Fixed Fee Recruitment vs Traditional Recruitment Agencies
If you run a small business, hiring usually means choosing between two options that both hurt: pay a traditional recruitment agency $15,000 or more, or lose days of your own time doing it yourself. Fixed fee recruitment is the third option, and in this guide I’ll explain exactly how it works, what it costs, where it beats a traditional agency, and where it honestly doesn’t.
What is fixed fee recruitment?
Fixed fee recruitment is a recruitment service where you pay one flat, all-inclusive fee instead of a percentage of your new hire’s salary. It’s all in the title, really: you know exactly what you’re paying before the recruitment process kicks off.
The easiest way to think about it is as the middle path. It bridges the gap between doing recruitment yourself and going to a traditional agency. Most small business owners I speak to are stuck between those two: they don’t have the money to pay a traditional agency, and they don’t have the time, or the expertise, to do it themselves. Fixed fee recruitment exists for exactly that gap. You get the recruitment expertise, the advertising reach and the screening done for you, at a price a small business can actually justify.
You’ll also hear it called flat fee recruitment, fixed fee recruiting or fixed price recruitment. Same model, same idea: one fee, agreed upfront, no surprises.
How do fixed fee recruiters work vs traditional agencies?
Fixed fee recruiters charge one flat fee that you know before the recruitment process kicks off. Traditional agencies charge a percentage of the candidate’s salary, typically 15% to 25%, payable when someone is placed. On an average Australian salary of $100,000 a year, that’s a placement fee of $15,000 to $25,000.
Fundamentally, the biggest difference between fixed fee and traditional recruitment is how you’re charged. The quality and recruitment expertise are consistent, what changes is the bill.
| Fixed fee recruitment | Traditional agency | |
|---|---|---|
| How you’re charged | One flat fee, known upfront | 15-25% of first-year salary |
| Cost on a $100k hire | $2,995 + GST | $15,000 – $25,000 |
| When you pay | Upfront, invested straight into advertising your role | On placement, plus extras along the way |
| Hiring two people at once | One campaign, small per-hire fee for the second | Two full placement fees |
| Candidate visibility | Every applicant screened, full shortlist is yours | Only the candidates they choose to show you |
| Who makes the call | You interview and choose | Agency-driven shortlist and salary negotiation |
How much does fixed fee recruitment cost in Australia?
Fixed fee recruitment in Australia and New Zealand costs a flat $2,995 + GST at Recruit Shop, regardless of the role, the salary, or the location. A traditional agency charges 15% to 25% of first-year salary for the same hire. Here’s what that difference looks like across common salary levels:
| Salary | Agency fee @ 15% | Agency fee @ 25% | Recruit Shop flat fee | You save |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $70,000 | $10,500 | $17,500 | $2,995 | $7,505 – $14,505 |
| $80,000 | $12,000 | $20,000 | $2,995 | $9,005 – $17,005 |
| $90,000 | $13,500 | $22,500 | $2,995 | $10,505 – $19,505 |
| $100,000 | $15,000 | $25,000 | $2,995 | $12,005 – $22,005 |
| $110,000 | $16,500 | $27,500 | $2,995 | $13,505 – $24,505 |
| $120,000 | $18,000 | $30,000 | $2,995 | $15,005 – $27,005 |
| $130,000 | $19,500 | $32,500 | $2,995 | $16,505 – $29,505 |
| $140,000 | $21,000 | $35,000 | $2,995 | $18,005 – $32,005 |
| $150,000 | $22,500 | $37,500 | $2,995 | $19,505 – $34,505 |
Whatever the salary, whatever the agency rate, a flat fee saves you between 71% and 92% on every hire. Even in the scenario most favourable to an agency, the lowest salary at the lowest rate, you’re still paying more than triple with the traditional model.
What are the benefits of flat fee recruitment?
The main benefits of flat fee recruitment are cost certainty, significant savings on every hire, a fully managed campaign, and access to candidates a job ad alone will never reach.
You know the cost before you start. One flat fee, agreed upfront, with nothing more to pay when you hire. No percentage calculations, no surprise extras on the invoice. For a small business, that means you can budget for recruitment the same way you budget for anything else.
