UK SIC 2007 · 78101
Activities of employment placement agencies (SIC code 78101)
Recruitment agencies that place permanent staff file here. The code covers contingent recruiters, retained search and executive search. Agencies for film, TV and theatre are 78102. Temp agencies are 78200.
Division 78: Employment activities
This division covers the recruitment industry in all its forms. Permanent placement agencies use 78109. Temporary staffing businesses use 78200. Code 78300 covers human resources provision. Umbrella companies, payroll vehicles and staff outsourcing arrangements all use it, alongside genuine HR providers. Respect the split when you build a list. A 78200 company runs candidates on its own payroll and carries the compliance burden that brings. Many 78109 companies are one recruiter working from a laptop.
Related SIC codes
Who prospects SIC 78101 companies
Recruitment firms buy a deep stack for their size. They need job board credits, sourcing tools, CRM and ATS platforms, invoice finance to cover contractor payroll, and back-office outsourcing. Funders watch 78200 incorporations most closely. A temp agency needs working capital from its first placement. A brand new 78109 company usually means an experienced consultant has gone solo. That is prime timing for software and finance offers. Young agencies often launch with a thin website, so pair the poor-website filter with incorporation date rather than reading it as a dead company.
Lead generation for recruiters →How to read SIC 78101
SIC 78101 is a five-digit code, and the digits are not arbitrary. The first two, 78, are the division, employment activities. Add the third and you have group 781; the fourth narrows it to a class, and the fifth to the subclass, which is the level Companies House actually asks a company to pick. The whole division sits under section N, administrative and support service activities, the broadest tier there is. Reading a code left to right therefore goes from a whole sector down to one activity.
A company chooses its own codes when it incorporates and can change them on any confirmation statement. It may list up to four, and Companies House does not check whether they are right. That is why 78101 is worth reading as a claim the company made about itself rather than as a verified fact, and why the first-position and any-position counts above differ.
Measured on the August 2026 register, the busiest registered-office post towns for 78101 are London (658), Manchester (33), Birmingham (31), Glasgow (21) and Edinburgh (21). Those are registered-office locations, which is where the paperwork sits rather than necessarily where the work happens, so treat them as where to start looking rather than as a service area.
Using SIC 78101 as a filter
1,835 companies is 0.04 per cent of the 5,190,464 active companies on the UK register, and ranks 78101 4th most used of the 4 codes we track in division 78. That is the pool before any filter. Whether it is a big market for you depends on what you sell, but it is the number every other filter on this page cuts down from.
1,176 companies put 78101 first and a further 659, 36 per cent, list it in one of their other three SIC slots. That gap is the difference between a tight list and a broad one. First-code-only is the safer filter when you are writing to them; matching any position is worth it when you need the volume.
The population is concentrated: the five busiest post towns hold 42 per cent of it, and London alone accounts for 36 per cent. If you sell nationally, those five towns are most of the market. If you sell locally and you are not in one of them, expect a much smaller pool and widen the radius early.
In practice the code on its own is rarely the whole filter. Pair 78101 with an incorporation date to catch companies in their first months, when they are still choosing suppliers, or with a filing deadline to reach them while the year end is on their mind. A worked example for this code: 78101, registered office in London, incorporated in the last ninety days, which turns a 1,835 company pool into a list you can write to in an afternoon. Add the poor-website filter if what you sell is a website, or a recent change of officer if you sell to whoever just took the job. Every company you pull carries the Companies House record, the director's name, a verified website and a verified email, and the ones we cannot complete are not charged.
Where SIC 78101 clusters in the UK
ACTIVE COMPANIES BY REGISTERED-OFFICE POST TOWN · COMPANIES HOUSE REGISTER, AUGUST 2026
SIC 78101 companies, as leads
Tell us the kind of company you sell to and we find them on the public record. One credit is one lead: the record, the director, a verified website and a verified email. If we cannot complete it, you are not charged. 25 free to start, no card.
About SIC 78101
Are headhunters filed under SIC 78101?
Yes. Executive search and retained recruitment both file 78101. The SIC makes no split between contingent and retained models.
Do temp agencies use a different SIC code?
Yes, they file 78200. That takes in umbrella companies and payroll-bureau temp providers. The split matters. Temp agencies carry employer-of-record liability that placement agencies do not.
Find UK SIC 78101 companies
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