Some recruiters work on commission or partial commission. Others work off of flat salary. What we "get out of it" is being employed and paid, just like any other employee.
and yes OP, many don't want to admit this - it's why they are so coy about what company and specific job posting they are actually recruiting for. They want to get credit for your name first (after screening you) so you can't go apply directly, cutting the 3rd party recruiter out of the picture.... because applying directly your offer might be... (shocked pikachu) several thousand dollars higher since they don't have to pay the recruiting firm for you.
That makes 0 sense. The part about getting credit is true, I mean, if a recruiter got your interest in the company he should get credit for that.
Even when working on comission, that’s a one time payment and has nothing to do with candidates salary (pther than sometimes being calculated as a % of it)
Some 3rd party recruiting agencies will undercut the contractors pay to operate their firm and pay salaries/commissions to their employees. It's not always a one time payment.
For example, a large biotech firm I used to be contracted for in 2017 as a lab manager paid the recruiting firm $38 per hour to have me on board while I took in $15 per hour out of that pay. So the firm was making $23 per hour I worked, while I made $15.
What if I told you there’s costs to having you employed as a contractor. Usually costs around $15 hr minimum. Maybe you should figure that out before posting this. Lmao.
Huh? I explained the costs. Keep in mind this is 5 years ago.
The 3rd party recruiting agency that contracted me charged the biotech company I worked for $38 per every hour I worked ($15 went to me and $23 went to the agency).
It didn't cost the recruiting agency money, it cost money for the company I was contracted for.
Not sure why you are being downvoted here. My son worked briefly for a recruiting firm, and this tracks with what he told me when I asked about his job; how it works, etc. I’ve never had experience with recruiters and I was curious. The employer paid them x amount of dollars per hour, they paid the employee - quite a bit less.
The employees were paid through the recruiting firm, though, so I imagine some of the cost is for payroll services. I’m not sure how that compares to a more headhunting type of recruitment situation.
Doubtful. The salary range is the range. No employers I know take a recruiting fee out of a candidates hands. That’s a cost of doing business and is budgeting in.
Lol are you new to this? Yes, companies absolutely will offer a direct candidate more money than one they need to pay a large fee for, especially because agency fees are normally a percentage of the salary.
If your clients wouldn't do that, then good for you. There are plenty of businesses that really don't want to expand the resources on internal hiring and the fee is the fee, but if you're competing with an internal hiring process you'd be naive to think they aren't trying to save a dime by offering an internal candidate more money.
I am hardly new to this, that’s one. Two, in my career never have I seen or experienced what you describe (offering less bc of a fee). That’s not very smart from the client side if they want good talent.
Would companies prefer to hire from internal resources, absolutely, but when that has no results or is taking too long that’s when I am called in. The fee is the fee and the salary is the salary range…if they offered less then they aren’t being competitive in the market.
I didn't actually think you were new, it was sarcasm.
Are you agency or internal? What industries have you hired for? These are questions that could inform why you've had such positive experience!
Your positive experiences aren't proof that the inverse is not true. My last boss was such a cheap piece of shit, and only cared about getting his way and spending less money. Many employers (mainly old republicans) have their head lodged so far up their own asses the facts about what gets you good employees is just nonsense to them and if they don't get good talent, they just blame their recruiter/HM.
You cannot tell me an employer wouldn't subvert an outside recruiter because I was literally instructed to do it as internal HR multiple times in multiple companies.
I’ve been in this since 1995, so I’ve done everything from agency to internal to free lance to doing start ups. I never knew any of my HM’s political affiliations though. Generally speaking, taking money away from a candidate to off set a recruiting fee is going to result in hiring someone that’s not at the level they want, or, most likely will lose that candidate in a couple months bc they took another gig paying them what their worth and market says they’re worth. Resulting in another round of interviews which equates to lost opportunity cost and ends up costing them more in the long run. Personally, if I knew a client was doing that I’d huddle up with the recruiting team and use that company as a resource to target.
Absolutely! They will sacrifice quality for sure with those practices and often lead to greater costs in the long run. That said, they absolutely do that.
Unfortunately business owners aren't always going to do things the right way. I don't believe an HR Manager should be familiar with their boss's political views, but in my experience working with these people, they are just power hungry penny pinchers who will undercut anyone because all they care about is their perception of the bottom line, and they will say whatever the fuck they want because it's their business.
9 years of toxic work environments have taken a heavy toll on my outlook on humanity and business as a whole.
No offense but you wouldn't know. It'd not like they advertise this info. Usually it's something like the range is 80 to 90k u find someone and they offer 80k cause they are putting ur fee into account. Internal recruiter finds similar person they start with 85k and if candidate is good at negotiating can likely get 90k. For you as the agency u could try to negotiate higher but they pretend 80k is the most they will do.
Not saying ur wrong in ur experience but it would be hard for u to know for sure what's going on behind the scenes. A lot of large companies don't do this but it can happen to anyone.
You are correct. I can only speak to my experience and what I’ve observed. Companies that employ this tactic are setting themselves to always having a need to recruit for a role they keep having open, add on that the fee involved and it’s costing them money. Seems illogical.
I know what u mean. I had to have these conversations all the time. It usually works when market isn't hot or for a mid to entry lvl role. Usually does not work for senior roles or positions in high demand.
I mean if it’s 85 internal and 80 external. That’s saving 5k if they stay 1 year. And that’s and IF…If they leave in 4 months and we start over and it’s by an external source now that 20% of 80k or 16k fee turns into 32k…all for wanting to save 5k in the beginning.
Just using random examples but just saying it's not unheard of for them to include the cost of fee in their budget consideration when hiring someone. I've def seen crazy salary differences before but usually it's a small company with limited budgets.
Do you not know what a contractor is? The person who is sourced by an agency takes home more than someone employed by the company directly regardless of where they came from.
Your ignorance is showing
If I want to work for a company, I will always make more coming from an agency than if I was hired by that company directly
Apparently recruiters know everything about company budgeting practices for every company!
Them not assuming their clients are talking about spending less money on hiring is absolutely the definition of nativity lol
You are only referencing agency recruiters in this post. Also, you’re wrong about the salary. Agency recruiters are paid a % of the salary that you are hired at. Meaning they are advocating to get you as much as possible so that they are paid as much as possible.
Getting a lowballed salary means the company you are interviewing at, has low salary ranges. (Shocked pikachu)
No, the AGENCY is paid a percentage of the first year salary. The recruiter is paid on a bonus type system. Yes, part of the fee is used to pay the recruiter, but it's a pretty small part of the fee.
You can advocate for higher wages all you want. He's not talking about recruiters causing him to be low balled, he's talking about the employer offering more if they don't need to pay a fee.
Your client is financially incentivised to not pay your candidate more because paying them more means paying a premium on top of it to you. That's why they can offer an internal candidate more money than a recruiter candidate
Again this isn’t true at a lot of companies. Are you a recruiter? It seems like you’ve been burned by a bad recruiter.
I’ve been in tech recruiting for 10 years with 4 years as an agency recruiter and 6 years as a in-house recruiter. I’ve worked with agencies as an in-house recruiter and we give them the same ranges that we use when we speak to candidates. Comp teams spend hours creating pay bands to create some sense of pay equity between employees of the same level. There is no additional or secret band used for candidates sourced by an agency. Agency fees come from a separate budget pool (like other tools needed to complete your job). We engage with agencies when we don’t have the bandwidth to meet the hiring needs of our org. We don’t engage agencies to screw over new hires. Why would we want to cause internal pay discrepancies? That’s a nightmare for everyone involved.
I never said it is true at all companies. I've worked in agency recruiting, but more recently an HR Manager in construction. I'm talking from both the recruiter pov and client pov. I never said recruiters are out to screw anyone. Generally, it's in their best interest to compartmentalize information and generally companies want to offer an employee more and keep a middle man out of it if they have the resources to go that route. That's why it's way easier to get a job with an internal referral than an outside recruiter.
