What percentage do Robert Half and Hays charge for a permanent hire?

Neither firm publishes fees. Buyers typically report 20 to 30% of first-year salary for professional direct hires in the US, with finance and executive roles at the top of that range. In the UAE and Europe, 20 to 25% is the commonly reported band.

Which is better for hiring in the UAE, Robert Half or Hays?

Hays has the stronger UAE operation, with an established Dubai desk and depth in banking, construction, and technology. Robert Half's Gulf presence is thinner. Flat-fee alternatives with Dubai delivery teams, Hyring included, cut the same placement cost by roughly a third.

Do Robert Half and Hays do temp and contract staffing?

Yes. Robert Half runs large temporary lines in finance, accounting, admin, and legal, and Hays placed 212,000 people in temporary roles in its 2024 fiscal year. Both price temp work as a markup on the worker's pay rate, typically 40 to 60% for professional roles.

How is Hyring different from Robert Half and Hays?

Hyring is an AI-native recruitment agency with flat, published fees: 7% of CTC for India hires and 14% for the US, UAE, Europe, and rest of world. Every candidate passes AI video and skills screening, clients track everything in a live portal, and staff augmentation teams run on Insight by Hyring for transparent time tracking. Book a call to price your open roles.

Can finance and accounting roles run remotely from India?

Many can. Accounts payable, receivable, bookkeeping, reporting, and FP&A support run well remotely. Hyring employs the team in India, handles payroll and statutory compliance, screens everyone with AI interviews including an English proficiency test, and runs engagements on Insight by Hyring for transparent time tracking.

How fast can Robert Half and Hays deliver a shortlist?

Consultant-led shortlists typically take one to three weeks at both firms depending on role and market. Hyring delivers AI-screened shortlists with interview recordings and calibrated scores in 48 to 72 hours because screening starts the day candidates apply.

What should I check before signing a recruitment agency agreement?

Three clauses: the fee percentage and what salary components it applies to, the replacement guarantee period, and any temp-to-perm conversion charges. Benchmark the salary itself first with free salary data, since an inflated base inflates every percentage fee built on it.

Agency Comparison

Robert Half vs Hays: Which Recruitment Firm Fits Your Hiring in 2026?

The finance-and-accounting powerhouse against the international specialist, compared on fees, direct hire, temp staffing, and coverage across the US, UAE, and Europe. With the flat-fee math in the third column.

Last updated on: July 12, 2026Read time: 12 mins

Written byAdithyan RKFact checked bySurya N

20–30%

Typical perm fee, professional roles

255K

Perm + temp placements, Hays FY2024

7% / 14%

Hyring flat fee, India / rest of world

48–72h

Hyring AI-screened shortlist

Robert Half and Hays sit at the top of professional recruitment, and they got there by different roads. Robert Half built the deepest finance and accounting recruitment practice in the US, then layered on technology, legal, and the Protiviti consulting arm. Hays built a specialist network across the UK, Europe, Australia, and the Gulf, and became the most followed recruitment brand on LinkedIn along the way.

A quick disclosure before the tables. Hyring is an AI-native recruitment agency with delivery teams in the US, India, and Dubai, and we appear as the third column throughout. Not because we pretend to be neutral, but because the moment you see what these firms typically charge for a placement, you will want a cheaper number to compare against. We brought one.

Quick Verdict

Robert Half leads US finance and accounting recruitment, Hays leads UK, Europe, and UAE hiring, and flat-fee AI agencies beat both on cost per hire.

Pick Robert Half

When you need a controller, senior accountant, or FP&A lead in a US metro and want the deepest specialist bench in that niche.

Pick Hays

When the role sits in London, Dubai, Berlin, or Sydney and you want a recruiter with a genuine local desk and salary data.

Pick Hyring

When the fee matters. Flat 14% in the US, UAE, and Europe, 7% in India, with AI-screened shortlists in 48 to 72 hours.

Who Are Robert Half and Hays?

Robert Half is the largest finance and accounting recruiter with $5.4 billion revenue; Hays is an international specialist recruiter strongest in the UK, Europe, UAE, and Australia.

Robert Half runs six specialized divisions across finance, accounting, technology, administrative, legal, and creative roles, backed by 300+ locations and seven straight years as the top-ranked professional recruiting firm in Forbes surveys. Their brand promise is depth in a niche: the recruiter who calls you about a tax manager role has probably placed thirty of them.

Hays plays a different game. In its 2024 fiscal year the firm placed 43,000 people in permanent roles and 212,000 in temporary positions, with technology as its largest vertical. The UK is home turf, but the Dubai, Germany, and Australia desks are what make Hays the default call for cross-border professional hiring. Their salary guides get downloaded by half the market every January, competitors included.

