A contingency agency typically charges 20%, often 25 to 30% for senior roles of the hire’s first-year salary, so $20,000 or more on a $100,000 role. DMD’s Flat-fee Search is $5,000 to $12,000 per role ($12,000 for roles paying $150,000 or more), a flat fee set up front, never a percentage of salary. On a $100,000 role that is a saving of $6,000 to $20,000 per hire, and the gap gets wider as salaries go up, because the agency fee keeps rising with salary while ours stays flat within each band and tops out at $12,000.
The rest of this page covers where the percentage came from, the math at different salaries, what you should demand from any recruiter and the cases where an agency is still the better choice.
Why agencies charge a percentage
The percentage model made sense when agencies controlled access to candidates: they had the database, the network and the phone lists, and the fee tracked the value of the hire. Today most candidates are findable. What you are paying for now is judgment and time: defining the role properly, finding the people who fit, screening hard and closing the offer. None of that work doubles when the salary doubles. A $160,000 search is not twice the effort of an $80,000 search, but a 20 percent agency fee charges you twice as much for it.
The math at different salaries
| Salary | Agency at 20% | Agency at 25% | Agency at 30% | DMD flat fee (up to) | You keep (vs. 20%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $60,000 | $12,000 | $15,000 | $18,000 | $9,000 | $3,000 |
| $80,000 | $16,000 | $20,000 | $24,000 | $9,000 | $7,000 |
| $100,000 | $20,000 | $25,000 | $30,000 | $9,000 | $11,000 |
| $130,000 | $26,000 | $32,500 | $39,000 | $9,000 | $17,000 |
| $160,000 | $32,000 | $40,000 | $48,000 | $12,000 | $20,000 |
Stuck on this at your company?
Twenty minutes. We’ll tell you what to fix first, and whether we’re the ones to fix it.
Book a free 20-minute HR check$9,000 is the top fee for roles under $150,000. Roles at $150,000 or more are $12,000.
A worked example: three hires next year
A 35-person company plans three hires: an operations manager at $90,000, a controller at $110,000, and a sales lead at $140,000.
- Agency at 20 percent: $18,000 + $22,000 + $28,000 = $68,000
- Flat fee at $9,000 each: $27,000
- Difference: $41,000, which is most of another hire’s first-year salary.
Run your own numbers in the cost-per-hire calculator. It also counts the costs most people leave out: interview hours and the output you lose while the seat is empty.
The cost nobody puts on the invoice
The fee is only part of what a hire costs. Two other numbers usually matter more.
The empty seat. Every week a role sits open, the work either does not get done or lands on someone already at capacity. For a revenue or operations role, a month of vacancy can easily cost more than a flat recruiting fee. A search that produces a shortlist in two weeks instead of six is worth real money, whatever the fee model.
Interview hours. A loose process burns your team’s time: five interviewers, four rounds, twelve candidates who were never a fit. A tight intake and hard screening cut that to a handful of conversations with people worth meeting. That is time your managers get back.
A bad hire. The most expensive outcome is filling the seat with the wrong person and doing it again six months later. That is why the intake and the 90-day replacement search matter more than the headline price. The cost-per-hire calculator puts numbers on all three.
What any recruiter owes you
The fee model is not what makes a search good. Whether you pay a percentage or a flat fee, demand these:
- A real intake. An hour on what the role must deliver in its first 90 days, not a copy of the job description.
- An actual search. Direct outreach to people who are not applying, not a job-board repost with a markup.
- Hard screening. You should see a short list of people worth meeting, with notes on why, not a stack of resumes.
- A timeline. DMD’s standard is a shortlist in about 14 days.
- Offer and close support. Help with the offer, the counteroffer and the notice period, where most searches fail.
- A 90-day replacement search. If the hire leaves the same role within 90 days, we run one replacement search at no fee (exclusions are written into the SOW).
If a recruiter cannot tell you who will do the work, ask. With many agencies the partner sells the search and a junior associate works it alongside a dozen other roles. With a flat-fee search from DMD, the person on the call is the person who runs the search.
When an agency is still the right call
Flat fee is not always the answer. An agency or retained search firm (paid up front, for executives) can be the better choice when:
- You need a C-suite executive. Retained executive search brings networks and assessment depth that justify the fee for a CEO, CFO or board-level hire.
- The role is deeply specialized. Some niches (certain engineering, clinical or regulated roles) have specialist recruiters whose networks are worth paying for.
- You are hiring at volume. Twenty warehouse or contact center seats is a different project than one senior search. That is what our volume hourly recruiting is for. Not a fee per seat. Volume hourly recruiting is quoted per project. Book a free 20-minute HR check.
- You need a confidential replacement. Some firms are built for quiet searches where the incumbent is still in the seat.
For most roles a 15 to 150 person company hires (managers, specialists, first leaders in a function), a flat-fee search does the same work for a flat fee set up front.
Why this is personal for us
Before DMD, our founder built an in-house recruiting program: $1.5M in agency fees saved across 100+ in-house hires. The flat-fee model is that same approach, sold one search at a time.
Frequently asked questions
How much does DMD’s Flat-fee Search cost?
How fast is the shortlist?
What if the hire does not work out?
Do you work contingency?
Can we combine a search with building our hiring process?
Opening a role soon? Price it in the cost-per-hire calculator, or see how flat-fee recruiting works.