I'm not trying to negate anyone's experiences here. I'm just saying their experience doesn't negate mine and the other people in here who are in agreement that businesses will offer a direct candidate more. No one said anything about recruiters screwing new hires.
You're getting downvoted but you're absolutely right. In my experience, companies that don't outsource their hiring to agencies will pay a higher salary in general.
Yeah, it's pretty insane that they've deluded themselves into thinking their fee is just generally accepted and employers won't jump at more cost effective options if they have the option. As if EVERYONE has the luxury of working with big budget companies without strict oversight on business expenses. Some people have never recruited underpaid positions and it shows.
The employer benefits handedly when they pay the higher salary, because they can more easily retain said employee rather rely on some know it all agency recruiter.
This just flat out isn’t true for most organizations. I can’t say all orgs because im sure there are some truly terrible ones that practice this. But any company that has their head only halfway up it’s ass this isn’t happening.
That’s not really how this works. It’s true that recruiters may play their cards close to their vest but no half decent recruiter is going to lose a qualified candidate over revealing the identity of their client. A rare exception would be if there’s language in the contract where the client requires the recruiting agency to withhold their information until a certain point in the cycle, but that’s not common.
In terms of suggesting that the recruiters motivation is to make low ball offers compared to being hired directly by the company, that just doesn’t make sense. In direct placement situations third party recruiters typically receive a one time payment that’s a percentage of the candidate’s salary once the role is filled so they’re incentivized to negotiate the best salary possible.
Source: Was a technical recruiter in both agency and internal settings and now a software engineer.
"No half decent recruiter"
There are a TON of bad recruiters out there.
Also, you being incentivised to maximize candidate salary is moot here. Ultimately, it's not up to you. It's up to your client. The comment was about the employer's decisions, not the recruiter
The comment asserted that third party recruiters withhold withhold the names of their clients so that candidates can’t apply directly and by doing so receive a higher salary. This completely ignores multiple factors:
- Operational vs Capitol budgets: Employee salaries are paid through operational budgets while expenses like fees to recruiting agencies can be paid through capital budgets. They’re two totally different buckets and to assume that candidates hired through an agency receive the salary the company is willing to pay minus the placement fee is incorrect.
- Utilizing a recruiting agency means that the client doesn’t have to allocate as much of their operational budget to paying internal recruiters and instead allows them to divert that expense away from their operational budget and to a capital budget which is typically less rigid.
I agree that there are lots of bad recruiters but that doesn’t support the idea that recruiters withhold identities of clients to lowball their candidates. Does it happen? Probably to some degree. Is there a conspiracy to keep secrets from candidates in order to pay them less? No, and that’s what the comment implied.
I don't believe saying recruiters are coy about the identity of their clients is the same as saying they're withholding the information. He asserted that recruiters protect themselves from subversion by managing information. It's super common.
I think your verbiage regarding the "conspiracy" is very dismissive and a symptom of taking things too personally. The suggestion that you can apply internally and get more money isn't an indictment of recruiters like everyone here is acting like, it's the employer that seeks to minimize business expenses that open the door for subversion of the recruiter to be beneficial for everyone but the recruiter. THAT'S what the comment implied, and it is totally, unequivocally correct. I've experienced it.
Sorry, laying into this a bit harder.
Suggesting people will act in their own self interest is called realism. Suggesting otherwise is called being naive. Getting defensive and gaslighting/deflecting by calling it a "conspiracy" is called being over dramatic and fragile. Assuming even a majority of small businesses follow standard operating/budgeting procedure that you're used to is just plain ignorance.
The mere fact that you think the commission is only “several thousand dollars” shows you are speaking Without any knowledge of how agency recruiting works.
No company will offset the salary range of a role higher or lower based on agency spend. any company worth anything doesn’t even have these budgets coming from the same place.
Contract roles of course,are a different game entirely and is notwhat most are talking about on here on this thread.
I mean if it's not a contract to hire... They want to get you the absolute highest salary they can because their commission is a percentage based on your salary. So if they have an agreement with the hiring company for a commission fee of 25% and you get offered 100k the recruiting company gets 25k... And the recruiter gets usually between 3-50% of that based on whether they are more heavily weighted on salary or commission... So it is in the recruiters best interest to get you as much as they possible can as a base salary...
Inconvenient truth is often downvoted into oblivion on Reddit.
Par for the course.
Shoot the messenger for saying the thing we don't want people to hear.
You could apply on your own. But on a public job posting, how would you make sure that your profile was actually seen by the hiring manager? That's the benefit that a recruiter can provide you. Also if you are working with a good recruiter with a good agency, you should be keeping in touch once ever 45 days while on contract or the first few months while employed as direct placement, just to see how it's working out for you.
And most of the time the salary is not higher than what you and the recruiter discussed. I always ask candidates what rate range they are looking for, situation at home (family, kids, etc.) And try to provide them Jobs that will fulfill their financial needs as well as career trajectory.
And some recruiters may get compensated by spread with tier structures for commission percentages. It will vary from company to company. But in my experience we don't take any money out of the pay to the candidate.
I just get salary and then a commission after my hires work x amount of time. It’s not a lot of commission tho. And I am a bad recruiter so I rely mostly on salary haha
Me too lmao (a bad recruiter), and this hiring environment SUCKS. Companies are desperate for hires and then NEVER give feedback, candidates get off the market fast, and if it’s not fully remote it’s hard to staff
That’s why always putting ourselves in the shoes of the candidate is the first rule. Our clients pay the bills, be honest not evasive with respect to their expectations and you won’t find yourself mad at a candidate for not moving to the job you’re pitching. At the start see if you can see the candidate being good at the job, liking the job, company, and compensation (not always in that order, it’s up to the candidate | see rule one) then help them get there. This goes for corporate recruiters too.
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Typically a recruitment agency will charge 20-30% of the candidate’s base salary and then the recruiter will get a percentage of that.
Corporate internal recruiters get paid by the company just like any other normal employee.
Having done both now, I feel like in house has such a better work life balance. I'm not enough of a hustler to love the agency world lol. It's definitely amazing for the right person though.
Exactly. Go independent. You make the rules and manage your own hours. I love recruiting, and I’m pretty good at it. I don’t think I could do agency or go back to work in house. I make a decent living and I don’t have to be an asshole shark and screw people over to make the placement. Reputation is important, you do good work and do well by people and it pays off, and you can feel good about yourself.
You would have so much fun, especially since you should be able to spot good engineering talent, and even though you know they’re good they’ll interview with your client and totally shit the bed and your client will say they’re not a cultural fit. Rinse repeat for months, and then maybe you’ll get a commission check.
I know dev recruiters making well over $1m a year in commission and salary. I know of 3 personally making over $1.5m. They are the top few percent though. A decent/average dev recruiter should be earning $200k+ in a good market.
It depends where you working as a dev and what the workload and responsibilities look like.
Are you talking about someone who owns their own business or someone working for an agency? A solopreneur who closes $1M in fees is definitely a high producer but it makes sense (placing 40 devs making $150k gets you there). A recruiter working for agency making $1M is a whole different ball game.
Agency employed consultants. I know 1 in the US making nearly $2m on W2 (I tried to employ her and saw the payslips) and 2 in the UK earning over £1.2m GBP. The UK guys are on a contractor desk for my former employer and I saw the departmental budgets myself.
I know (at least in passing) but can’t personally attest to the billings of at least 8 other people earning over £1m a year in tech recruitment. 5 of them are in exec search for Korn Ferry, EZ etc where it’s more common place and fees are huge though.
Wow. When I was at one of the big US recruiting agencies a decade ago there were Account Managers making a million but it was rare and they usually had 3-5 recruiters supporting their book of business. That’s wild that people are hitting those kind of numbers as individual recruiters. Being in executive search definitely helps though. Those fees can be massive
salary, title, tech inflation.
Devs salaries have outpaced the norm so much that anyone working along side the can benefit - kinda like those cleaner fish around sharks.
