What it is
A clawback is the contractual obligation for a recruitment agency to repay some or all of its placement fee if the candidate it placed resigns or is dismissed within the guarantee period set out in the terms of business. It gets used interchangeably with rebate, and the two clauses almost always travel together, but they describe different moments. A rebate is the scale, the percentage of the fee that is repayable depending on how long the candidate lasted. A clawback is the event itself, the client reclaiming cash that has already been invoiced and paid, sometimes weeks or months earlier.
The mechanic is almost always a sliding scale rather than a flat all-or-nothing rule. The repayable percentage is highest in the first days or weeks after start and tapers down as the guarantee period runs, so a candidate who leaves in week one exposes the agency to a much larger clawback than one who leaves in week eleven of a twelve-week window. Some agencies negotiate a flat clawback instead, the same percentage for the whole guarantee period, but a taper is the more common structure because it reflects that a longer tenure is itself evidence the placement worked.
A rebate is the scale. A clawback is the client asking for the money back.
Why it matters
A clawback is a real cash event, not a bookkeeping adjustment. By the time a candidate leaves inside the guarantee period, the fee has usually already been invoiced, paid, and in many agencies partly paid out again as consultant commission. A clawback means returning money that has already left the building, which is why the scale attached to it gets negotiated as hard as the fee percentage itself, and why an agency that ignores its clawback exposure can find a strong billing month wiped out by a handful of early leavers months later.
It also shapes behaviour, not just accounting. A desk that tracks its clawback exposure watches its recent placements closely in the weeks after start, checking in with both candidate and client so an unhappy hire surfaces as a conversation rather than a resignation. A desk that does not track it finds out about the risk only when the client's finance team asks for the money back, by which point there is nothing left to do but pay it.
How boilr handles it
boilr does not negotiate your clawback scale, that stays part of the terms of business conversation between consultant and client, but the moment a placement is logged, the scale and the guarantee period it runs against are recorded in the Company Brain alongside the rest of that account's commercial terms, rather than left in an email thread or a single consultant's memory.
If a job-change or departure signal fires on a candidate still inside their clawback window, your AI sales employee surfaces it the same day, so you can get ahead of a resignation before it becomes an invoice dispute, or at minimum flag the exposure honestly rather than being caught by it. Because that exposure sits in shared memory rather than a spreadsheet on one laptop, it stays visible to the desk even if the consultant who made the placement has since moved on.