You save thousands on every single hire. As the table above shows, even against the cheapest agency rate you’re saving over 70%, and at the top end it’s over 90%.
The incentives finally work in your favour. Because the fee is flat, we have no reason to push a candidate’s salary up or persuade you who to hire. Our job is to find you the right person, not the most expensive one.
You reach passive candidates, not just active job seekers. Your role is marketed across all the major job boards, social media, and our candidate database. Put an ad on Seek yourself and you’re only reaching people actively looking. Some of the best candidates aren’t.
The heavy lifting is done for you. Every applicant is screened and shortlisted, your campaign is refreshed and refined along the way, and you get updates every 3 to 4 days. You step in at the good part: interviewing a shortlist of suitable candidates.
There’s a safety net. If you don’t hire within 28 days, you get $1,000 back or an additional month of service. And you can add an Employee Guarantee before your hire starts, so if they leave within 3 or 6 months, we go back to market for you.
Is fixed fee recruitment cheaper than doing it yourself?
Not on paper, and I’ll be upfront about that: you can put an ad on Seek yourself for anywhere from $300-$1000+, which is cheaper than our fee. But the ad was never the real cost of doing it yourself. Your time is.
When you run your own campaign, there’s no one screening applications, no one shortlisting, no one refreshing and refining the campaign when it’s not pulling the right people. You could get 100 candidates, hire one, watch them leave, and have no safety net to replace with. And your ad only reaches active job seekers, the people scrolling Seek that week, not the passive candidates who’d be open to the right role if it was put in front of them.
Then there’s what a campaign actually asks of you. On a typical campaign, here’s what doing it yourself looks like:
- Writing the ad, posting it, and managing it across job boards: around 2 hours
- Reviewing 80 applications at 5 to 6 minutes each: around 7.5 hours
- Phone screening your shortlist, plus the phone tag to reach them: around 3 hours
- Scheduling interviews, reschedules and no-shows included: around 1.5 hours
- Reference checks on your finalists, plus chasing referees: around 2 hours
- Getting back to unsuccessful applicants (the step everyone skips, then pays for in reputation): around 1 hour
That’s roughly 17 hours, more than two full working days out of your business, for one hire. And that’s not counting the final interviews, because you’ll be doing those either way.
So here’s the question I’d ask you to sit with. Not what your hourly wage is, but what an hour of your contribution is actually worth to your business. What happens to sales, customers and your team when you disappear for two days? Now multiply that by 17, add the ad spend, and compare it to a flat fee. For most business owners, the DIY option stopped being the cheap one well before the end of that maths.
And the slower you move, the worse it gets. If you’re screening applications around your actual job, you’re not getting back to good candidates quickly, and good candidates don’t wait. The person you wanted takes another offer, you’re back to square one, and the role sits empty even longer. It’s a vicious circle, and it’s the most expensive part of doing it yourself.
So no, we’re not cheaper than a Seek job ad, but we’re far more cost-effective than what the job ad actually ends up costing you.
What are the downsides of flat fee recruitment?
You pay before you see candidates. With a traditional agency you pay on placement; with fixed fee recruitment you pay upfront, because that fee goes straight into advertising and marketing your role. The first time you use a fixed fee recruiter, that takes a level of trust, and I understand that. It’s exactly why we back our service with a promise: if you don’t hire within 28 days, you get $1,000 back or an additional month of service.
You make the final call yourself. We take you all the way to interview stage with a shortlist of screened, suitable candidates, and we support you right through the hiring process. But you conduct the final interviews and decide who gets the offer, and that’s deliberate. In a small business, every hire shapes your culture. When you’ve got eight staff, the ninth changes the room. We can screen for skills, experience and suitability, but no recruiter can tell you who’ll fit the culture you’ve built, because nobody knows your team, your values and your way of doing things like you do. If you’d rather be completely hands-off and have someone else make that call, a traditional agency model may suit you better.
It’s not an executive search service. Fixed fee recruitment is built for the roles that make up the vast majority of small business hiring: your salespeople, admin staff, tradespeople, managers, accountants. If you’re recruiting a CEO on $300k and need someone discreetly headhunted from a competitor’s boardroom, that’s a genuine executive search brief, and you should pay an executive search firm to do it.
How do fixed fee recruiters keep their fees so low?
