likely to quote describes nobody in particular. Our study of 109 Singapore local pages found the same miss leading a different trade, and it was a wording problem rather than a technical one.

Not one of the ten published its own fee

None of the ten stated a fee, a percentage or a range for their own service. One published the industry's range in an FAQ, saying fees "can range from 18% to 25% of the candidates' annual salaries" and, for some roles, "between 1 to 2 months of the salaries" — but not what that agency itself charges. Another said charges differ by salary range and placement type. A third said fees are tailored to each client and asked for an enquiry.

None of that is dishonest. Recruitment fees genuinely move with seniority, scarcity and the fee model, and a firm that quotes 20% flat will be wrong for half its own roles. But an employer comparing three agencies is not asking for a binding quote. They are asking whether they are in the right shop. A percentage band with its conditions answers that. Silence sends them to a blog.

We have measured this pattern across trades. Our study of 211 Singapore service websites found 99 showing a price, so Singapore service businesses are not uniformly secretive. On this sample, recruitment is at the silent end.

Who answers the fee question instead?

Third parties, in 12 of 15 slots. For "recruitment agency fees singapore" those 12 were a job-portal blog, an AI product's content hub, a marketing-agency roundup, a best-of site, two HR software blogs, a corporate-services firm's guide, a corporate directory, a city guide, a founder-focused blog, TikTok and YouTube. Three of the 15 were a Singapore agency's own page, and two of those three were insight articles rather than service pages, so they answer the question without quoting their own number either.

Read that as an opening rather than a complaint. Those pages are generic by necessity: a writer who does not run an agency cannot say what the fee trigger is, when the replacement period starts, or who pays the GST. You can. The gap is specificity, the same gap we described in why your cost guide quotes every price but your own.

What MOM's rules fix, and what they leave to you

Eight of the ten showed a licence number on the homepage. Only two of those eight said what the number is.

Licensing here is real and public. The Ministry of Manpower's key facts on employment agency licences say a licence is needed by "Organisations and individuals who place job seekers with employers", that "Certain organisations and activities are exempted", and that a licence runs "Up to 3 years". MOM's page on which employment agency licence to get adds that a Select Licence covers "Workers earning a monthly salary of more than $4,500", so the licence a firm holds already says something about who it places.

Of the eight showing a number, two labelled it as MOM's, four called it an EA licence, and two printed a bare "Licence No." in the footer with nothing to say what it was. A number with no label is a trust signal that only works on readers who already know the scheme.

The rules settle one more thing the websites mostly do not. MOM caps what an agency may charge a jobseeker, and its FAQ on the fee cap says the cap "is calculated based on the worker's total salary", including "the worker's basic salary and all fixed allowances", and "will not include bonuses and variable components such as overtime pay". So the candidate side of the fee question has a published ceiling, while the employer side is a commercial matter between two businesses. A site that explains that distinction has answered the most confused search in this market.

This is marketing guidance, not legal or professional advice. Check your own obligations against MOM's current pages and your licence conditions.

Six name the work, one names the wait

Six of the ten named the industries or job functions they recruit for. One of the ten said how long a placement takes.

The six were often very specific: semiconductor, automation, shipyard, petroleum, freight forwarding, network security, banking, interior design, kitchen staff, drivers. One listed its sectors only in the site menu, so the words exist on the page but no paragraph commits to them. The four that named none described themselves instead, as a wide spectrum of industries, various industries, technical and professional fields. An employer hiring a maintenance technician in Tuas and an employer hiring a compliance manager in Raffles Place are not the same customer, and naming the work is how each recognises themselves.

On timing, the one site that committed said placements "can take anywhere from 1 day for urgent roles to 6 months for specialised or executive positions". Wide, and still better than the alternatives we read: realistic timelines based on hiring needs, a claim about reducing recruitment cycle time, and silence. Time is the second question an employer asks after price, and the first when a resignation has already landed.

What the technical checks showed

None of the ten reached 70 on PageSpeed mobile. The scores ran from 36 to 67, and lab LCP ran from 4.8 seconds to 25.1 seconds.

Treat those lab numbers with care. Four of the ten also had real-user field data, and it was consistently better: field LCP of 2,407, 2,610, 3,652 and 3,755 milliseconds against lab figures of 7.8, 7.7, 14.5 and 8.4 seconds for the same sites. Where both exist, the field number is what your visitors actually got, which is why a bad PageSpeed score is not a reason to rebuild.

Four smaller findings from the same audit. Three of the ten had at least one internal link returning a 4xx error in the pages we sampled. Two served a homepage with no H1. One served no structured data at all, and served its homepage at both http and https with no canonical, so two addresses competed for the same page. One had a malformed title tag, where an unclosed comment left the title field over a thousand characters long — the kind of fault that survives for years because the page looks fine to a human.

Three of the ten declared the EmploymentAgency schema type, which names what the business is rather than what the website is. Seven declared an organisation or a web page and left it there, a choice our guide to schema for AI search covers.

