Why The Best Recruiter In The Niche Gets Squeezed Hardest On Fee

Michael B. Jordan is directing and starring in a new version of The Thomas Crown Affair. Trailer landed a few weeks ago, cinemas next March.

It's the third time this story has been filmed. Steve McQueen in 1968. Pierce Brosnan in 1999. Now Jordan.

Amazon has put studio money behind a story a big chunk of the audience has already sat through twice. That only makes sense if you understand what was actually being bought. Not the story. The name on the poster.

There is a director somewhere in Los Angeles this morning with a better, more original script than that one, who cannot get a fraction of that budget. He isn't worse. He's unknown. So he gets asked to prove himself first, on someone else's terms, for less money.

You've met him. He runs a recruitment firm.

The problem

You get told your fees are too high by people who have no idea what you actually do.

He's had nine approaches this week. Same opening line about a candidate he might want to see. Same claim about knowing his sector inside out. Same promise of a shortlist by Friday. Same website with four people laughing at a laptop.

You know your firm isn't that. You've spent fifteen years in this space. You know the salary bands, the counter offer patterns, which two competitors poach relentlessly and why their attrition looks the way it does.

He has no way of knowing any of it. The first time he ever encounters you is a message that reads like the other eight.

Most owners who are unknown before the first conversation end up negotiating on the only variable the buyer can actually see. Which is price.

He isn't squeezing you because he's tight. He's squeezing you because you've handed him nothing else to compare on. When four options look identical, price is the only rational way to choose. He'd be daft not to use it.

What I actually think about this

The industry keeps telling you to get better at the fee conversation. Handle the objection. Justify the number. Hold your nerve.

By the time that objection arrives, it's over. You're defending the price of something he has already filed as a commodity, and you're doing it with about four minutes of evidence.

The number was set long before you got in the room. It was set across the months he spent thinking about his own hiring problems, reading about them, forming views about who understands them. You weren't in any of that. So you arrived as a supplier, and suppliers get compared.

The owners getting squeezed hardest are rarely the worst recruiters. They're very often the best ones in their niche. They're just the ones nobody has heard of. Fifteen years of genuine expertise and no trace of it anywhere the buyer could have found it.

That's a choice. An understandable one, because being unknown is comfortable and building a name in public means saying things you can be judged on. But it's a choice with a price tag, and the invoice arrives every time a fee gets negotiated down.

The reframe

Visibility isn't marketing. It's pricing.

What a hiring manager knows about you before you speak is what sets the ceiling on what you can charge. Not your track record. What he can see of your track record.

Two owners, identical skill, identical results. One is a name in his sector, quoted, read, recognised, with a view about the market that people repeat. The other is a message in an inbox. They are not competing for the same fee. They aren't even in the same conversation. One is being chosen. The other is being compared.

That's what Amazon paid for. Not a better story, a story that arrives pre trusted. And notice it's a person on that poster, not a studio logo. Nobody has ever booked a cinema ticket because they admired a production company.

One example of what changes. An owner who'd run his agency for more than a decade on cold calls, handshakes and a Rolodex. It worked until it stopped working, and he told Terry he felt like a dinosaur in his own industry. He kept the parts that made him good and put a modern engine behind them, targeted content, proper follow up, communication that led with value instead of availability. He started winning clients who bought his expertise rather than shopping his price. Same man, same experience, thirty years of it. The market could finally see it.

What changes

Before: roles arrive with three other agencies already on them. Fee conversations that open at twenty percent and close somewhere you'd rather not repeat to your team. You win the work by being quickest and cheapest, then quietly resent the work for the same reason.

After: he knows who you are before the call. He's read something of yours. He's seen your name attached to a view about his market that he agreed with, possibly one he's since repeated to his board. The meeting isn't a pitch. It's a conversation between a man with a problem and the person he's already decided understands it.

Among the owners we work with it's normal to see business won at five to six times the fees they'd been accepting before. Not because they got braver in the negotiation. Because they stopped arriving as one of the interchangeable ones.

There's a life consequence to that and it's worth naming. When the fee multiplies you can carry fewer roles and still grow. Fewer roles is the difference between the Sunday you spend on your laptop with the door shut, and the Sunday you don't.

One thing to do this week

Take the last hiring manager who pushed back on your fee. Then go and look at everything he could have found about you in the two months before that call. Your profile, anything you've published, anything with your name on it.

One question. If he'd found that, would he have opened at a different number?

You already know the answer. Don't fix anything yet, just sit with it.

The question

When did you last quote a fee without bracing yourself for what came next?

If you can't remember, the fee was never the problem.

If this was useful and you're not subscribed, subscribe. It goes out weekly, written for owners who are done being compared on price.

And if you read the bit about the director with the better script and recognised yourself, that's the conversation to have on the Fast Track to More Placements call. Thirty minutes, your business, an honest look at why your market can't see what you're worth yet and what moves first. APEX is the system that installs the fix. The call is where you find out which part of it you need.

Book your spot at makemoreplacements.com/call.