A contingency recruiter charges a percentage of first-year salary and invoices when the hire starts. Recruiting software charges a subscription whether anyone gets hired or not. The comparison we get asked about is sticker against sticker, and on sticker price the contest is over before it starts. The interesting arithmetic is in what each price includes.
SHRM's 2016 guidance puts contingency recruiting fees at 20 to 25 percent of first-year cash compensation, and the wider market convention stretches to 30. On a $120,000 hire that is $24,000 to $36,000, our derivation. A year of recruiting software at published list prices runs $1,680 for LinkedIn Recruiter Lite to $5,928 for a hireEZ solo seat, the latter derived from its monthly rate, checked August 2026. Divide those totals by a 20 percent fee and the break-even salary lands between $8,400 and $29,640, below any role anyone pays a fee to fill. The catch: the subscription buys a tool and assumes your labor, while the fee buys finished work. Metix AI sits between the two, $49 to $299 a month, billed per interview-ready candidate delivered rather than per seat.
A contingency recruiter gets paid a percentage of first-year pay, and only when the hire starts. That is the whole deal in one sentence. No placement, no invoice. The fee scales with the salary of the person placed, not with the effort the search took. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), in its 2016 guidance on working with search firms, puts contingency fees "in the area of 20 percent to 25 percent" of the role's first-year cash compensation, which covers salary, bonus, and signing bonus, earned only if the firm fills the job. Retained executive search runs richer. The same SHRM guidance puts the standard retained fee at about 33 percent of the role's annual salary, bonus, and signing bonus.
The range you will hear more often is 20 to 30 percent. We quote it ourselves on our pricing page, because it is the range founders actually get told on the phone. Trace it toward a primary source, though, and the trail goes cold in a loop of recruiting blogs citing each other. The published, citable band is SHRM's 20 to 25 for contingency work. Treat 30 as the top of the market convention, not as a documented standard. Both ends matter for the arithmetic below.
Software meters the other way. A seat is a subscription: the same price in a month with five hires and a month with none, and the meter never asks how the search went. That indifference is what makes the seat cheap. The vendor sells access and carries none of the outcome, so the price can sit two orders of magnitude below a fee. There is a third meter between these two, billing on the delivered candidate rather than the seat or the salary, and we will get to it, because it is the one we built Metix AI on.
Percentages hide the size of the number, so put salaries under them. The table below is a derivation from the fee structure above, not a quote from any agency. Real fees move with market, seniority, exclusivity, and negotiation, and cash compensation runs higher than base salary once bonuses count.
| First-year salary | Fee at 20 percent | Fee at 25 percent | Fee at 30 percent |
|---|---|---|---|
| $80,000 | $16,000 | $20,000 | $24,000 |
| $120,000 | $24,000 | $30,000 | $36,000 |
| $160,000 | $32,000 | $40,000 | $48,000 |
Derivations, not quotes. The 20 and 25 percent columns follow SHRM's published contingency band (2016); the 30 percent column marks the top of the market convention, which has no traceable primary source.
Two things keep that table from reading as an indictment. The fee is contingent, so a failed search costs you nothing, and the agency eats the cost of every search that dies. And the fee pays for finished work: sourcing, outreach, screening, scheduling, and a shortlist of people who have already said yes to the conversation.
For scale, set the fees against what employers spend per hire overall. SHRM's 2022 benchmarking report, built on data collected in 2021, put the average cost per hire at nearly $4,700. The median in the same table was $1,244, so a handful of expensive searches drags the average hard. SHRM's 2025 Recruiting Executives Benchmarking brief reports medians only: $1,200 per nonexecutive hire and $10,625 per executive hire, the executive figure up 113 percent from 2017. A single 20 percent fee on a $120,000 role, $24,000, is twenty times that 2025 nonexecutive median, our arithmetic on SHRM's figure. The two numbers are not like for like. SHRM's median is a blended all-in figure for every hire an employer makes, agency fees included where they were paid, which is exactly why most hires land nowhere near the cost of one. What actually goes into a cost-per-hire number, and why the average and the median disagree so sharply, gets its own treatment in our cost-per-hire breakdown.