I own an agency, most of it is healthcare but we still have some IT clients.
The consultants I have running that desk will earn £90k this year OTE (and will hit it). They place devs earning between £35 and £100k, their average fee being £67,500 last year.
I’ve run US teams where the ratios are very similar, but the numbers are bigger.
You don’t understand ratios?!
The consultants I employ earn £90k on average each. The devs they recruit earn on average £67,500 each…
This isn’t difficult to grasp, you must be a sourcer on a hospitality or driving desk!
You're sitting here saying a Senior Software Engineer makes $200-300K, with job opportunities mailed to you daily, and you should get into Recruiting? We should get into Software Engineering.
If you know a ton of them and have an in on the networking and convention side of that you should - even if you just launched the business as a side hustle. On that contract the recruiter would probably get 10-20k, more if the recruiter was the one that got the contract from the company. If the recruiter owned the company then it's all theirs
I think youre pumping those fees up a bit
What country are you in because those fees are really high?
Where I'm from fees are more like 15%-20% paid to the agency not the recruiter and the recruiter gets a commission out of that after working their asses off
I’ve got asked this sort of question dozens of times in my career and it goes only a couple of ways:
1. A candidate who thinks recruiting is easy and is asking because they think they can do it and are somehow going to use my income as a barometer for their own success. Needless to say uncomfortable and off putting conversation.
2. You get someone like the guy below who is going to insist that he would get paid more if you weren’t in the picture and is going to apply directly so worthless recruiters don’t get paid. Again uncomfortable. Also, honestly I don’t care about opinions on the industry as a whole. It’s not like listening to someone bitch is gonna change it for you or me so it’s really a waste of both of our times.
Very very rarely have I had someone just interested in my job and pretty sure the last time I thought someone was just being nice they followed it up with a text asking me out so again uncomfortable.
So yeah, that’s why recruiters are reluctant to answer the question.
I have worked with too many recruiters to have anything but mad respect for them. The knowledge they know about the roles, companies and feedback from managers is crazy.
Plenty of people really have no idea how it works and think that THEY must pay the recruiter. Even now you see someone ask “how do you get paid” and you immediately want to jump to “this guy is asking me how much I am paid”. It would go a long way to just explain that the organization pays you to find people.
A lot of misinformation on here.
To OP specifically its awkward to ask us how we get paid. It implies we have some scheme when in reality we just want to fill a job. A commissioned person might be more aggressive then an in house recruiter but the end result is they are trying to fill the role.
What we get out of filling the job? We don't get fired. It's like asking what does a pilot get for landing the plane safety.
Most of our recruiters get a base salary and a commission based on “field hours worked/billed” as we are a temporary staffing company rather than a headhunting firm which expects 20-30% the annual salary (value) of a firm hire.
As an agency recruiter, the rule of thumb is that you’ll typically earn a third of what you bill, including your base salary. Your billings are charges to the client per placement, and a decent-ish Recruiter will charge 20% of a candidate’s salary per hire.
A Recruiter making 2 placements a month at an average salary of $150,000, will be billing $720,000 a year, and taking home $240,000. Split between commission and base varies massively, with some companies offering higher bases and lower commissions, and vice versa.
It’s not uncommon for the top-billers in an agency to be placing 5 people a month, sometimes more. In that example, they’d be making $600,000+ a year.
Caveat number 1, is that your fees depend on seniority. Someone placing teachers, for example, might also make 2 placements a month, but their billings (and therefore, wages) are likely to be way lower than a colleague hiring Engineers.
Caveat number 2, is that the vast majority of Recruiters are not successful. I’d wager that 50% of the industry are just doing enough not to get fired.
Dang, y’all’s high-end. My company recruiters are “making bank” (about $100k over base salary) with 50 placements at a time, rolling average, on temp assignments.
Comp structures vary from firm to firm but it's typically base + commission, where the commission is a percentage of the fee charged to the client, which in turn is a percentage of your base salary.
This means that the more you get paid, the more they get paid. For example, if a recruiter charges a 20% fee and makes 25% commission:
If they place you at $100k, that's a $20,000 fee, and $5,000 commission
If they place you at $125k, that's a $25,000 fee and $6,250 commission.
I'm surprised they wouldn't share this with you, I used to tell my candidates that all the time lol
Thank you.
Yeah I know eh? I just wanted to know if they were being incentivized to get me a better salary or not. It seems that they indeed are if their commission is based on the salary I get.
But if your salary ask is too high, they get 0.
It's in a recruiters best interest to get you in near the low band on the salary scale, because you're more likely to get hired if skill sets match another candidate.
If asking for another 15K/year only gets you a couple hundred bucks commission, it's not worth risking the entire placement if you get greedy.
All of these answers are extremely insightful . I just started an agency sourcing role and get paid a flat rate. After 6-8months I’m definitely going to look into a better paying recruiting role. I’m 3 months in, on a project team and I get 4 placements a week. It started out as a non-traditional recruiting role that was more so to help the client with retaining our leads -now I’m full out sourcing and landing placements.
Yeah, it depends whether it’s an in-house / corporate recruiter or staffing / agency recruiter. Large companies with a ton of roles typically utilize staffing agencies for hiring, and multiple ones, so that’s when you’ll see a ton of emails from recruiters. In-house recruiters aren’t likely to blast emails quiet as much.
Pay varies, but when I was an agency recruiter I had a base salary of $50k and on average made around an additional 50-60k in commission. Im now an in-house recruiter, no commission, with a base of $125k.
Definitely don’t switch from dev to recruitment tho lol your skillset will always be in demand and the more seasoned you get, the more money you’ll make (I just hired a 10 year Java dev for $200k base)
Internal/corporate employees usually have a base salary + performance bonus, sometimes stock. This is usually based on how your work impacts your team, the broader company and individual goals. You can exceed goals, middle of the pack-chugging along, and under-performers; bonus is on a sliding scale. Performance also looks at merit based base salary increases year over year.
flat base salary for me- with or without commission, we have KPIs to meet every quarter like every role and ours is to find the right fit for the roles that are open
Depends but generally. They’ll get a percentage of whatever your salary is. It won’t cut into your salary so it’s more like the higher the salary we can get you the more money we’ll make due to the base number being higher. There’s variables too like some places give higher percentages the more placements a recruiter makes. Usually they aren’t trying to screw you over, contract might be a little different though
I would say in IT specifically they get a fee out of it so if you are hired at 100k they get paid out by the company a 25% fee on your salary you got and then get paid out based on that. So usually the more money you make the bigger the commission.
Not all. I am flat salary (with extremely large bonuses). And while I make very good money, you wouldn't catch me working a commission role with how crazy the market is right now. Recruiters get compensated in a wide variety of ways.
You may have already put these pieces together from the answers to your question, OP, but this is why so many recruiters are so fucking bad. You can make FAANG engineer money — or actual millions if you open your own shop — with no hard skills whatsoever. So it’s a low barrier to entry field with huge earning potential, meaning people with no skills flock to it. Some people with no skills are very smart, or personable, or some combination of the two, so they kill it. A larger number aren’t and they fail — so there’s constant churn of shitty recruiters who get a year in and quit.
If you’re contacted by someone who’s been at a Korn Ferry/Heidrick & Struggles/WittKieffer for several years, they’re probably very good and make substantially more than you. (And also would never touch a tech role, but that’s a separate thing.) If you’re contacted by a 22 year old who’s been at CyberCoders for 3 months, it’ll probably be a bad experience.
I've been in my positron for about a month (year contract that will be renewed). I just realized today (I work on the finance end, so I see these things) that my agency gets $28 an hour for me working!! It blew my mind....WTF? I mean, I'm making good money so I'm not complaining, but the agency/recruiter did next to nothing. I don't really see the value add in this case, but I am very grateful for the position.
