An International Recruitment Agency Cannot Hold Your UK Sponsor Licence — Here Is What It Can Do

What an International Recruitment Agency Actually Does

An international recruitment agency does the candidate half of a sponsored hire. It finds workers who are outside the UK, verifies that they are who and what they claim to be, checks that the role you want to fill is one the immigration system will actually permit, and keeps the candidate engaged and prepared through a process that runs for months.

What it does not do — what it cannot do, as a matter of law — is hold your sponsor licence, log into your Sponsorship Management System account, assign your Certificates of Sponsorship or carry your sponsor duties. Those belong to the employing organisation. No agency absorbs them, and an agency that implies it does is selling you a version of the process that does not exist.

That division is the single most useful thing to understand before you pick a supplier, because it tells you exactly what you are buying and exactly what will still be sitting on your desk afterwards. This guide sets out both sides of the line, what the whole exercise costs, and how long it really takes — with every figure checked against GOV.UK on the day of writing.

What Stays With You, Whoever You Hire

Five things stay with the employer. They are worth naming individually, because suppliers differ most in how honestly they describe them.

The sponsor licence. It is granted to the organisation that will employ the worker and it is assessed on that organisation — whether you are genuinely trading lawfully in the UK, whether your named key personnel pass the Home Office checks, and whether you can evidence compliance. It cannot be held on your behalf. Our guide to how a UK employer actually gets a sponsor licence covers what the Home Office assesses and who you have to name.

The application itself. Preparing or filing an immigration application for someone else is a regulated activity in the UK. A recruitment agency is not an immigration adviser and should not be drafting your licence application. If you want that done for you, engage a regulated adviser or a solicitor — and treat a recruiter who offers to do it as a warning rather than a convenience.

The SMS account and the Certificate of Sponsorship. Your Level 1 User assigns the certificate, and the sponsor guidance is specific about who that can be: your primary Level 1 User must be an employee, director or partner within your organisation and a settled worker, and every one of your Key Personnel must be based in the UK for the period they hold the role. You cannot nominate a contractor or consultant engaged for a specific purpose. From 9 September 2026 you also cannot appoint anyone supplied to you by an employment business. A third-party HR provider can hold an additional Level 1 User account; it cannot be the one the Home Office is relying on. An agency can tell you when to request a defined certificate and what to put on it. It cannot press the button.

The sponsor duties. Record-keeping, reporting changes to UKVI, right-to-work checks, keeping a current address and absence record for every sponsored worker. These run for the life of the licence and are checked by compliance visit, which the Home Office may carry out before or after a licence is granted.

The money the Home Office says you must pay. The sponsor licence fee, the Certificate of Sponsorship fee and the Immigration Skills Charge are sponsor costs. GOV.UK states that your licence may be revoked if you try to recoup the Immigration Skills Charge, or associated administrative costs, from the sponsored worker. You cannot push it down the chain to the worker, and it is not something an agency's fee absorbs.

Read that list and the agency's job comes into focus by subtraction. Everything above is yours. Everything below is what you are actually buying.

The Check That Decides the Hire, Before Anyone Is Sourced

The most valuable hour an international recruitment agency spends on your file happens before it looks at a single CV: confirming that the role you want to fill can be sponsored at all, at a salary you will actually pay.

Two tests have to pass together.

Is the occupation code eligible? Since 22 July 2025 the Skilled Worker route sorts every occupation code into three buckets. If your code is listed as higher skilled, it is eligible. If it is listed as medium skilled, it is eligible only if the job is also on the Immigration Salary List or the Temporary Shortage List. If it is listed as ineligible, nothing rescues it. GOV.UK gives the distinction that catches construction employers out in one line: bricklayers, roofers and carpenters are eligible, construction labourers are not.

