The question posed in the title to this blog post is a fair one. After all, job orders have been scarce during the past few years, and companies have been even more reluctant than they were previously to pay fees to recruiters.
So it would make sense that in some cases, recruiters have discounted their fees in order to secure more job orders. They might have done so to secure a single job order from a prospective client or to secure multiple job orders from a long-time client.
Whatever the reason, we wanted to get a feeling for how many recruiters have done this recently—say, within the past year. So what did we do? We conducted a poll, of course! (After all, we’re good at that sort of thing.)
We polled recruiters from all across the country by posing the question below:
Have you discounted your fees during the past 12 months in the hopes of securing more job orders?
The choice of answers that we provided is listed below, along with the percentage of recruiters who selected each one:
- Yes—34.7%
- No—65.3%
As you can see, roughly two-thirds of respondents have NOT discounted their fees during the past 12 months, while a third have done so. Those numbers make sense, considering the economy seems to have been improving during that same time span.
Now, two or three years ago, those numbers might have been different. In fact, the breakdown might have been more along the lines of 50/50. Ideally, nobody would be discounting fees, but recruiters certainly aren’t working within ideal conditions at the moment.
What about you? Have you discounted your fees within the past 12 months? How about the past two to three years? Are market conditions improving . . . or have things stayed roughly the same within your industry and niche?