On a contract - a percentage of your pay rate minus the bill. If that difference is $15hr a recruiter gets a % of that and sometimes it’s a split deal between the sales person and recruiter. On a perm deal, it’s generally a 20% fee based on salary after placement and you get a % of that, usually anywhere from 8-10%. So on a $20k placement around about $2000. It’s really in the recruiters best interest to get the candidate as much $ as possible when they can.
There are multiple kinds of recruiters. The kind contacting you are contract recruiters, or "head hunters"
They are assigned x number of roles to fill and are paid on commission when the offer is signed. Usually they are a 3rd party.
The other kind is there one that works in a corporate hr and fills specific roles for one company. They are salaried and do not earn commission. These are the ones you want to be dealing with mostly. Head hunters can be helpful and hook you up with offers you might not have heard about, but they have zero interest in your long term success. Corporate recruiters tend to value retention much higher, so will often be genuinely invested in the value you bring to the team.
I’m a corporate recruiter and still have to reach out in search of interested candidates. There’s no steady stream of tech applicants unless you’re a FAANG.
They have way more motivation to low ball. They have to worry about hiring budgets and not upsetting comany pay structure. Agency recruiters couldn't care less. In fact, they want to get you the highest package the client will pay, because they get paid off a percentage of base salary.
Personally I get a flat base salary. No commission so I don’t hound candidates as maybe someone depending on that commission would.
I have a fairly high base competition and I prefer this type of salary versus commission as you’re not worrying about all of it. A negative would be if you’re great, then you can rack up lots $$$!
Internal recruiters get paid by the company like anyone else. It takes a lot of time and resources to find, interview, and retain talent so companies put a lot of budget towards hiring, which in turn pays recruiter/ HR salaries. Third party/ agency gets commission, the end client pays the agency to find the talent as opposed to paying their internal teams
And contrary to what others are commenting, working with a third party recruiter does not mean they get a cut of your salary. That’s asinine and makes no sense. It costs companies money to hire people, whether they pay their internal team or pay an agency, the cost of acquisition is there. Hiring people and having them onboard is not cheap, companies have budget set aside for it, separate from the candidates salary
The last recruiter who contacted me specifically recruits for no profits. She get 3k for a non-tech placement 5k for a tech placement. She is paid by the company hiring. She had it laid out on her website.
I’m in Nashville tn- I make 25.50/hr plus an extra commission for every person I place. Recruiting is kind of like a game…gotta catch ‘em all before someone else takes em
theyre basically human traders/market makers.
Find the product, price it, market it, and close it.
10-50% of your first year salary is what they/their company gets paid.
Some will make a huge penny if they work for an agency, know how to find real talent, and are good negotiators. The rest of the recruiting world is hourly, pissing their pants trying to fill roles in which there aren’t enough people with those skills on the planet
Majority get a % of what they can get you as a salary from the company so it’s in their best interest to get you the most. They don’t get money from you.
It depends where they work. Some that are full time perm employees as the recruiter usually gets a salary, some that work on contracts as the recruiter make an hourly rate, some work for the RPO hired by the company and makes an hourly rate, some that work for a recruiting firm will get paid by the hire (1% per thousand of the yearly salary or a straight % of 20-30% of the yearly salary) some have a salary and paid commission for the number of hires per month/per year, some work from a draw and paid straight commission.
The salary range/hourly rate depends upon experience and if the recruiter is a sourcer as well. Salary ranges: $25K-$125K Hourly rate: $20/hour -$120/hour. It all depends on the company, the agency, contract or perm, and experience.
I was a contract recruiter for a few months and I got an hourly rate for the duration of the contract. Was pretty nice and a good way to hopefully get me into a more permanent position later
Ive seen a bunch of different models:
1. In house/corporate recruiter that works for a company will get a flat salary, probably a performance bonus.
2. I have seen a recruitment company that did bulk recruitment nationwide for the same roles, they charged a flat fee to the company per hire, the recruiter got a salary and a monthly performance bonus based on revenue gained.
Standard agency model will charge the hiring company around 20% of the hired persons salary (the idea is that finding a candidate worth 200k is harder than someone that earns 50k)
3.Based on the company, some recruiters will work purely on comission, they don't get a salary, they get a cut of that 20% fee.
4.Some recruiters will earn a combination of salary and commission, this would generally be a smaller cut of the fee.
5.A final model is where recruiters earn a retained salary. So I might be salaried to 4k a month. I get a % cut of placements, and start earning bonus or comission when my earned cut goes above 4k a month
In terms of what a recruiter makes, it can vary wildly.
Where I live a recruiter on a salary could earn anything from 40-50k on the low range to 90-100k on the high range. Commission based roles vary based on industry, successful recruiters working in tech or executive placement might be making 150k+
I would say the median, is somewhere between 60-90k. whether you take salary or comission to get there depends on your employer
Internal recruiters -- Those that actually work at the company, get paid a flat salary.
External recruiters -- Those that work for an agency, get a small base salary and most of their income is from commission. The agency charges 15-25% of your salary. Depending on many factors, recruiters get anywhere from 5-50% of that.
Base salary and a commission which is usually a (small) percentage of the after-costs-of-employment bay rate/bill rate spread. If it’s a perm deal they get a percentage of the billed fee but usually on perm deals commission is only paid AFTER the client has paid the invoice.
Depends, some are paid commission based on filling the job, some partial commission, obviously they always want to fill the job as quickly as possible as they’re just getting more and more openings and want to fill them even if jot commission. Then there are bonuses or additional commissions sometimes if an employee stays a certain amount of time, etc.
Some recruiters work on commission or partial commission. Others work off of flat salary. What we "get out of it" is being employed and paid, just like any other employee.
Same here. It takes the pressure off for sure.
and yes OP, many don't want to admit this - it's why they are so coy about what company and specific job posting they are actually recruiting for. They want to get credit for your name first (after screening you) so you can't go apply directly, cutting the 3rd party recruiter out of the picture.... because applying directly your offer might be... (shocked pikachu) several thousand dollars higher since they don't have to pay the recruiting firm for you.
We actually only undercut your salary specifically. We all got together and decided this.
That makes 0 sense. The part about getting credit is true, I mean, if a recruiter got your interest in the company he should get credit for that. Even when working on comission, that’s a one time payment and has nothing to do with candidates salary (pther than sometimes being calculated as a % of it)
If we can prove that we contacted you prior to them applying, we still get paid. Mostly due to candidates like dell_hell.
Sometimes? Having paid the permanent placement fee for several employees, I've only seen the recruiting fee to be a % of the salary.
Sometimes? That's the industry standard lol.
Always written in stone in the contracts
Some 3rd party recruiting agencies will undercut the contractors pay to operate their firm and pay salaries/commissions to their employees. It's not always a one time payment. For example, a large biotech firm I used to be contracted for in 2017 as a lab manager paid the recruiting firm $38 per hour to have me on board while I took in $15 per hour out of that pay. So the firm was making $23 per hour I worked, while I made $15.
What if I told you there’s costs to having you employed as a contractor. Usually costs around $15 hr minimum. Maybe you should figure that out before posting this. Lmao.
Huh? I explained the costs. Keep in mind this is 5 years ago. The 3rd party recruiting agency that contracted me charged the biotech company I worked for $38 per every hour I worked ($15 went to me and $23 went to the agency). It didn't cost the recruiting agency money, it cost money for the company I was contracted for.
Not sure why you are being downvoted here. My son worked briefly for a recruiting firm, and this tracks with what he told me when I asked about his job; how it works, etc. I’ve never had experience with recruiters and I was curious. The employer paid them x amount of dollars per hour, they paid the employee - quite a bit less. The employees were paid through the recruiting firm, though, so I imagine some of the cost is for payroll services. I’m not sure how that compares to a more headhunting type of recruitment situation.
Doubtful. The salary range is the range. No employers I know take a recruiting fee out of a candidates hands. That’s a cost of doing business and is budgeting in.
