Sage Wage Advice

A client facing 360 Recruitment Consultant and a topflight Premier League CDM shouldn’t have too much in common. Besides the obvious comparisons of performing at extremely high levels, they are also getting paid SILLY money at the moment. For those not across the increasingly volatile state of the transfer market in the English Premier League, the British transfer record was broken twice in the current window. Firstly, with ex-Hammer Declan Rice accepting a £105m bid from Arsenal and then Brighton’s Moise Caicedo moving to Stamford Bridge for the outlandish sum of £115m. Liverpool seemingly dodging a bullet with a £110m bid rejected for the relatively unproven former Gull. As a Liverpool supporter, I was relieved. Firstly, I didn’t have to convince myself that the deal actually made sense, but I still have PTSD from the last time we smashed the transfer record a little over 10 years ago for Big Andy Carrol for the insignificant amount of £35m. Funny how much things can change over 10 years. It got me thinking how much our industries pay structure has also risen in recent times.

When I started my recruitment career 10 years ago, I was offered a cool $45K as a base salary. Jim White wasn’t exactly donning his yellow tie breaking the news of that signing. It was however inline with the market. I was new to recruitment, I had a substantial amount to learn and not an awful lot to offer so naturally I jumped at it, making my way down to the training ground before the ink was dry. Having placed a lot of new to recruitment candidates in my tenure as a rec to rec I can say this was the first area influenced by inflation. A couple of years after I started $55K was the norm, then $65K and now if you have come from a steady sales background $70K+ is very much achievable. That used to be going rate for an intermediate recruiter; someone with a couple of years’ experience and some decent billings under their belt. Now, I see consultants that have a year and change going for closer to the 80K mark. The entry point has certainly increased, the middle has been given some wriggle room, but the senior end has risen considerably.

If you had 3+ years of experience within a single agency and have backed up billings year on year, you would be in the area of $80 - $90K. In the past few years, you can comfortably chuck another $10K on to that. Like any footy club, wage structure it is impacted by what you are playing other players. Principal Consultants are the Mo Salah’s, the Erling Haalands, the Jadon Sanchos (little bit of bait there for any Utd supporters) they are the club’s top earners as their performance justifies their salaries. They have sat around the $120K mark but recently that has been given an increase of anything from $10 – $20K. The thing is if you can back it up then go for it. The market shifted at the beginning of the year, with every brief I was given included an intense emphasis on business development. If so much of the role is centred around making money, then you have to pay up. This has reverberated around the industry resulting in increased wages across the board.

The great equaliser has always been threshold, the more you earn the higher your price of seat. This tends to be calculated based on your salary, usually it’s three times your base divided by quarters or months however your comms are paid out. This puts a ceiling on desires and acts as a dose of reality for any consultants aiming to fly too close to the financial sun. When our recruitment forefathers sat down four score and heaps of years ago it was deemed a fair trade off but perhaps this is something we can look at to curtail this ever-rising expectation of salary. It kind of depends on what your average placement is. I think you should be getting comms by your second placement, how much of that second placement depends on your structure. Let’s say you have an $18K threshold and your average placement fee in $10K, that’s $2K you’re earning anywhere from 15% – 33% on. Instead of looking for more money, the smart move is to eat more of what you’ve killed.

Don’t get me wrong, this model has been in place for years because it works. Agency owners aren’t evil overlords, after all, if you blank they still pay you leaving them out of pocket. This is a conversation that should happen between consistently billing consultants and management. I should really be advocating for higher salaries as I have a pretty obvious horse in that race but it’s not sustainable. Plus, the target it puts on your back isn’t worth the stress. I know plenty of internal recruiters on outrageous salaries that have an impending sense of doom whenever activity drops. I know a higher salary sounds nice to your friends, your mum, your bank but the real driver comes from getting more on your placements, trust me.