“Sometimes we charge $3,000 for a $50K employee. Sometimes we charge $15,000 for a $40K employee.” So said a very successful specialist in sales recruiting.”We have literally dozens of sales openings from ‘household name’ companies where the maximum fee is a flat $5,000, take it or leave it. For several years, we stuck by our guns and turned this business down until we realized that, for several of these openings, $5 grand was about all they were worth since we could almost always find the successful candidate in our file cabinets.”Some of the ingredients that go into our thought process and decision on what flat fee to charge are:
These factors may not work outside the sales area but this practitioner (with a major franchise specializing in sales/marketing) claims he makes more money with his variable “degree-of-difficulty” fees than before when he stuck to the more traditional 1% per $1,000 formula.