Why a good hire can cost $1,997 and still be a good hire.
The recruiting fee you’re used to is a percentage: 30 to 40 per cent of first-year salary. That means the person placing the candidate earns more the more you agree to pay them. It also means the fee has almost nothing to do with the work: the same search, the same shortlist, the same three interviews cost you several times as much for a senior role as for a junior one.
We charge the same $1,997 for every role we place, because the work really is roughly the same every time. We recruit for 50+ role types inside three industries. We have run those searches enough times to know which questions separate a good intake specialist from a merely confident one, which applications to close in the first minute, and what a résumé claiming Clio experience looks like when the claim is real.
A percentage fee prices the salary. A flat fee prices the search. Only one of those is the thing you’re actually buying.
The second half of the answer is geography, and one piece of arithmetic people forget. We recruit across 10 countries where an experienced operations or legal support professional earns a fraction of the US rate for the same work. On top of that, a US salary is not what a US seat costs: an employer pays payroll taxes and benefits over it, which the federal figures put at 1.40 times base pay. You employ our placements directly, so none of that sits on your side. Put the two together and the gap on our salary table runs between 76% and 87%. That is not a discount on the person: they are paid a strong local salary, by you, directly. We never touch that money and never take a percentage of it, which is why we have no reason to inflate it.
What that leaves is a recruiting business that earns $1,997 per successful placement and nothing at all per unsuccessful one. It only works at volume, and volume only comes from placements that stick. That is also why we can offer unlimited replacements for 90 days without flinching. Re-running a search we have already scoped is cheap. A reputation for placing people who quit in month two is not.
The genuine catch, if you want one, is the part nobody advertises: this is offshore hiring. Your new colleague is in a different time zone, working to a written brief rather than a tap on the shoulder, and that takes more intent from you in the first month than hiring down the hall would. Firms that budget for that get a great hire for $1,997. Firms that don’t get a replacement, free, and a second chance to budget for it.


















