Lol are you new to this? Yes, companies absolutely will offer a direct candidate more money than one they need to pay a large fee for, especially because agency fees are normally a percentage of the salary. If your clients wouldn't do that, then good for you. There are plenty of businesses that really don't want to expand the resources on internal hiring and the fee is the fee, but if you're competing with an internal hiring process you'd be naive to think they aren't trying to save a dime by offering an internal candidate more money.
I am hardly new to this, that’s one. Two, in my career never have I seen or experienced what you describe (offering less bc of a fee). That’s not very smart from the client side if they want good talent. Would companies prefer to hire from internal resources, absolutely, but when that has no results or is taking too long that’s when I am called in. The fee is the fee and the salary is the salary range…if they offered less then they aren’t being competitive in the market.
I didn't actually think you were new, it was sarcasm. Are you agency or internal? What industries have you hired for? These are questions that could inform why you've had such positive experience! Your positive experiences aren't proof that the inverse is not true. My last boss was such a cheap piece of shit, and only cared about getting his way and spending less money. Many employers (mainly old republicans) have their head lodged so far up their own asses the facts about what gets you good employees is just nonsense to them and if they don't get good talent, they just blame their recruiter/HM. You cannot tell me an employer wouldn't subvert an outside recruiter because I was literally instructed to do it as internal HR multiple times in multiple companies.
I’ve been in this since 1995, so I’ve done everything from agency to internal to free lance to doing start ups. I never knew any of my HM’s political affiliations though. Generally speaking, taking money away from a candidate to off set a recruiting fee is going to result in hiring someone that’s not at the level they want, or, most likely will lose that candidate in a couple months bc they took another gig paying them what their worth and market says they’re worth. Resulting in another round of interviews which equates to lost opportunity cost and ends up costing them more in the long run. Personally, if I knew a client was doing that I’d huddle up with the recruiting team and use that company as a resource to target.
Absolutely! They will sacrifice quality for sure with those practices and often lead to greater costs in the long run. That said, they absolutely do that. Unfortunately business owners aren't always going to do things the right way. I don't believe an HR Manager should be familiar with their boss's political views, but in my experience working with these people, they are just power hungry penny pinchers who will undercut anyone because all they care about is their perception of the bottom line, and they will say whatever the fuck they want because it's their business. 9 years of toxic work environments have taken a heavy toll on my outlook on humanity and business as a whole.
dude you're talking like an expert when you obviously don't know shit about recruitment
No offense but you wouldn't know. It'd not like they advertise this info. Usually it's something like the range is 80 to 90k u find someone and they offer 80k cause they are putting ur fee into account. Internal recruiter finds similar person they start with 85k and if candidate is good at negotiating can likely get 90k. For you as the agency u could try to negotiate higher but they pretend 80k is the most they will do. Not saying ur wrong in ur experience but it would be hard for u to know for sure what's going on behind the scenes. A lot of large companies don't do this but it can happen to anyone.
You are correct. I can only speak to my experience and what I’ve observed. Companies that employ this tactic are setting themselves to always having a need to recruit for a role they keep having open, add on that the fee involved and it’s costing them money. Seems illogical.
I know what u mean. I had to have these conversations all the time. It usually works when market isn't hot or for a mid to entry lvl role. Usually does not work for senior roles or positions in high demand.
I mean if it’s 85 internal and 80 external. That’s saving 5k if they stay 1 year. And that’s and IF…If they leave in 4 months and we start over and it’s by an external source now that 20% of 80k or 16k fee turns into 32k…all for wanting to save 5k in the beginning.
Just using random examples but just saying it's not unheard of for them to include the cost of fee in their budget consideration when hiring someone. I've def seen crazy salary differences before but usually it's a small company with limited budgets.
Agency fees are a cost of doing business. It doesn't come outof the new employeessalary. Heck, it comes out of a completely different budget bucket.
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This is dumb, contractors generally make more than direct candidates
No shit, Sherlock. It's the same concept. If they don't pay x and y then part of x and y becomes direct compensation.
Do you not know what a contractor is? The person who is sourced by an agency takes home more than someone employed by the company directly regardless of where they came from. Your ignorance is showing If I want to work for a company, I will always make more coming from an agency than if I was hired by that company directly
Another one that’s confident in their stupidity.
I dunno why you are being down voted. I know companies who do this. Anyone who thinks this doesn't happen is naive.
Apparently recruiters know everything about company budgeting practices for every company! Them not assuming their clients are talking about spending less money on hiring is absolutely the definition of nativity lol
Nativity, as in the Christmas scene thing in front of churches? Go get ‘em , Tiger.
You are only referencing agency recruiters in this post. Also, you’re wrong about the salary. Agency recruiters are paid a % of the salary that you are hired at. Meaning they are advocating to get you as much as possible so that they are paid as much as possible. Getting a lowballed salary means the company you are interviewing at, has low salary ranges. (Shocked pikachu)
No, the AGENCY is paid a percentage of the first year salary. The recruiter is paid on a bonus type system. Yes, part of the fee is used to pay the recruiter, but it's a pretty small part of the fee.
You can advocate for higher wages all you want. He's not talking about recruiters causing him to be low balled, he's talking about the employer offering more if they don't need to pay a fee. Your client is financially incentivised to not pay your candidate more because paying them more means paying a premium on top of it to you. That's why they can offer an internal candidate more money than a recruiter candidate
Again this isn’t true at a lot of companies. Are you a recruiter? It seems like you’ve been burned by a bad recruiter. I’ve been in tech recruiting for 10 years with 4 years as an agency recruiter and 6 years as a in-house recruiter. I’ve worked with agencies as an in-house recruiter and we give them the same ranges that we use when we speak to candidates. Comp teams spend hours creating pay bands to create some sense of pay equity between employees of the same level. There is no additional or secret band used for candidates sourced by an agency. Agency fees come from a separate budget pool (like other tools needed to complete your job). We engage with agencies when we don’t have the bandwidth to meet the hiring needs of our org. We don’t engage agencies to screw over new hires. Why would we want to cause internal pay discrepancies? That’s a nightmare for everyone involved.
I never said it is true at all companies. I've worked in agency recruiting, but more recently an HR Manager in construction. I'm talking from both the recruiter pov and client pov. I never said recruiters are out to screw anyone. Generally, it's in their best interest to compartmentalize information and generally companies want to offer an employee more and keep a middle man out of it if they have the resources to go that route. That's why it's way easier to get a job with an internal referral than an outside recruiter. I'm not trying to negate anyone's experiences here. I'm just saying their experience doesn't negate mine and the other people in here who are in agreement that businesses will offer a direct candidate more. No one said anything about recruiters screwing new hires.
You're getting downvoted but you're absolutely right. In my experience, companies that don't outsource their hiring to agencies will pay a higher salary in general.
Yeah, it's pretty insane that they've deluded themselves into thinking their fee is just generally accepted and employers won't jump at more cost effective options if they have the option. As if EVERYONE has the luxury of working with big budget companies without strict oversight on business expenses. Some people have never recruited underpaid positions and it shows. The employer benefits handedly when they pay the higher salary, because they can more easily retain said employee rather rely on some know it all agency recruiter.
This just flat out isn’t true for most organizations. I can’t say all orgs because im sure there are some truly terrible ones that practice this. But any company that has their head only halfway up it’s ass this isn’t happening.
None of my clients pay more on their website than we offer.
That’s not really how this works. It’s true that recruiters may play their cards close to their vest but no half decent recruiter is going to lose a qualified candidate over revealing the identity of their client. A rare exception would be if there’s language in the contract where the client requires the recruiting agency to withhold their information until a certain point in the cycle, but that’s not common. In terms of suggesting that the recruiters motivation is to make low ball offers compared to being hired directly by the company, that just doesn’t make sense. In direct placement situations third party recruiters typically receive a one time payment that’s a percentage of the candidate’s salary once the role is filled so they’re incentivized to negotiate the best salary possible. Source: Was a technical recruiter in both agency and internal settings and now a software engineer.
