Understanding the benefit of paying recruitment fees

I, as many recruitment consultants do, am often challenged on the fees we charge for the service we offer. To many, the perception is that the function is easy, unskilled, and to some, profiteering.  The truth couldn't be more different. Of course, it depends on the service you want. If it's just to be inundated with a lot of unsuitable, unqualified CVs, then why would you pay a lot for someone to post your job description on job boards and auto-pass the responses?

In my case, that isn't a service I offer. 

My role in the recruitment process is, by using my expertise and experience, to source, evaluate and selectively qualify suitable applicants against the Client’s role specification, in return for a pre-advised, stage-based fee.

A typical recruitment process involves two to three interviews and a number of the Client’s interviewers, and throughout the process, I work closely with my client to cross-check their and the applicant’s feedback at each interview stage and through the offer, negotiation, acceptance, and resignation phases to completion and start. 

Each party has responsibility in terms of the sector-specific competence, suitability, and references aspects, however, to ensure the applicant and Client bond, once the Applicant starts my role is complete and I have no contact or control over them. Neither do I have any control over the Client’s working environment and management practices.

My fee is based on my expertise, experience, and of course time. A typical process on a recent project included :

Taking the brief, creating a job description and recruitment advert, posting the advert, receiving, reading, and responding to 92 applications, phone interviewing 11 applicants, physically interviewing 4, presenting 3 applicants, managing the ongoing interview process, client and applicant feedback, applicant management throughout, discussing and presenting the offer, managing the negotiations, acceptance and resignation phase and finally, completion and start.

By contrast, the Client input and involvement with the recruiter on the functional recruitment process was as follows:

So, when considering whether the fee justifies the result, it's not as straight-forward as you might think.

If you'd like to explore how working with a professional, competent recruitment consultant with proven results, please do get in touch.