What it is
A split desk divides the recruitment cycle across two people instead of one. A business development consultant, sometimes called an account manager or a 180 recruiter, owns the client relationship: prospecting, pitching and winning the job order. A second consultant, usually a delivery consultant or resourcer, owns the candidate side: sourcing, screening and submitting against that job order. Neither runs the full cycle alone. The "180" in 180 recruiter marks exactly what it is not: the full 360 degrees a solo recruiter covers.
Naming varies by agency and region, but the split itself is consistent: one seat is client-facing, one is candidate-facing, and a job order is what passes between them. Larger and volume-focused agencies favour the model because it lets each side specialise, rather than asking one person to switch constantly between pitching a client and searching a database.
A split desk lives or dies on the handoff, not on how good either half is alone.
Why it matters
Specialisation is the argument for a split desk. A BD consultant who never has to break off and search for candidates keeps momentum on prospecting and client meetings. A delivery consultant who never has to chase new business can go deeper into a niche talent pool and build genuine expertise in sourcing it. Two people fully focused on one half of the cycle typically outproduce one person constantly context-switching between both.
The trade-off is the handoff. A job order is only as good as the detail that survives the move from the person who took the brief to the person who has to fill it: the client's real priorities, the objections raised in the room, the candidate profile that will actually get signed off. When that detail is relayed from memory or a rushed note, the delivery consultant is sourcing against a version of the brief that is already out of date.
How boilr handles it
boilr sits on the BD side of a split desk. It is scoped to that consultant's ICP and target accounts, watches for buying signals, and drafts the outreach that wins the job order in the first place, the same work it does for a 360 recruiter, just for one half of a two-person desk rather than the whole cycle.
The part that matters most for a split desk is what happens after the job order is won. Because the account's full history, the signal that opened it, the client's stated priorities, the terms agreed, lives in the Company Brain rather than in one consultant's head, the delivery consultant inherits the real brief instead of a secondhand version of it. The handoff that usually degrades a split desk becomes a shared record instead.
