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The salary would be recurring annually so 20% higher salary is a bigger cost than a one shot commission


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Thanks, doubling the price seems logical.

Any more opinions on the yearly salary -- is 150 to 200k an acceptable amount to ask for?

PS: Collectively thank you all for your great comments! They help me a lot clearing things up.


Or maybe certain professions have a limited number of openings, which tend to go to people with connections, and cooincidentally these professions deal with large amounts of money, so taking 1% commission on a hundred million dollar deal for very little work seems reasonable.

5% of first year's salary seems an extremely (and unnecessarily) low commission.

Companies that otherwise spend $20,000 to fill a role. Headhunting is a huge overhead

Maybe they want a higher total comp than $200-250k/yr. If they were a Director or VP at a big public company, they could easily bring in $500k+/yr TC.

Sounds like it should be entirely commission based ? I don't think anyone sees an issue if you get a share of the amount you generated, but getting large salary without having achieved anything seems a bit unreasonable.

It would probably never reach scale for obvious reasons, but someone should productize this.

"I'll get you a 20% more high paying job for $1,000"


Point taken, but with the given numbers it wouldn't actually be that bad. If you interview thousands of candidates, then paying an amortized $100 per candidate is not too much. If that is what it costs to give people a good impression of your company, it might well be worth it.

I still suspect they could get 90% of the performance at half the price by recruiting differently.

And of course, if the return on that extra 10% dwarfs half the salary, of course it makes sense to pay for the extra 10%, too, I suppose.


Almost certainly a lot of that would be variable comp depending upon a bunch of things. And I could also imagine a $10m gig (especially with speculative equity) at a company with really exciting prospects could trump a $50m one for a stodgy company not going anywhere.

Follow the money. The other way of finding candidates — paying professional sourcers who do it for a living — costs an enormous amount of money, often 25% of the first year salary.

Paying your employees $5k or even $25k (in sfba) is a lot cheaper.


100k once is a way better deal than 100k a year. It's better than 25k a year if you expect to retain employees.

I.e. those hires are expensive. I am sure there would be candidates with an offer of $1M/year.

Depends. $100k arr low hassle would be preferable to me to $1M but hiring lots of people.

With such cynicism who knows, they might charge more for different people.

This guy has credentials from a previous startup, hence why an article like this might create excitement for some.


Yes, that's technically true:

You sign at 100k, they make 20% so: $20,000

You sign at 110k, they make 20% so: $22,000

No deal, they make 20% so: $0

Do you think they have much incentive to make that extra $2k, while introducing more risk, and not spending time on the other openings they're working?


Agreed, a "progressive" pricing based on salary would be a good way to address this, e.g. >50k -> 1%, >80k -> 3%, >100k -> 5%, >120k -> 7%.

I'd prefer to pay the higher salary instead of a low one followed by paying out a big bonus if they fail.

$1.2 million seems so low of a dollar amount, for an multi year effort. Isn't that just like... 1 engineer's salary? $150k/year, 1.5x multiplier to account for benefits and other expenses of hiring somebody.
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