[sokoloff]

I'm on the hiring manager side (full time roles, no contracts). I can assure you that you won't make any more coming directly to us for a full-time role than working through a recruiter.

We fill most (90+%) roles using our internal recruiters (so you still get an advantage coming direct through our internal team and by all means I encourage that), but for the subset of roles that we open to external recruiters, I'm going to make you the same offer [or think about the negotiations the same] either way.

The referral fee we pay the external recruiter is a one-time fee and literally comes from another bucket of money. Yes, I also have to budget for and fund that bucket, but since it's non-recurring, it's treated as a recruiting expense, not a compensation expense.

For a contract role, there are probably good reasons to go direct, as the markup is an on-going compensation expense in many case, but for full-time, I suspect most companies work like mine does.

[jghn]

This is how we operate as well. There's no penalty for someone coming in via an external recruiter in terms of their salary.

I don't necessarily believe this but the other argument about making less money is that recruiters are incentivized for you to take the job and not to push the envelope on your behalf knowing that the company might balk and back out.