That middle bucket is where most practical hiring now lives, and the two lists behave differently. The Immigration Salary List carries 25 entries, several of them construction trades — bricklayers (5313), roofers and roof tilers (5314), carpenters and joiners (5316), stonemasons (5312). The Temporary Shortage List carries 52, including electricians (5241), plumbers and heating installers (5315), welding trades (5213) and pipe fitters (5214). Read the entries, not the job titles — several are narrower than they look. The Immigration Salary List entry for welding trades (5213) reaches only high-integrity pipe welders where the job requires three or more years' related on-the-job experience, and several entries apply in one UK nation only.

There is a difference between the two lists that decides budgets, and it is routinely missed. The Immigration Salary List lowers the salary floor. The Temporary Shortage List does not. A job on the Immigration Salary List must be paid at least £33,400 and at least its going rate. A job on the Temporary Shortage List gets eligibility and nothing else — the general threshold still applies unless the worker separately qualifies as a new entrant or on a PhD discount. So an electrician whose published Temporary Shortage List rate is £38,800 still has to clear the general threshold above it. Getting that backwards produces an offer that cannot be sponsored.

There is also a consequence attached to the medium-skilled band that nobody mentions until the offer stage: a worker sponsored in one of these occupations cannot bring a partner or children, unless they were already continually employed in the UK in a medium-skilled Skilled Worker job before 22 July 2025. Children born in the UK, and children for whom the worker has sole parental responsibility, are exempted. For a 32-year-old electrician with a family, that is not a footnote. It is the whole decision, and it belongs in the first conversation rather than the last.

Does the salary clear both floors? A Skilled Worker role must normally pay at least £41,700 a year or the published going rate for the occupation code, whichever is higher. Lower general thresholds exist in defined cases — £33,400 for jobs on the Immigration Salary List, for new entrants under 26 at 70% of the going rate, and for STEM PhD holders at 80% (£37,500 and 90% for a non-STEM PhD) — and some healthcare and education roles are set against national pay scales instead. The trap is the word higher. Clearing £41,700 proves nothing on its own if the going rate for that code is £46,000.

If you are a care provider, read this before you read anything else. Occupation codes 6135 (care workers and home carers) and 6136 (senior care workers) have been closed to entry clearance applications since 22 July 2025. They can now only be used in-country, by a worker switching from another route who has already been legally working for the sponsoring provider for at least three months before the certificate of sponsorship is issued — and that transitional arrangement itself runs only to 22 July 2028. In England the employer must also hold Care Quality Commission registration and be carrying on a regulated activity.

What is still open from overseas is narrower than most care employers assume, and the mechanism matters. The registered nursing codes 2231 to 2237 and social workers (2461) are higher skilled, so they are eligible on their own. Nursing auxiliaries and assistants (6131) and residential, day and domiciliary care managers (1232) are medium skilled and are only eligible because they sit on the Immigration Salary List — and 6131 carries a restriction written specifically to stop it being used as a workaround: for Skilled Worker purposes it applies only to roles in environments where registered nurse or other registered healthcare professional roles also exist. A care home cannot relabel a care assistant post as a nursing assistant post and proceed.

Any agency still offering you care assistants from overseas on a Skilled Worker visa is describing a route that closed over a year ago, and that single fact tells you everything about how current their knowledge is. If the role genuinely is a care assistant, Ireland is the route still open — no sponsor licence, no Immigration Skills Charge, and a different set of quotas and rules that we set out in full on our UK Skilled Worker sponsorship page.

What the Whole Thing Costs

Employers usually arrive with one number in mind — the agency's fee — and get caught by the three Home Office charges sitting underneath it.

Your costs as the sponsor. A Worker sponsor licence is £611 if you are a small or charitable sponsor and £1,682 if you are medium or large; a Temporary Worker licence is £611 whatever your size. Each Skilled Worker Certificate of Sponsorship you assign is £525 (certificates on the Temporary Worker and Scale-up routes are £55). Then the Immigration Skills Charge: £480 for the first 12 months for a small or charitable sponsor plus £240 for every further six months, or £1,320 plus £660 for a medium or large one. Sponsor a medium-sized employer's role for a full five years and the charge alone reaches £6,600. It is exempt for certain science and research occupation codes, for dependants, for workers switching from a student visa, and for some Global Business Mobility transfers from the EU under 36 months — our guide to the Immigration Skills Charge sets out the exemptions and the refund rules in full.

