[aashaykumar92]

I wanted to learn more about how this works so sorry I'm not responding to your question, but when one has an agent, does the agent take 15% (or in this case, a mind blowing 52%) of the workers salary or that's just how much the hiring company pays the agent? Basically, is anything being deducted from the workers salary?

And there are mentions of a contract. What would this type of contract consist of?

The job candidate-agent relationship...is it like sports where agents can represent multiple job seekers but a job seeker usually only has one agent? And is there a legal side to this?

Sorry for all the questions, just trying to learn!

[gadders]

Normally, you (the contractor) is quoted a rate of £xxx/day, and the agency's % is on top of that and normally unknown to you.

You typically sign a contract with the recruitment agency, who has a back-to-back contract with the end employer. The contract basically just says you will be working at employer X for Z months.

There will be other legalise about intellectual property, confidentiality etc but that is the gist of it.

The flow of a job opening is normally that a hiring company will send the vacancy details to a shortlist of preferred recruitment agencies. These agencies will then submit CVs of candidates on their books back to the hiring company. Then the interview process etc starts.

To answer your specific question: agents can represent multiple candidates (a database of thousands) and a wise contractor would not rely on just one agency (my CV for example is probably with ~10 or so).

This is specific to the UK market - other markets may vary.

[gadders]

Also, recruitment agents are "employed" by the candidate and they will often say during negotiations "that the more you get paid, the more they make".

However, this is subject to the same issue that Freakonomics highlights vis Real Estate agents and house sales.

[chris_dcosta]

This is not like the sports industry is today. It is however like the sports industry used to be.

In the past sports agents worked both for the team and the player. This lead to exactly this situation, players and clubs getting shafted by the agents.

It changed when some smart person decided that the clubs and the players should have their own agents, and that if a club wanted a player because of their talent - which is the main reason - they had to engage their own agent 1) to attract the player 2) negotiate a price with the play's agent. The pplayer paid their agent 10%, and it was their job to defend the interests of the players against the interest of the club.

Hence today we have players paid huge amounts based on their talent.