What it is
A 180 recruiter is the individual role that a split desk creates: one consultant who runs exactly one half of the recruitment cycle, either winning and managing the client relationship, or sourcing, screening and delivering candidates against a brief someone else won. The "180" marks the half of the 360 degrees a full-desk recruiter covers that this particular seat leaves out. Where "split desk" describes the two-seat structure, "180 recruiter" describes the person sitting in one of those two seats.
In practice the label is used most often for the client-facing seat, also called an account manager or BD consultant, with the candidate-facing counterpart called a delivery consultant or resourcer. Some agencies use "180 recruiter" more loosely for whichever seat is not running the full 360, so it is worth checking what a specific agency means by it before assuming which half of the desk someone owns.
A 180 recruiter is only ever as good as the seat they are not sitting in.
Why it matters
Pay and skill development split along with the desk. A BD-side 180 recruiter is usually measured and paid on new business won and the margin on job orders opened, and builds deep strength in prospecting and account management, but can lose sourcing sharpness the longer they go without touching a candidate database. A delivery-side 180 recruiter is usually paid on placements and fills, and builds real depth in sourcing and screening a niche talent pool, at the cost of the commercial reps that keep a pitch sharp.
The trade-off is that a 180 recruiter is only ever as strong as the counterpart they are paired with. A BD-side 180 recruiter can win every job order in the market and still miss target if the delivery side cannot fill them, and that unfilled pipeline erodes the exact client relationship the BD side owns. Many agencies also use the 180 structure as a training ground: a newer consultant learns one half, often delivery, before being trusted to run a full 360 desk.
How boilr handles it
boilr is built for exactly the BD-side 180 seat. For a recruiter whose entire job is business development, with no candidate delivery to fall back on or be distracted by, prospecting is not half a role to automate around, it is the whole role. The agent finds companies matching that consultant's ICP, watches for buying signals and drafts outreach, so a BD-side 180 recruiter spends more of the day pitching and less of it researching.
Because a BD-side 180 recruiter's only output is the job order and the relationship behind it, what happens after they hand it off matters more to them than it does to a 360 recruiter working the full cycle themselves. boilr logs the account's context, the signal that opened it and the terms agreed in the Company Brain the moment the job order is won, so the delivery side inherits the real brief rather than a version relayed from memory.
