Recruiters: My fee for referrals is 5%

I forward job emails to my friends if I think its' a good job, regardless of the fee. That's a very low percentage of headhunting letters I get, but I'm far more interested in giving my friends relevant info than spamming them in the hopes of getting 5%---the fact that the (rare) offer of compensation is small actually helps me. As a result, I know that my friends will forward good jobs to me.

It would be nice if the world worked the way that this author wishes it would, but a headhunter would rather cruise LinkedIn than negotiate a fee separately with every person who might know somebody who knows somebody. If you don't like the terms of this recruiter's offer, don't forward it.

During the last bubble I used keen.com to charge them by the minute to talk to me. That was a discount compared to this.

That's a great technique for getting yourself off of the annoying recruiter mailing list.

Who are you talking to and where are you finding them? They must be coming from offshore because no self-respecting recruiter in the US would go that low or be allowed to go that low if they were working for an agency.

On second thought, what a brilliant way to reward bad recruiters - by by taxing them for helping you waste your own time and simultaneously testing good will of people in your network. Save yourself the time and use your spam filter on bad recruiters. Not good enough? Change your email address, stop posting your resume on job boards, and stop talking to bad staffing agencies. Better yet, save yourself the time and get to know a handful of good recruiters and then forget about all the bad ones. Only let good ones through.

Box.net takes this approach, we will pay a flat $10,000 for a referral.

Good blog post.

I used to get spammed to hell by recruiters until I:

1. Requested the removal of my details from their database. 2. Threatened to report them to the REC (UK-based recruitment organisation). 3. Threatened legal action, quoting relevant EU directives. 4. Named and shamed them on a blog post (or two). 5. Requested an apology from their managing director.

Seemed to work a treat.

One 'sorry' recruiter admitted that they generated an 'email blast' based on a keyboard search which was taken from data scraped from JobSite (or other similar job website) 1-2 years ago.

Deal.

Unfortunately the company I work for dictates how much of the fee goes into my pocket, so heres the deal: I'll give you 5% of my own commission if the candidate you recommend gets the job.

Lets say for arguments sake that the salary is £50k and our fee is 25%.

My company gets £12.5k for placing the candidate.

I get 15% of the fee: £1,875 in my pocket.

You get 5% of my commission: £93.75

Where do I sign up?

How do you ensure that they don't play games with numbers? Do the terms of your payment state that you have access to final salary?

Even when you get that, how do you know they didn't completely falsify it or fudge it somewhat?

It seems safer to me to just charge $5K flat fee or something.

Start charging recruiters fee just for sending in your resume I would say or your friend's resume, coz they are making money just passing out qualified resumes to the company!

Er... most permanent recruitment agencies charge between 15%-25% of the first years annual salary of the successful applicant.

Unless you are helping a friend, why do it?

Seeing that Apple takes 30% of the cuts, 5% seems to be a reasonable amount. However, if anyone reply you with this kind of demands, you won't entertain any demands from that guy without 5% cut on anything ever in the future.

There is a blur line between friends and business partners and things like that make this line crystal clear.

I thought to post this because I read it a few days ago and tried it on recruiter spam last night. After he checked that I was a dev and not a recruiter he said it had never happened before and that the $500 Visa gift card he offered was "a little bonus as 'a thank you'." Sure, guy, let me just do half your job for 'a little bonus'.

How do you enforce it?

Good idea but hard to make it really happen.

This makes sense as to why a lot of recruiters don't tell you who the company is in the email (for ones that they are not the sole recruiter on) because they don't want you to apply directly and lose out on their 15% cut. However, 2 minutes of googling and you can usually find the same job posting on dice or monster with the company name on it.