What it is
A placement fee is the fee a recruitment agency charges a client for successfully placing a candidate in a permanent role. It is usually calculated as a percentage of the placed candidate's first-year base salary, most commonly somewhere between 15 and 25 percent, though retained searches for senior or specialist roles can run higher. Some agencies, particularly on volume or lower-salary roles, charge a flat fee instead, a fixed amount agreed upfront regardless of what the candidate ends up earning. Either way, the fee is invoiced once the candidate accepts the offer and starts, not when the shortlist is delivered.
The placement fee is distinct from two other commercial mechanics recruiters deal with constantly. It is not the same as pay rate markup, the percentage a temp or contract desk adds to a contractor's pay rate to reach the bill rate, which is earned on every timesheet rather than once. And it is not the guarantee period or rebate clause, which governs what happens to that fee if the placement falls through early, not what the fee actually is. A placement fee, a markup and a rebate scale can all sit in the same terms of business, but they answer different questions.
A placement fee isn't earned on the shortlist. It's earned on the start date, and not a day before.
Why it matters
The percentage or flat amount agreed is the number that determines whether a placement was worth doing at all. A desk quoting 15 percent on a role that took three months of sourcing carries very different economics to one quoting 25 percent on the same effort, and that difference compounds across every mandate the desk runs in a year. Fee negotiation happens before the search starts, inside the terms of business, which is exactly why it is easy to under-price a hard search out of habit or against pressure from a client comparing quotes.
It also anchors how a desk prioritises its time. A retained mandate with a fee paid in stages justifies deep, exclusive work on one brief. A contingency role competing against four other agencies for the same fee rewards speed over depth. Knowing the fee model attached to an account, before committing hours to it, is what separates a desk that bills consistently from one that works hard on roles that were never going to pay out.
How boilr handles it
boilr does not set or negotiate your placement fee, that stays a commercial decision the consultant owns, weighing seniority, difficulty and the relationship. What it does is make sure the agreed fee percentage or flat amount for an account is never buried in an old email thread or left in one person's memory. Once it exists, it lives in the Company Brain alongside that account's terms of business, guarantee period and rebate scale, so every consultant working the account quotes from the same number.
When a buying signal fires on an account, your AI sales employee already has that fee context attached, so the task it drafts reflects what the desk actually agreed rather than a guess or last year's number. Because that context sits in shared memory rather than a spreadsheet on one laptop, it survives a consultant leaving, and it gives the desk a concrete number to check before the fee on a given account has quietly drifted from what the role, and the market, actually justify.