Fixed fee recruiters keep fees low through volume, an online service model, and upfront payment. It’s economies of scale, not a catch.
Let me break down exactly where the difference comes from, because “how are you so cheap?” is one of the most common questions I get. When an agency quotes $20,000 and we quote a fraction of that, it’s fair to wonder what’s missing.
We run on volume. Traditional agencies work a handful of roles at big margins. Our systems allow us to recruit effectively at scale, so we don’t need to make $20,000 on yours.
We’re an online service. We’re not travelling around the country to meet clients and candidates face to face, and we’re not spending hours and money taking clients out for fancy lunches. Every dollar not spent on those things is a dollar that comes off your fee. We do everything online, and we pass those savings on to our clients.
You pay upfront, and it goes straight to work. Your fee goes directly into advertising and marketing your role across the job boards, social media and our candidate database. If we charged you after the hire instead, we’d just be a traditional agency, and we’d have to charge you 20% of the salary to cover the risk.
And honestly? We run low profit margins. We’re a small business built to help others, so we’ve built the product to make a small amount on a lot of hires, rather than a lot on a few. That’s the whole model.
What we don’t cut is the recruitment itself, and this shows from our hundreds of google reviews. The screening, the shortlisting, the campaign management, that’s the product, and it’s the same expertise you’d get at ten times the price.
How to choose a flat fee recruitment agency
The best way to choose a fixed fee recruitment agency is to ask five questions before you commit: where your role will be marketed, who does the screening, what happens if you don’t hire, what’s included in the fee, and what support you get through to offer stage.
Not all fixed fee services are the same, and the cheapest option isn’t always doing the same job. Here’s what to ask:
- Where exactly will my role be marketed? Some services just post your ad on one or two job boards. Look for a campaign that covers all the major job boards, social media, and a candidate database, that last one is how you reach passive candidates who’ll never see a job ad.
- Who screens and shortlists the applicants? If the answer is “you do”, you’re not buying recruitment; you’re buying ad placement. A real service screens every applicant and delivers you a shortlist, with regular updates along the way so you’re never wondering what’s happening.
- What happens if I don’t hire? Any recruiter confident in their service will put a guarantee in writing. Ask what happens at the end of the campaign if you haven’t hired, and be wary of anyone who gets vague.
- Is the fee actually all-inclusive? “Fixed fee” should mean exactly that: when you hire, there’s nothing more to pay. Additional add ons such as AI phone screens, police and reference checks should remain optional.
- What support do I get after the shortlist? Recruitment doesn’t end when the CVs arrive. Look for a service that supports you through interviews and up to the offer, not one that disappears once the ad is live.
Why small businesses choose fixed fee recruiters
Small businesses choose fixed fee recruitment because it fits how they actually hire: once or twice a year, without an HR department, and without an agency-sized budget.
If you run a business with under 50 staff, recruitment usually lands on your desk. You’re the owner or manager, you’re already doing three jobs, and now you need to find a salesperson by next month. A $15,000 to $25,000 agency fee is out of the question for a role you hire for once a year. And two days of screening CVs is time your business can’t give up.
That’s the client we built this for. Not big companies with talent teams, they don’t need us. The small business where hiring is important, occasional, and always someone’s second job.
Frequently asked questions
Why do I have to pay upfront?
Because your fee goes directly into advertising and marketing your role on the job boards, social media and our candidate database. If we charged you after the hire instead, we’d just be a traditional agency, and we’d have to charge you 20% of the salary.
What happens if I don’t make a hire?
If you don’t hire within 28 days, you get $1,000 back or an additional month of service, your choice.
Is fixed fee recruitment worth it?
For most small business hires, yes. You save between 71% and 92% compared with percentage-based agency fees, and you get the screening, shortlisting and campaign management done for you rather than losing two days of your own time.
Can I hire more than one person from the same campaign?
Yes, and this is where the model really beats an agency. Instead of paying a second full placement fee, additional hires from your campaign are $1,495 + GST each.
If you’re weighing up your next hire, you now know exactly what the two models cost, and what your own time is worth. When you’re ready, we’re here: one flat fee, a shortlist of suitable candidates within 28 days, and $1,000 back if you don’t hire.
