Our good friend Stephen O’Donnell (this is NOT a picture of him looking sad by the way) recently wrote this and we love it..
Contingency recruitment fees are archaic because:
1. We most commonly hear about “No win, no fee from American lawyers, but at least there’s only one lawyer on each case.
2. Multiple agencies on each vacancy, means that only a proportion of assignments result in a fee.
3. Success fees which are achieved need to be large enough to cover for the time spent on unsuccessful assignments.
4. There is no correlation between the amount of work and skill required to fill a vacancy as a proportion of the new employee’s salary.
5. Vacancies with higher salaries, and therefore placement fees, are rarely harder to fill than lower salary jobs.
6. Arbitrary percentage fees are eroded all the time by competing agencies and market conditions.
7. Recruiters refuse to work on difficult to fill roles.
8. TA departments try to fill easy roles themselves, and only assign the difficult to fill roles.
9. Candidates are unaware of the success fee on their head, when they accept an offer.
10. Employers have the false perception of a free service, to view unlimited candidates.
