What is Your Recruiting Firm’s Guarantee Period?

The truth be told, recruiting firms would rather not offer a guarantee period. After all, once their client decides which candidate to hire (the client’s decision, not the recruiting firm’s), the firm has no control over the future.

However, since companies seem to think that recruiters are more than just identifiers and wooers of great talent, but also magicians with otherworldly powers of prognostication, they want guarantees, gosh darn it!

So we posted the following question in the Members’ Area. Follow along, everybody:

What is the standard time frame for your recruiting firm’s guarantee period?

The choice of answers that we provided is listed below, along with the percentage of recruiters that selected each one:

• 30 days — 14.6%
• 45 days — 0.0%
• 60 days — 22.3%
• 90 days — 59.2%
• 180 days — 1.0%
• One (1) year — 1.0%
• We offer no guarantee — 1.0%

The MOST popular guarantee period

As might be expected, “90 days” was the most popular answer by participants in this poll. That’s been the industry standard for quite a few years now. However, there are some other results of note:

• Nobody offers a 45-day guarantee. Apparently, clients like gurantee periods in increments of 30 days.
• A healthy number of respondents offer just a 30-day guarantee (14.6%), which is impressive considering they got their clients to sign a fee agreement that included such a guarantee.
• Only 1% of recruiting firms represented in this poll offer NO guarantee period, underscoring the fact that although such guarantees make little sense on the surface, they’re alive and well.

What is your recruiting firm’s guarantee period? Is it 90 days? Is it 30 days? Why are recruiting firms even offering guarantees? You’re not psychic, after all!

(Unless, of course, you are psychic . . . and if so, I apologize. Also, I would like you to give me a call: 330.455.1433.)