What we would change first, in order

Our view, for an agency owner looking at this list and wondering where to start:

1. Rewrite the opening paragraph. Name the side you sell to, the work you fill and where. One paragraph, this afternoon. Five of ten sites would improve on this check alone.
2. Publish a fee band with its conditions. A percentage range by role type, what triggers the fee, when the replacement period runs, and whether GST is included. You are not quoting; you are qualifying.
3. Label the licence number. Say it is your MOM employment agency licence, not just a number in the footer.
4. Name your sectors in a sentence, not only in the menu.
5. Put a time range on a placement, with the conditions that widen it.
6. Then look at speed, using field data where you have it, not the lab score.

The first five are writing. Only the sixth needs a developer.

What it costs

Honesty about the price of this advice, because none of it is free.

Publishing a fee band costs you negotiating room with clients who would have paid more than the band, and it invites a competitor to undercut a number you have put in public. Some agencies will decline that trade. It is a defensible call, and if you make it, write the fee page anyway and explain what moves the number without stating the band.

Naming your sectors costs you the enquiries outside them. That is usually the point, but it cuts your total enquiry count before it lifts your conversion rate, so the first month can look like a loss.

Stating a placement time creates an expectation you will sometimes miss. Build the range wide enough to be true on a bad week.

The honest version of the whole list: these are clarity fixes. We measured what pages say, not what they earn. Clearer pages give a buyer fewer reasons to leave, which is not a promise of more enquiries, and we are not making one.

Method and limits — read these before quoting

• Metasearch is not Google. Results came from SingRank's self-hosted SearXNG on 14 October 2026. Most of its engines returned errors that day and the ranking that remained was Yandex-led, so this is the competitive shape of the market, not Google's order.
• Ten sites. A small sample from three searches on one morning. Every count here is a direction, not a rate.
• Homepages, read by hand. The content checks cover the page an agency puts first. A fee may sit on an inner page we did not read, and for two sites a linked contact page may hold a form we could not see.
• Our classifications. Whether an opening paragraph "names a side" is our reading of real page text, applied to the first block of 15 or more words outside the header, menu and footer. Another reader would move one or two.
• The technical sample is small too. Our audit sampled up to three pages per site and verified up to 40 links. For one site only one page was reachable through its sitemap, and for one the sampler returned the homepage twice.
• No business is named. This page names none of the ten, and it is not a rating of any company. Every finding describes a page as it stood on 14 October 2026, and pages change.
• No exclusions were needed. None of the ten is a business SingRank works for.
• An earlier, different sample. Our guide for recruitment agencies reported a separate check of 19 agency pages on 23 September 2026, which found 10 of 19 showing a licence number. Today's 8 of 10 is a different sample on a different day and the two should not be added together.

Our method page sets out how we separate findings from assumptions.

Want the same checks on your page?

Send us the one page an employer lands on when they search your service. We will run these seven content checks and the technical audit on it, and tell you which of the six fixes above is worth your morning. It starts as a free visibility check through our contact page.

If you want the work done for you, our SEO, AEO and GEO programme starts from S$500 a month, with a 3-month minimum.

What we will not do is promise you rankings or enquiries. Search engines and AI assistants choose their own answers.

These findings describe ten websites as sampled on 14 October 2026 through metasearch and direct page fetches. This page names no business and is not a rating of any company.

FAQ

Do recruitment agencies in Singapore have to publish their fees?

No. MOM caps what an agency may charge a jobseeker, but nothing requires an agency to publish what it charges an employer. In our sample of ten Singapore agency websites on 14 October 2026, none stated a fee for its own service, and one published the industry's general range without naming its own.

How much do recruitment agencies charge employers in Singapore?

We cannot tell you from this study, because none of the ten sites said. One site's FAQ described an industry range of 18% to 25% of annual salary for some roles and one to two months' salary for others. Treat that as one firm's description of the market, not a benchmark, and ask each agency what triggers its fee.

Is there a cap on employment agency fees?

MOM caps the fee an agency may charge a jobseeker. Its FAQ says the cap is calculated on the worker's total salary, including basic salary and all fixed allowances, and excluding bonuses and variable components such as overtime pay. The fee an agency charges an employer is a commercial matter between the two businesses.

Should a recruitment agency website serve employers and jobseekers on the same page?

It can, if the opening paragraph says so and each audience has its own route within a click. In our sample, two of ten named both sides in the opening paragraph and five named neither. The failure is not sharing a homepage; it is leaving both visitors to guess.

Does showing a licence number help a website rank?

We have no evidence that it does, and we would not sell it as a ranking tactic. It is a trust and compliance signal for the reader. Eight of the ten sites we measured showed a number, and only two said it was MOM's, which is the cheaper gap to close.

Can I cite these figures?

Yes. Please cite "SingRank, Singapore recruitment agency website study, 14 October 2026" with a link to this page. Quote each figure with its base, such as 0 of 10 or 3 of 15, and keep the note that results came from our own metasearch rather than Google. Challenges to a number are welcome through our contact page.