Different roads, same toll booth. Both firms charge percentage fees that have barely moved in twenty years, while the cost of actually finding and screening a candidate has collapsed. That gap is the story of this comparison.

What Do Robert Half and Hays Fees Look Like?

Professional recruitment firms typically charge 20 to 30% of first-year salary for permanent placements and 40 to 60% markups on temporary staff.

Permanent placement: typically 20 to 30% of first-year salary, with senior finance and executive searches at the top of the band. A $120,000 finance manager costs $24,000 to $36,000 to fill.
Temporary and contract staffing: a markup on the worker's pay rate, commonly 40 to 60% for professional roles.
UAE and Europe: 20 to 25% is the commonly reported band for professional perm placements, with retained senior searches higher.

Neither firm publishes a rate card, so these are the ranges US, UAE, and European buyers consistently report:

Hyring publishes its fee, which is still unusual enough in this industry to feel like a trick. It is not. Direct hire costs a flat 7% of CTC in India and a flat 14% in the US, UAE, Europe, and everywhere else. The same $120,000 finance manager costs $16,800. The fee stays flat whether the role takes one shortlist or three, and you can sanity-check the offer itself against our free salary benchmarks before you sign anything.

Perm fee on a $120,000 US finance manager

Competitor figures are typical reported ranges; Hyring fee is published

Same math in the UAE: on an AED 360,000 package, a 22% fee is about AED 79,000. A 14% flat fee is AED 50,400.

Full Comparison Table: Robert Half vs Hays vs Hyring

The firms differ most on geographic strength, specialization depth, fee structure, and how much technology sits inside the recruiting process.

Head-to-head across twelve buying criteria
Criteria	Robert Half	Hays	Hyring
Home market	United States	United Kingdom	US, India, and UAE hubs
Core strength	Finance, accounting, and legal recruitment	Cross-border professional recruitment, tech-led	AI-native direct hire, staff augmentation, RPO
Perm placement fee	~20–30% of salary (typical)	~20–30% of salary (typical)	7% India, 14% US, UAE, Europe, flat
Temp/contract pricing	~40–60% markup (typical)	~40–60% markup (typical)	~30% below big-firm quotes
UAE presence	Thin	Established Dubai desk	Dubai delivery team
Europe presence	Selected markets	Deep, UK and Germany led	Remote-first delivery, EU placements at 14% flat
Sourcing engine	Specialist branch recruiters	Sector desks plus 7M+ LinkedIn followers	AI sourcing plus thousands of recruiting partners
Screening	Recruiter interviews, references	Recruiter interviews, skills checks	AI video, skills, and English screening on every candidate
Time-to-shortlist	One to three weeks, role dependent	One to three weeks, market dependent	48–72 hours for most professional roles
Client visibility	Consultant updates	Consultant updates, salary data	Live portal: pipeline, recordings, reports
Post-hire transparency	Timesheets on temp lines	Timesheets on temp lines	Insight by Hyring time tracking on staff aug teams
Best for	US finance and accounting depth	Cross-border roles in the UK, EU, UAE, Australia	Fee-sensitive teams hiring across the US, Gulf, and India

Hiring in the UAE and Europe: Where Hays Is Strong, and Where the Math Changes

Hays leads Gulf and European professional recruitment among the two, while flat-fee models cut the same placement cost by roughly a third.

Give Hays its due here. The Dubai office has real desks in banking, construction, and technology, consultants who know DIFC from Downtown, and salary guides the local market actually uses. Robert Half's Gulf footprint is thinner, and most US buyers hiring in Dubai through them end up routed through international teams. For Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK, Hays is the stronger of the two by a wide margin.

What changed in the last three years is that "local desk" stopped being the only way to hire well in these markets. Our Dubai delivery team runs UAE placements on the same flat 14%, with AI screening doing the first two rounds before a consultant ever books a call. On a typical AED 360,000 package, that is roughly AED 29,000 back in your budget per hire versus a 22% fee. European roles work the same way: remote-first delivery, local compliance handled, one flat rate from Lisbon to Warsaw.

And if your Gulf hiring involves relocating talent from India, the two-market structure pays twice. Source in India at 7%, place in the UAE, and your global staffing pipeline runs through one portal instead of three vendors.

Temp, Contract, and Staff Augmentation: Three Names for the Same Invoice

Temp staffing, contracting, and staff augmentation all price as markups on worker pay, which is exactly where remote India teams change the equation.

Robert Half and Hays both run large temporary lines. An interim accountant through either firm bills at the worker's rate plus a markup, commonly 40 to 60% for professional roles. Perfectly standard. Also perfectly opaque, since you rarely see the split.