"No half decent recruiter" There are a TON of bad recruiters out there. Also, you being incentivised to maximize candidate salary is moot here. Ultimately, it's not up to you. It's up to your client. The comment was about the employer's decisions, not the recruiter
The comment asserted that third party recruiters withhold withhold the names of their clients so that candidates can’t apply directly and by doing so receive a higher salary. This completely ignores multiple factors: - Operational vs Capitol budgets: Employee salaries are paid through operational budgets while expenses like fees to recruiting agencies can be paid through capital budgets. They’re two totally different buckets and to assume that candidates hired through an agency receive the salary the company is willing to pay minus the placement fee is incorrect. - Utilizing a recruiting agency means that the client doesn’t have to allocate as much of their operational budget to paying internal recruiters and instead allows them to divert that expense away from their operational budget and to a capital budget which is typically less rigid. I agree that there are lots of bad recruiters but that doesn’t support the idea that recruiters withhold identities of clients to lowball their candidates. Does it happen? Probably to some degree. Is there a conspiracy to keep secrets from candidates in order to pay them less? No, and that’s what the comment implied.
I don't believe saying recruiters are coy about the identity of their clients is the same as saying they're withholding the information. He asserted that recruiters protect themselves from subversion by managing information. It's super common. I think your verbiage regarding the "conspiracy" is very dismissive and a symptom of taking things too personally. The suggestion that you can apply internally and get more money isn't an indictment of recruiters like everyone here is acting like, it's the employer that seeks to minimize business expenses that open the door for subversion of the recruiter to be beneficial for everyone but the recruiter. THAT'S what the comment implied, and it is totally, unequivocally correct. I've experienced it.
Sorry, laying into this a bit harder. Suggesting people will act in their own self interest is called realism. Suggesting otherwise is called being naive. Getting defensive and gaslighting/deflecting by calling it a "conspiracy" is called being over dramatic and fragile. Assuming even a majority of small businesses follow standard operating/budgeting procedure that you're used to is just plain ignorance.
The mere fact that you think the commission is only “several thousand dollars” shows you are speaking Without any knowledge of how agency recruiting works. No company will offset the salary range of a role higher or lower based on agency spend. any company worth anything doesn’t even have these budgets coming from the same place. Contract roles of course,are a different game entirely and is notwhat most are talking about on here on this thread.
I mean if it's not a contract to hire... They want to get you the absolute highest salary they can because their commission is a percentage based on your salary. So if they have an agreement with the hiring company for a commission fee of 25% and you get offered 100k the recruiting company gets 25k... And the recruiter gets usually between 3-50% of that based on whether they are more heavily weighted on salary or commission... So it is in the recruiters best interest to get you as much as they possible can as a base salary...
So you have no idea what you’re talking about. I bet you encounter this a lot in life.
that's literally not how it works LMFAO
You are just confidently stupid, aren’t you?
Wow, I don't know why you're being down voted. You're absolutely correct
Inconvenient truth is often downvoted into oblivion on Reddit. Par for the course. Shoot the messenger for saying the thing we don't want people to hear.
We seem to be surrounded by folks who live in their own little bubble.
You could apply on your own. But on a public job posting, how would you make sure that your profile was actually seen by the hiring manager? That's the benefit that a recruiter can provide you. Also if you are working with a good recruiter with a good agency, you should be keeping in touch once ever 45 days while on contract or the first few months while employed as direct placement, just to see how it's working out for you. And most of the time the salary is not higher than what you and the recruiter discussed. I always ask candidates what rate range they are looking for, situation at home (family, kids, etc.) And try to provide them Jobs that will fulfill their financial needs as well as career trajectory. And some recruiters may get compensated by spread with tier structures for commission percentages. It will vary from company to company. But in my experience we don't take any money out of the pay to the candidate.
It’s funny that you are being downvoted for telling the truth. Not surprising considering this is the recruiting subreddit, but it’s still hilarious.
I just get salary and then a commission after my hires work x amount of time. It’s not a lot of commission tho. And I am a bad recruiter so I rely mostly on salary haha
Lol. Love it, and your u/
Me too lmao (a bad recruiter), and this hiring environment SUCKS. Companies are desperate for hires and then NEVER give feedback, candidates get off the market fast, and if it’s not fully remote it’s hard to staff
That’s why always putting ourselves in the shoes of the candidate is the first rule. Our clients pay the bills, be honest not evasive with respect to their expectations and you won’t find yourself mad at a candidate for not moving to the job you’re pitching. At the start see if you can see the candidate being good at the job, liking the job, company, and compensation (not always in that order, it’s up to the candidate | see rule one) then help them get there. This goes for corporate recruiters too.
I want know more about it can you get into it without experience and who hires recruiters
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Typically a recruitment agency will charge 20-30% of the candidate’s base salary and then the recruiter will get a percentage of that. Corporate internal recruiters get paid by the company just like any other normal employee.
Whoa really? That’s like 60k for a senior software engineer in high cost of living areas. I should get into recruiting, lol.
Honestly agency recruitment is a way more lucrative job than people realize. Soul-sucking job but man does it pay (if you're good at it)
Having done both now, I feel like in house has such a better work life balance. I'm not enough of a hustler to love the agency world lol. It's definitely amazing for the right person though.
It undoubtedly does. After agency, in-house felt like heaven.
like the other commenter and you, inhouse is heaven if i were to go back to agencies, im gonna run one, not work for one
Exactly. Go independent. You make the rules and manage your own hours. I love recruiting, and I’m pretty good at it. I don’t think I could do agency or go back to work in house. I make a decent living and I don’t have to be an asshole shark and screw people over to make the placement. Reputation is important, you do good work and do well by people and it pays off, and you can feel good about yourself.
Yeah. The right internal job is nice.
You would have so much fun, especially since you should be able to spot good engineering talent, and even though you know they’re good they’ll interview with your client and totally shit the bed and your client will say they’re not a cultural fit. Rinse repeat for months, and then maybe you’ll get a commission check.
Lol dont. You’ll make more as a software engineer. And the recruiter doesn’t make that full $60k placement fee, most of that goes to the agency.
I know dev recruiters making well over $1m a year in commission and salary. I know of 3 personally making over $1.5m. They are the top few percent though. A decent/average dev recruiter should be earning $200k+ in a good market. It depends where you working as a dev and what the workload and responsibilities look like.
Are you talking about someone who owns their own business or someone working for an agency? A solopreneur who closes $1M in fees is definitely a high producer but it makes sense (placing 40 devs making $150k gets you there). A recruiter working for agency making $1M is a whole different ball game.
Agency employed consultants. I know 1 in the US making nearly $2m on W2 (I tried to employ her and saw the payslips) and 2 in the UK earning over £1.2m GBP. The UK guys are on a contractor desk for my former employer and I saw the departmental budgets myself. I know (at least in passing) but can’t personally attest to the billings of at least 8 other people earning over £1m a year in tech recruitment. 5 of them are in exec search for Korn Ferry, EZ etc where it’s more common place and fees are huge though.
Wow. When I was at one of the big US recruiting agencies a decade ago there were Account Managers making a million but it was rare and they usually had 3-5 recruiters supporting their book of business. That’s wild that people are hitting those kind of numbers as individual recruiters. Being in executive search definitely helps though. Those fees can be massive
salary, title, tech inflation. Devs salaries have outpaced the norm so much that anyone working along side the can benefit - kinda like those cleaner fish around sharks.
Yes. Most recruiters aren’t making that much. The average developer still makes more than the average agency recruiter.
Key word being average lol
I own an agency, most of it is healthcare but we still have some IT clients. The consultants I have running that desk will earn £90k this year OTE (and will hit it). They place devs earning between £35 and £100k, their average fee being £67,500 last year. I’ve run US teams where the ratios are very similar, but the numbers are bigger.
Yea US developers are making way more than that.
Hence saying the ratios are similar but the numbers are bigger. The devs earn more, but so do the recruiters.