The worker's costs. A Skilled Worker visa from outside the UK is £819 for up to three years or £1,618 for longer, dropping to £628 and £1,235 for jobs on the Immigration Salary List, plus the immigration health surcharge at usually £1,035 a year and evidence of £1,270 held for 28 consecutive days. Whether you cover any of it is a commercial decision, not a legal one — but it is part of what makes your offer competitive against every other sponsoring employer chasing the same candidate.

The agency's fee. Ours is agreed in writing before any work begins, and no placement fee falls due until a worker actually starts with you. What no agency fee can do is absorb the Home Office charges above: those are paid to the government, not to us, and any supplier suggesting otherwise is quoting you a number that will move.

How Long It Really Takes

Four to six months from a standing start is the honest planning figure, and most of it is queue rather than work.

GOV.UK says most sponsor licence applications are decided in less than eight weeks. There is a priority service at £750 for a decision within 10 working days, but its daily availability is limited and allocated first come, first served, so it is a possibility rather than a plan. Sourcing and vetting a genuinely suitable candidate typically runs four to eight weeks, and can run alongside the licence application rather than after it — which is where a competent agency takes real time out of the process. A defined Certificate of Sponsorship, the type needed for a worker applying from outside the UK, is usually approved within one working day. The visa decision, the worker's notice period in their current job, and travel then add several more weeks.

Nothing compresses a notice period, and the candidate market does not hold still while you wait. A shortlist assembled in March is not a shortlist in June. Any agency that hands you CVs and then goes quiet for two months is handing you a list of people who have since taken other jobs.

The 90-Day Replacement Guarantee

Every placement we make is covered. If a worker leaves your employment within their first 90 days, or you have to dismiss them for gross misconduct within that period, we source and place a replacement and waive our recruitment fee for that replacement.

Two boundaries stated plainly, because a guarantee is only worth what its exclusions allow. It covers our recruitment fee only — never the sponsor licence fee, the Certificate of Sponsorship, the Immigration Skills Charge, the visa or travel, all of which are paid to third parties and are not ours to refund. And it covers those two events, not any parting of ways on any terms. The full wording is on our guarantee terms page, written in plain English for exactly this reason.

How to Tell a Real Agency From a CV Reseller

The market is crowded and most of it reads identically online. Four questions separate the suppliers quickly.

"Which occupation code does this role sit under, and what is its going rate?" A supplier who cannot answer this in the first conversation has not done the work that decides whether your hire is possible. It is the first question, not the last.

"Do you source and vet these candidates yourselves?" A good slice of this market resells another agency's shortlist. That is not automatically a problem, but it means nobody you can reach has met the candidate, and the accountability when someone withdraws sits two companies away from you.

"What exactly stays with us?" If the answer is a vague "we handle everything", ask specifically who assigns the Certificate of Sponsorship and who is the named Level 1 User. There is only one correct answer and it is you.

"What happens if they leave in month two?" Get the replacement terms in writing, and get the exclusions in writing with them.

Where CA Recruitment Fits

We are Filipino and Irish owned, and we source and vet every worker ourselves before you see a CV — we are not a middleman reselling another agency's candidates.

For UK employers we do the candidate half and are direct about the boundary. We check the role, the occupation code and the salary against the current thresholds before you spend anything. We source and vet the candidates, primarily from the Philippines. We prepare the worker for the Certificate of Sponsorship and the visa application, and we stay with the hire through to arrival rather than disappearing at offer stage. We do not prepare sponsor licence applications, give immigration advice, or hold anything that is legally yours.

We work both the Irish employment permit system and the UK Skilled Worker route, which matters more than it sounds. When a role is closed on one side of the Irish Sea and open on the other — as care assistant roles currently are — you get told that on the first call rather than after a licence fee has been spent.

Book a free consultation and we will confirm whether your role is sponsorable, at what salary, and on what realistic timeline — before you commit to anything.

Frequently asked questions