Quotation Management for Recruitment: Fee Terms That Get Paid Without an Argument

Recruitment firms rarely send anything that looks like a quotation. They send terms of business, a fee proposal or a rate card, and the industry habit is to treat that document as a formality standing between the desk and the real work of filling roles. That habit is expensive. Every recruitment invoice that goes unpaid or gets negotiated down was authorised, or not, by a clause in a document somebody rushed.

What the document actually has to settle

The fee model and amount. The salary definition the fee is calculated on. The guarantee period and the remedy inside it. What triggers the invoice, and the payment window that follows. How long an introduced candidate remains attributable to your introduction. And whether the mandate is exclusive, and for how long. Six things. A proposal that settles all six is unremarkable to send and almost impossible to argue with afterwards.

A fixed percentage looks like a precise number until you ask what it is a percentage of. Fixed pay, or total cost to company. With or without the variable component. With or without the joining bonus, the relocation allowance, the retention payment in year one. The same percentage applied to two definitions can differ by a fifth of the invoice, and the two parties almost always assume the definition that favours themselves.

The remedy is not legal drafting. It is stating the definition on the proposal in plain language with a worked example, and recording it as a field so any consultant on the desk can see which definition governs that client. This is the cheapest dispute prevention available in the entire business, and the one most consistently skipped because the conversation feels awkward at the point where everyone is enthusiastic.

Every agency offers some form of replacement guarantee and very few quote it precisely. State the period. State whether the remedy is a replacement search or a rebate, and if a rebate, give the scale. Then state what voids the guarantee: a redundancy or restructure, a material change to the role after joining, a candidate managed out for reasons unconnected to the hire, or an original invoice still unpaid.

None of this is unreasonable to ask for. It becomes unreasonable only when it is raised for the first time in month three, after a candidate has left and the client is already frustrated. The agencies that hold their fees are the ones that had the conversation while everybody was still pleased with each other.

Most firms run more than one of these, and each one prices and converts differently. Keeping them in a single generic pipeline hides the fact that they are not comparable.

Rate cards get renegotiated, usually annually and usually downward, in exchange for volume or preferred supplier status. Both halves of that trade need to be recorded: the reduced rate, and the volume commitment given in exchange. Otherwise the desk carries a discount into the following year against a commitment that was never met, and nobody notices because the only surviving artefact is the lower number.

Authority to price below the card is your own policy. A system should not enforce a limit or claim to. It should record the request, the justification, what was traded, who agreed it, and which version of the terms was issued afterwards, so the pattern across a desk or a quarter can actually be reviewed.

The follow-up rhythm changes completely at the signature. Before terms are returned, the person who matters is whoever owns supplier paperwork, which is often procurement or legal, and the ask is administrative. Calling the hiring manager repeatedly about an unsigned agreement they cannot sign produces nothing except a reputation for nagging.

After terms are signed, the objective changes to being the first call the client makes when a role opens. That is relationship cadence rather than chase cadence: periodic contact with something useful attached, a market observation, a relevant profile, a salary reference point. Recording which state each client is in keeps the desk from applying the wrong rhythm to half its accounts.

Signed terms of business, and where the client requires one, a purchase order. That is the commercial conversion. The revenue event is later and separate: a candidate joining, and for permanent placements, surviving the guarantee period. Both are worth tracking, because a desk with strong signing rates and weak joining rates has a very different problem from one with the reverse.

What sits elsewhere stays elsewhere. Timesheet approval, contractor payroll, statutory deductions, invoice raising, credit control, tax and your accounts belong in payroll and finance systems. The quotation layer holds the commercial history those systems never keep: which terms were quoted, on what definition, with what guarantee, whether they were signed, and what happened to the ones that were not.

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