A discussion on Recruiting Fees

Happy New Year to everybody. Good 2020 to all of you. In this video we are going to talk about recruiting fees, which is not the most glamorous topic, but it’s an important topic.

When I got into this business and people explained how fees were generated and the percentage of salary and all that stuff, I thought that was a little wacky and candidly I still do. But it is what the industry does, and it is what companies have come to expect.

I think Right Recruiting is unique in two areas. One is we have been able to generate a recruitment model that can drop your fees dramatically as a percentage basis, if that is what you choose to do. We have had clients where we have been able to generate finished projects and candidly the fees have been as low as 10%. We can do that for a lot of companies. If you are interested in exploring that as an employer, please reach out to me and I can explain it to you.

The second thing we do is when a client will agree to it, and many of them do, is come up instead of a percentage fee for a project, a flat fee. So, they know what they are going to spend. It has secondary benefits that one of our projects in December that we completed really highlighted.

So, let me talk about that. We had a project for a Director of Supply Chain for a client of ours here in the Delaware Valley. The salary range for that was up to a specific figure and we ended up with 4 or 5 candidates that were within that salary range. In the process of identifying them, we found another candidate who was well outside the range, but who we thought was really good. Specifically good for that specific job at that specific company. We presented that candidate to our client and said to them ” listen, here is an individual that is outside the range, we really think they are very good and we think you should consider them along with these other people.”

Now, if this was a percentage fee on salary, rather than a flat fee, that client could be a little cynical about that recommendation. Is this just another one of those recruiting firms that wants me to hire the most expensive person out there so that their fee is higher? In this specific situation, because we had a flat fee, they knew that we had decoupled that from the salary perspective and our fee was independent of whatever they decided to pay the candidate. They knew that our advice on that particular candidate was objective and we weren’t looking out for our best interest, we were looking out for their best interest.

So happily enough, in the interviewing process they did see the benefit to that more expensive candidate, went outside their salary range. He is working there now, and my understanding is he is doing a good job. I do wonder if we had a more traditional fee structure that was percentage based on salary, whether they would have even evaluated the candidate. Because the concern, as human nature has taught us, is that you are always suspicious when you have a vendor who is aligned with something and as a client they may not be looking out for your best interest. In this situation we clearly were.

So, a little inside baseball, inside recruiting there and just an explanation about how some of the ways we think and do things benefit our clients in subtle ways

Thanks for listening and if you have any comments let us know please.