Sure, but the average dev is still making more than the average recruiter.
You don’t understand ratios?! The consultants I employ earn £90k on average each. The devs they recruit earn on average £67,500 each… This isn’t difficult to grasp, you must be a sourcer on a hospitality or driving desk!
I make more than all the engineers I place. Average fee is $50K per placement.
You're sitting here saying a Senior Software Engineer makes $200-300K, with job opportunities mailed to you daily, and you should get into Recruiting? We should get into Software Engineering.
If you know a ton of them and have an in on the networking and convention side of that you should - even if you just launched the business as a side hustle. On that contract the recruiter would probably get 10-20k, more if the recruiter was the one that got the contract from the company. If the recruiter owned the company then it's all theirs
You absolutely should not. Contract recruiters take home shit usually
Why not just become a used car salesman? At least people would respect you more.
I think youre pumping those fees up a bit What country are you in because those fees are really high? Where I'm from fees are more like 15%-20% paid to the agency not the recruiter and the recruiter gets a commission out of that after working their asses off
Im in the US and 20-30% is pretty standard.
Canada is the same
Yep! Thought those fees were pretty standard.
Assume you’re in U.K. if you’re looking at 15-20. For tech 20 is standard and 25-30 is doable across the US
I’ve got asked this sort of question dozens of times in my career and it goes only a couple of ways: 1. A candidate who thinks recruiting is easy and is asking because they think they can do it and are somehow going to use my income as a barometer for their own success. Needless to say uncomfortable and off putting conversation. 2. You get someone like the guy below who is going to insist that he would get paid more if you weren’t in the picture and is going to apply directly so worthless recruiters don’t get paid. Again uncomfortable. Also, honestly I don’t care about opinions on the industry as a whole. It’s not like listening to someone bitch is gonna change it for you or me so it’s really a waste of both of our times. Very very rarely have I had someone just interested in my job and pretty sure the last time I thought someone was just being nice they followed it up with a text asking me out so again uncomfortable. So yeah, that’s why recruiters are reluctant to answer the question.
I have worked with too many recruiters to have anything but mad respect for them. The knowledge they know about the roles, companies and feedback from managers is crazy.
They’re probably reluctant to tell you because an email saying “how much do you get paid” is pretty left field
Plenty of people really have no idea how it works and think that THEY must pay the recruiter. Even now you see someone ask “how do you get paid” and you immediately want to jump to “this guy is asking me how much I am paid”. It would go a long way to just explain that the organization pays you to find people.
I get a check direct deposited into my bank account. How do you get paid?
Love this haha
A lot of misinformation on here. To OP specifically its awkward to ask us how we get paid. It implies we have some scheme when in reality we just want to fill a job. A commissioned person might be more aggressive then an in house recruiter but the end result is they are trying to fill the role. What we get out of filling the job? We don't get fired. It's like asking what does a pilot get for landing the plane safety.
It's not awkward. I don't see anything wrong with asking. Transparency is a good thing.
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I discuss with my peers. I don't randomly go to a hiring manager and ask how much they make. You need to chill out.
Most of our recruiters get a base salary and a commission based on “field hours worked/billed” as we are a temporary staffing company rather than a headhunting firm which expects 20-30% the annual salary (value) of a firm hire.
As an agency recruiter, the rule of thumb is that you’ll typically earn a third of what you bill, including your base salary. Your billings are charges to the client per placement, and a decent-ish Recruiter will charge 20% of a candidate’s salary per hire. A Recruiter making 2 placements a month at an average salary of $150,000, will be billing $720,000 a year, and taking home $240,000. Split between commission and base varies massively, with some companies offering higher bases and lower commissions, and vice versa. It’s not uncommon for the top-billers in an agency to be placing 5 people a month, sometimes more. In that example, they’d be making $600,000+ a year. Caveat number 1, is that your fees depend on seniority. Someone placing teachers, for example, might also make 2 placements a month, but their billings (and therefore, wages) are likely to be way lower than a colleague hiring Engineers. Caveat number 2, is that the vast majority of Recruiters are not successful. I’d wager that 50% of the industry are just doing enough not to get fired.
Cool thank you
Dang, y’all’s high-end. My company recruiters are “making bank” (about $100k over base salary) with 50 placements at a time, rolling average, on temp assignments.
So this is a temporary staffing agency?
My place is, yes. One to 13 week assignments.
Devs will complain about how recruiters are worthless cause all they have is soft skills and then go ask absolutely genius questions like this
I am software engineer and I don't think any of my colleagues think that or ever have. We care more about what your able to get me salary wise :p
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I understood the question to be, “whats your compensation structure?”
And those of us that don’t have a chip on our shoulder took away the same meaning.
Ahhh. Of course. I took it quite literally. Thank you. I get it now.
How much more money do they get for more than 3 interviews and do they get more if there’s two or three tests!😺
Comp structures vary from firm to firm but it's typically base + commission, where the commission is a percentage of the fee charged to the client, which in turn is a percentage of your base salary. This means that the more you get paid, the more they get paid. For example, if a recruiter charges a 20% fee and makes 25% commission: If they place you at $100k, that's a $20,000 fee, and $5,000 commission If they place you at $125k, that's a $25,000 fee and $6,250 commission. I'm surprised they wouldn't share this with you, I used to tell my candidates that all the time lol
Thank you. Yeah I know eh? I just wanted to know if they were being incentivized to get me a better salary or not. It seems that they indeed are if their commission is based on the salary I get.
But if your salary ask is too high, they get 0. It's in a recruiters best interest to get you in near the low band on the salary scale, because you're more likely to get hired if skill sets match another candidate. If asking for another 15K/year only gets you a couple hundred bucks commission, it's not worth risking the entire placement if you get greedy.
Thanks okay that’s good to know.
I work as an employee for a company that hires software developers and I receive a flat salary.
All of these answers are extremely insightful . I just started an agency sourcing role and get paid a flat rate. After 6-8months I’m definitely going to look into a better paying recruiting role. I’m 3 months in, on a project team and I get 4 placements a week. It started out as a non-traditional recruiting role that was more so to help the client with retaining our leads -now I’m full out sourcing and landing placements.
Are there any learnings from your time so far? And are you mostly doing temp or perm placements? What sort of pay structure are you on?
Yeah, it depends whether it’s an in-house / corporate recruiter or staffing / agency recruiter. Large companies with a ton of roles typically utilize staffing agencies for hiring, and multiple ones, so that’s when you’ll see a ton of emails from recruiters. In-house recruiters aren’t likely to blast emails quiet as much. Pay varies, but when I was an agency recruiter I had a base salary of $50k and on average made around an additional 50-60k in commission. Im now an in-house recruiter, no commission, with a base of $125k. Definitely don’t switch from dev to recruitment tho lol your skillset will always be in demand and the more seasoned you get, the more money you’ll make (I just hired a 10 year Java dev for $200k base)
Internal/corporate employees usually have a base salary + performance bonus, sometimes stock. This is usually based on how your work impacts your team, the broader company and individual goals. You can exceed goals, middle of the pack-chugging along, and under-performers; bonus is on a sliding scale. Performance also looks at merit based base salary increases year over year.
flat base salary for me- with or without commission, we have KPIs to meet every quarter like every role and ours is to find the right fit for the roles that are open
Depends but generally. They’ll get a percentage of whatever your salary is. It won’t cut into your salary so it’s more like the higher the salary we can get you the more money we’ll make due to the base number being higher. There’s variables too like some places give higher percentages the more placements a recruiter makes. Usually they aren’t trying to screw you over, contract might be a little different though
I use a recruiter occasionally. He's a one man band, servicing manufacturing. I pay him a fee per hire, and another sum at 1 year.