Notice also what the percentage is indexed to. The fee tracks the salary of the hire, not the difficulty of the search. An easy $160,000 placement, filled in two weeks from a recruiter's existing bench, bills twice what a brutal $80,000 search bills after four months of digging. Agencies defend this honestly: the easy fees subsidize the searches that die, and pricing on salary beats pricing on effort nobody can predict. It is still worth seeing clearly. The fee works like an insurance premium, and premiums are priced against the pool, not against your particular search.
Now the other column, from the vendors' own pages. Three tools anchor it, because each publishes a real entry price you can read without a sales call.
LinkedIn Recruiter Lite is $170 a month for a single license, or $1,680 a year billed annually, checked August 2026. Finding that number takes work: LinkedIn's marketing pages show no price, and the figure sits on a help-center comparison page. LinkedIn notes the rates are US dollar list prices and vary by region. Lite includes 30 InMail messages a month, reaches your third-degree network only, and a second through fifth license runs $270 a month each. The full Recruiter Corporate tier publishes no price at all; every official page we checked routes to a sales conversation. Numbers for those quotes circulate, and our three-way comparison discusses what buyers report. None of those figures are published, so none appear here. The seat-by-seat arithmetic, InMail limits included, is in our LinkedIn Recruiter cost breakdown.
SeekOut's Recruit Core plan is $149 a month paid annually, checked August 2026, and the annual payment is due upfront. The real outlay is $1,788 in one charge, a derivation from the monthly list price. Month-to-month is $179. Every tier above Core is quote-only.
hireEZ publishes exactly one number: a solo recruiter seat at $494 a month with a seven-day trial, checked August 2026. Kept for a year, that seat is $5,928, our derivation from the monthly figure rather than a published annual price. Team and enterprise pricing is quoted against the stack it replaces.
The pattern repeats across AI sourcing tools: where an entry tier is published at all, the tiers above it are usually quoted. It is not a rule. Findem and Paradox publish no prices whatever, while on the ATS side Workable and JazzHR publish every tier they sell, all checked August 2026. The fuller sweep is in our AI recruiting tools pricing guide. Prices in this category also move without announcement, which is why every figure on this page carries its date. Treat the date as part of the price. Notice what none of these subscriptions include: the person. A seat is a license for a recruiter you already employ. The searches, the outreach, the screening calls, and the scheduling all come out of somebody's week. And the ATS underneath the seat carries its own bill, which we price separately in our ATS pricing comparison.
Put the two columns together. Take the conservative 20 percent fee. For one fee to come in under a full year of software, the salary has to sit below the software's annual price times five. Here is that crossover for each published price, with our own top plan included so the derivation runs on us too.
| Tool | A year at list price | Salary where one 20 percent fee matches it |
|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn Recruiter Lite | $1,680, published annual price | $8,400 |
| SeekOut Recruit Core | $1,788 paid upfront, derived from $149/mo | $8,940 |
| Metix AI Scale | $3,228 on annual billing, derived from $269/mo | $16,140 |
| hireEZ solo seat | $5,928, derived from $494/mo | $29,640 |
Prices checked August 2026. LinkedIn, SeekOut, and Metix AI Scale are shown on annual billing; hireEZ is its monthly rate times twelve, because no annual price is published. The crossover column divides the annual cost by a 20 percent fee and is a derivation, not a quote from anyone. At a 25 percent fee, every crossover salary drops by a fifth.