Our IT staff augmentation and finance staff augmentation offers take a different route. For roles that can run remotely, a dedicated professional in India at Indian salary levels, working your hours, typically lands 60 to 70% below the equivalent US or UAE contractor cost, and around 30% below big-firm quotes even for on-shore scope. Every augmented team runs on Insight by Hyring, our AI time tracking product, so you see hours, focus patterns, and plain-language answers from a BI bot instead of trusting a monthly PDF. Employees see their own data first. Transparency without surveillance theater.

How Candidates Actually Get Screened

Consultant-led firms screen by interview and reference; AI-native screening tests every applicant on video, skills, and communication before a human decides.

A Robert Half or Hays consultant interviews the candidates they choose to interview. Good consultants are genuinely good at this. The limit is arithmetic: one person, six to eight proper screens a day, and everyone below the cut line judged on a resume alone.

We screen the whole funnel. Applicants from the Hyring Jobs portal and submissions from the Recruiting Partners network, thousands of independent recruiters working our roles on results-based pay, all pass the same battery: an AI video interview, role-specific skills assessment, and an English proficiency test where client-facing communication matters. Finance roles get scenario questions written from real controller and FP&A hiring rubrics. The engine behind it has run 900,000+ interviews for Fortune 500 companies, so the scoring is calibrated on outcomes, not vibes.

Candidates get something out of it too, which matters for your offer-acceptance rate. Applicants prep with the free Jobseeker Toolkit and practice with real interview questions by company and role, so the people reaching your final round have already engaged seriously with the process. Hiring managers who want to go deeper on any screening concept can start with our Learn hub or look up any term in the HR Glossary, 1,100+ definitions and counting.

STEP 1

Brief the role

Send your JD or adapt one from 900+ templates in our JD library. Intake call within 24 hours.

STEP 2

AI screens the pool

Jobs portal applicants and partner submissions pass video, skills, and English screening automatically.

STEP 3

Review in the portal

Watch recordings, compare calibrated scores, shortlist in 48 to 72 hours.

STEP 4

Hire flat-fee

7% India, 14% everywhere else. Staff aug teams run on Insight for transparent tracking.

Which One Should You Pick?

Pick Robert Half for US finance depth, Hays for UK, European, and Gulf reach, and a flat-fee AI-native agency when cost per hire drives the decision.

Three honest endings. If the role is a senior accountant in Chicago and you want a consultant who has placed that exact profile thirty times, Robert Half is a safe call and you will pay for the safety. If the role sits in London or Dubai and local market feel matters most, Hays has the strongest claim of the two. If you are hiring across markets and the fee line on ten hires a year is real money, price one role through a flat-fee model first.

The worst outcome is signing a 25% agreement without ever seeing the 14% quote. That comparison takes one call.

Written by

Adithyan RK

View Profile

CEO & Co-founder, Hyring

18+ years of experience

Adithyan RK is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hyring, an AI-native recruitment platform that has run over 900,000 AI interviews for companies ranging from early-stage startups to the Fortune 500. He has spent 18 years building technology businesses, starting with a digital consultancy in 2008 and a staff augmentation firm in 2017, before founding Hyring in 2022 to rebuild hiring around evidence instead of guesswork. Read more

Expertise

AI RecruitmentAI InterviewsRecruitment AutomationHR TechnologyHiring AnalyticsApplicant TrackingRecruiter Operations

Fact checked by

Surya N

View Profile

CTO & Co-founder, Hyring

6+ years of experience

Surya N is the Co-Founder and CTO of Hyring, where he architected the AI interviewing engine that has now conducted over 900,000 interviews for companies ranging from early-stage startups to the Fortune 500. A mechanical engineer who moved into artificial intelligence, he spent 6 years building AI applications inside a technology consultancy before co-founding Hyring, and wrote the first version of its AI interviewer from scratch. Read more

Expertise

AI Interview SystemsConversational AIInterview Fraud DetectionPlatform ArchitectureMachine Learning EngineeringApplied AISpeech and Voice AIBias Testing and Model Evaluation

Get both quotes before you sign either

Send us the roles you are about to brief to Robert Half or Hays. We will return a line-by-line fee comparison for the US, UAE, or Europe, plus a sample AI-screened shortlist within 72 hours so you can judge quality, not just price. No commitment.

FAQs

Robert Half is larger by revenue, at roughly $5.4 billion with 300+ locations and the Protiviti consulting arm. Hays operates in more countries and placed 43,000 permanent and 212,000 temporary workers in its 2024 fiscal year, with deeper reach in the UK, Europe, UAE, and Australia.