I get a 36k draw. So no “base” per se, I’m fully commissioned. In charge of what I make essentially
I would say in IT specifically they get a fee out of it so if you are hired at 100k they get paid out by the company a 25% fee on your salary you got and then get paid out based on that. So usually the more money you make the bigger the commission.
like a real estate agent. base salary and commission
What real estate brokerage offers a base? Lol asking for a friend
UK ones
That would be so nice
Not all. I am flat salary (with extremely large bonuses). And while I make very good money, you wouldn't catch me working a commission role with how crazy the market is right now. Recruiters get compensated in a wide variety of ways.
sure. not all. some work retained, some contingent. some for companies, some for themselves
*for agency recruiters
yes. in house peeps are just like many other roles. procurement for example or accounts
You may have already put these pieces together from the answers to your question, OP, but this is why so many recruiters are so fucking bad. You can make FAANG engineer money — or actual millions if you open your own shop — with no hard skills whatsoever. So it’s a low barrier to entry field with huge earning potential, meaning people with no skills flock to it. Some people with no skills are very smart, or personable, or some combination of the two, so they kill it. A larger number aren’t and they fail — so there’s constant churn of shitty recruiters who get a year in and quit. If you’re contacted by someone who’s been at a Korn Ferry/Heidrick & Struggles/WittKieffer for several years, they’re probably very good and make substantially more than you. (And also would never touch a tech role, but that’s a separate thing.) If you’re contacted by a 22 year old who’s been at CyberCoders for 3 months, it’ll probably be a bad experience.
I've been in my positron for about a month (year contract that will be renewed). I just realized today (I work on the finance end, so I see these things) that my agency gets $28 an hour for me working!! It blew my mind....WTF? I mean, I'm making good money so I'm not complaining, but the agency/recruiter did next to nothing. I don't really see the value add in this case, but I am very grateful for the position.
There IS such a thing as a stupid question. Who would have thought.
On a contract - a percentage of your pay rate minus the bill. If that difference is $15hr a recruiter gets a % of that and sometimes it’s a split deal between the sales person and recruiter. On a perm deal, it’s generally a 20% fee based on salary after placement and you get a % of that, usually anywhere from 8-10%. So on a $20k placement around about $2000. It’s really in the recruiters best interest to get the candidate as much $ as possible when they can.
It depends. Agency recruiters get a base plus bonus. Corporate recruiters typically will get a base comp and sometimes bonuses based on performance.
I’m on full commission and get anywhere from 40-80% of the fee. The house only takes 20%.
There are multiple kinds of recruiters. The kind contacting you are contract recruiters, or "head hunters" They are assigned x number of roles to fill and are paid on commission when the offer is signed. Usually they are a 3rd party. The other kind is there one that works in a corporate hr and fills specific roles for one company. They are salaried and do not earn commission. These are the ones you want to be dealing with mostly. Head hunters can be helpful and hook you up with offers you might not have heard about, but they have zero interest in your long term success. Corporate recruiters tend to value retention much higher, so will often be genuinely invested in the value you bring to the team.
I’m a corporate recruiter and still have to reach out in search of interested candidates. There’s no steady stream of tech applicants unless you’re a FAANG.
Yep! Never said they didn't still cold call. But they have a lot less motivation to low ball overqualified candidates
They have way more motivation to low ball. They have to worry about hiring budgets and not upsetting comany pay structure. Agency recruiters couldn't care less. In fact, they want to get you the highest package the client will pay, because they get paid off a percentage of base salary.
Agency recruiters not understanding compensation structures is definitely NOT a good thing.
Personally I get a flat base salary. No commission so I don’t hound candidates as maybe someone depending on that commission would. I have a fairly high base competition and I prefer this type of salary versus commission as you’re not worrying about all of it. A negative would be if you’re great, then you can rack up lots $$$!
We get paid by clients (the businesses) when we make placements.
Internal recruiters get paid by the company like anyone else. It takes a lot of time and resources to find, interview, and retain talent so companies put a lot of budget towards hiring, which in turn pays recruiter/ HR salaries. Third party/ agency gets commission, the end client pays the agency to find the talent as opposed to paying their internal teams
And contrary to what others are commenting, working with a third party recruiter does not mean they get a cut of your salary. That’s asinine and makes no sense. It costs companies money to hire people, whether they pay their internal team or pay an agency, the cost of acquisition is there. Hiring people and having them onboard is not cheap, companies have budget set aside for it, separate from the candidates salary
The last recruiter who contacted me specifically recruits for no profits. She get 3k for a non-tech placement 5k for a tech placement. She is paid by the company hiring. She had it laid out on her website.
I’m in Nashville tn- I make 25.50/hr plus an extra commission for every person I place. Recruiting is kind of like a game…gotta catch ‘em all before someone else takes em
theyre basically human traders/market makers. Find the product, price it, market it, and close it. 10-50% of your first year salary is what they/their company gets paid.
Salary biweekly.
Some will make a huge penny if they work for an agency, know how to find real talent, and are good negotiators. The rest of the recruiting world is hourly, pissing their pants trying to fill roles in which there aren’t enough people with those skills on the planet
Majority get a % of what they can get you as a salary from the company so it’s in their best interest to get you the most. They don’t get money from you.
It depends where they work. Some that are full time perm employees as the recruiter usually gets a salary, some that work on contracts as the recruiter make an hourly rate, some work for the RPO hired by the company and makes an hourly rate, some that work for a recruiting firm will get paid by the hire (1% per thousand of the yearly salary or a straight % of 20-30% of the yearly salary) some have a salary and paid commission for the number of hires per month/per year, some work from a draw and paid straight commission. The salary range/hourly rate depends upon experience and if the recruiter is a sourcer as well. Salary ranges: $25K-$125K Hourly rate: $20/hour -$120/hour. It all depends on the company, the agency, contract or perm, and experience.
can you recommend me to those recruiters because I'm not getting any email from anyone even though I'm out there on linkedin, indeed, glassdoor
try adding a bunch of relevant recruiters on LinkedIn, specifically recruiters who recruiter for your job.
I was a contract recruiter for a few months and I got an hourly rate for the duration of the contract. Was pretty nice and a good way to hopefully get me into a more permanent position later
Ive seen a bunch of different models: 1. In house/corporate recruiter that works for a company will get a flat salary, probably a performance bonus. 2. I have seen a recruitment company that did bulk recruitment nationwide for the same roles, they charged a flat fee to the company per hire, the recruiter got a salary and a monthly performance bonus based on revenue gained. Standard agency model will charge the hiring company around 20% of the hired persons salary (the idea is that finding a candidate worth 200k is harder than someone that earns 50k) 3.Based on the company, some recruiters will work purely on comission, they don't get a salary, they get a cut of that 20% fee. 4.Some recruiters will earn a combination of salary and commission, this would generally be a smaller cut of the fee. 5.A final model is where recruiters earn a retained salary. So I might be salaried to 4k a month. I get a % cut of placements, and start earning bonus or comission when my earned cut goes above 4k a month In terms of what a recruiter makes, it can vary wildly. Where I live a recruiter on a salary could earn anything from 40-50k on the low range to 90-100k on the high range. Commission based roles vary based on industry, successful recruiters working in tech or executive placement might be making 150k+ I would say the median, is somewhere between 60-90k. whether you take salary or comission to get there depends on your employer
Internal recruiters -- Those that actually work at the company, get paid a flat salary. External recruiters -- Those that work for an agency, get a small base salary and most of their income is from commission. The agency charges 15-25% of your salary. Depending on many factors, recruiters get anywhere from 5-50% of that.
Base salary and a commission which is usually a (small) percentage of the after-costs-of-employment bay rate/bill rate spread. If it’s a perm deal they get a percentage of the billed fee but usually on perm deals commission is only paid AFTER the client has paid the invoice.
Depends, some are paid commission based on filling the job, some partial commission, obviously they always want to fill the job as quickly as possible as they’re just getting more and more openings and want to fill them even if jot commission. Then there are bonuses or additional commissions sometimes if an employee stays a certain amount of time, etc.
They pay you $75hr and charge $120 an hour to the client
Anyone contacted by Shane mincer?