Read the right-hand column as the break-even salary. Below it, the agency fee is the cheaper line item; above it, the software year is. Every professional salary clears these bars several times over. On a $120,000 hire, the $24,000 fee would fund more than fourteen years of Recruiter Lite, our derivation from the $1,680 published annual price. Founders expect that crossover to sit somewhere that makes the choice interesting, or so they tell us. It does not. It lands below $30,000 even in the most expensive case, so on sticker price the software wins at any salary you would realistically pay a fee on. If that were the whole story, agencies would not exist.
The whole story includes the labor. SHRM's own definition of cost per hire makes the point for us: its benchmarking glossary sums third-party agency fees, advertising, job board fees, referral costs, applicant travel, relocation, recruiter pay and benefits, and talent acquisition system costs, all divided by the number of hires. The subscription is one line on that list. The agency fee replaces most of the list at once, recruiter labor included. So a seat and a fee are not two prices for the same thing. They are prices for different fractions of the same job.
Volume moves the answer faster than salary does. The fee repeats on every placement; the subscription does not. Three $120,000 hires in one year cost $72,000 at a 20 percent fee, our derivation again, against a single seat year at $1,680 to $5,928 plus the labor to run it. One hire every two years reverses the logic, because the seat bills through every quiet month while the fee only exists when a hire does. This is why agencies keep the lumpy, occasional buyers, software keeps the steady ones, and the awkward middle, steady hiring without a recruiter on staff, fits neither meter well.
That makes the honest break-even conditional. With a recruiter on staff, the seat wins by a mile: the labor is already paid for, and the software multiplies it. Without one, the seat's missing labor comes out of a founder's or a hiring manager's calendar, at whatever those hours are worth, stretched across a search that SHRM's 2025 brief medians at 44 days for a nonexecutive role. The fee is expensive because that gap is expensive. Which unit of pricing fits which team, per candidate or per seat, is a question we take up properly in per-candidate versus per-seat pricing.
We built Metix AI to occupy the space that table leaves empty: agency-shaped accountability at software-shaped prices. Plans run $49, $89, $159, and $299 a month, buying up to 3, 12, 30, and 75 interview-ready candidates a month against 1, 3, 6, and 12 active roles, with 10 percent off on annual billing. The meter is a credit, and a credit is a person, not a login: a candidate who matches the role, has confirmed interest, and is booked on your calendar, after our delivery team reviews the shortlist. A month where nobody clears your bar spends no credits. The full definition lives on our FAQ, and the argument for pricing hiring this way is on the outcome pricing page and in our essay on buying outcomes rather than software.
Mira, our AI recruiter, does the volume work across 860M+ profiles: sourcing, outreach you approve before it sends, and screening for interest and fit. The delivery numbers are early and company-reported, so give them the same scrutiny you would give any vendor's homepage.
Now run the break-even on us, derivations labeled. A full year on the top plan is $3,588 billed monthly, or $3,228 on annual billing, derived from the $299 and $269 list prices. Either figure is less than one 20 percent fee on an $80,000 hire, and the plan covers up to 75 delivered candidates a month across 12 roles rather than a single placement. At the entry end, $49 a month makes $588 a year billed monthly, or $528 on annual billing, both derivations. The contrast our pricing page draws is with the retained model: a search firm's percentage is owed for running the search, not only for filling it, while a Metix AI subscription consumes credits only when a qualified candidate lands on your calendar. Read that line as shorthand for retained work. Contingency fees bill the other way, on success, which is where this article started.
Here is the part a software company is supposed to skip. This page carries a byline that spent two decades in the agency trade, at Career International, Hudson, and Kelly Services, and founded a search firm along the way. So take what follows as testimony, not concession. There are searches where the fee is the best money a company spends that year.
Executive search. SHRM's 2025 brief puts the median executive cost per hire at $10,625, up 113 percent from 2017, and its 2016 guidance puts retained fees at about 33 percent of first-year cash. Those numbers reflect how the work actually happens. The candidates for a VP role are not answering ads; they are walked out of jobs they like by someone they already trust. A retained partner's map of who runs what, who is restless, and who would move for the right chair takes a decade to build, and no subscription rents it. When the wrong hire costs a year of company time, a third of salary can be the cheap option.
Confidential replacements. Sometimes the search cannot be public because the person being replaced does not know yet. A search firm can hold that secret through months of quiet approaches. Software cannot, and the discretion is most of what the fee buys.
One hard role, no bandwidth. A five-person company with a make-or-break role open and nobody free to run the search is the classic contingency client, and rightly so. The fee buys a recruiter who lives in that niche, plus the closing craft that rarely gets priced: reference back-channels, counteroffer handling, the read on whether a candidate will actually resign. Twenty-five percent is a lot of money. A lost quarter is more.
One caveat belongs next to the praise, and honest recruiters say it themselves. Contingency economics pay on speed, without exclusivity, so effort flows toward the roles most likely to close. That is not a scandal; it is the model working as priced. It does mean the hardest role on your desk can be the one that sits, which is worth knowing before you send it out on contingency.
Start with staffing, because it settles most cases on its own. A recruiter already on payroll with hours to spend makes the seat obvious: the software multiplies labor you are paying for either way, and every crossover salary in the table above puts the subscription in rounding-error territory beside a fee.
The role itself decides the next set. Executive, confidential, or singular and urgent past whatever bandwidth is left, and the fee is right. Pay it without guilt. That is the work agencies are built for, and the percentage buys judgment and discretion no meter can.
What remains is the awkward case: real professional roles, nobody attached to run them, more than one a year. In our experience that describes a great deal of ordinary hiring, and both classic answers waste money on it. The seat assumes labor you do not have. The fee prices a $120,000 engineer as if the search were an executive one. Outcome pricing exists for that gap, and you can test whether it fits on a live role in a free two-week trial, which is a cheaper experiment than either a retainer or an annual seat.
Bring the role you were about to send to an agency, ideally the one where the fee made you wince. The free 14-day trial includes 3 New Roles and 12 Credits, no card required, so the test costs a percentage of salary that rounds to zero. Write the brief, approve the outreach, and compare what lands on your calendar with what the fee would have bought.
Contingency agencies charge a percentage of first-year pay, invoiced only on a successful placement. SHRM's 2016 guidance on working with search firms puts the fee at 20 to 25 percent of first-year cash compensation, and the wider market convention runs to 30 percent. As derivations: a $120,000 hire costs $24,000 at 20 percent and $30,000 at 25 percent. Retained executive search runs about 33 percent in the same SHRM guidance, and that is the model billed for running the search rather than for filling it.
Published entry prices, checked August 2026: LinkedIn Recruiter Lite is $1,680 a year for a single license, SeekOut Recruit Core is $149 a month paid annually and upfront ($1,788 in one charge, derived from the monthly list price), and a hireEZ solo seat is $494 a month, or $5,928 a year as a derivation. Metix AI plans run $49 to $299 a month, 10 percent off billed annually, so the top plan is $3,228 a year on annual billing as a derivation. Above those entry tiers, LinkedIn, SeekOut, and hireEZ all quote rather than publish.
Almost immediately. Dividing a year of software by a 20 percent fee, one fee overtakes a year of LinkedIn Recruiter Lite at a salary of $8,400, SeekOut Recruit Core at $8,940, Metix AI Scale at $16,140, and a hireEZ solo seat at $29,640, all derivations from list prices checked August 2026. Every professional salary clears those bars, which is why the sticker comparison misleads: the subscription excludes the recruiter's labor, and the fee includes it.
Executive search, where SHRM's 2025 benchmarking brief puts the median cost per hire at $10,625 and its 2016 guidance puts retained fees at about 33 percent; confidential replacements, where discretion is the service; and a single hard role with no internal bandwidth, where the fee buys market knowledge and closing craft. For steady professional hiring without a recruiter on staff, Metix AI delivers interview-ready candidates on plans from $49 to $299 a month with a free 14-day trial.