Why we do not offer recruitment
A recruiter earns a fee every time somebody moves, and we earn a fee only for as long as your employee stays. Holding both mandates means holding both incentives at once, and only one of them points the same way as your retention.
We do not provide recruitment, and we turn the work down when it is offered. Clients ask why reasonably often, usually assuming we are too small to run a search or that we lack the network for it. The actual reason is a decision about incentives, and it is the clearest thing we can tell you about how we are paid.
The problem with being paid per placement
A recruiter earns a fee when somebody changes job, and that is the entire economic model behind a perfectly legitimate business. Following that model through to its conclusion is where it gets interesting for you as a client. The firm that places your engineer this year holds a standing financial reason to place that same engineer somewhere else next year, because a second placement earns a second fee. The better your hire turns out to be, the more valuable they become to move.
This holds even where everybody behaves impeccably, which is the part worth understanding. Most recruiters are straightforward people who would not deliberately poach from a client, and they still hold a database of exactly the people they placed, complete with current salaries, current employers and a warm relationship, while answering to revenue targets that reward movement. When a competitor briefs them on a role your engineer fits, the incentive sits on the other side of the table from you.
The second problem compounds the first one considerably, and it applies wherever the two services sit together. If the same firm also runs your payroll and holds your employment contracts, they know precisely what everybody earns, when each contract renews, and who has gone longest without a raise. That is a great deal of information to hand to somebody whose other line of business profits from your team turning over.
How an Employer of Record is paid instead
Our fee recurs monthly for as long as your employee stays employed with us. When somebody leaves we stop billing for them, and the only way we replace that revenue is by winning new clients. Retention is what pays us and churn is what costs us, so there is no finder's fee anywhere in the model and no version of our business that improves when your team turns over.
That is the whole argument, and we make it as an argument about incentives because incentives are checkable. Anybody can tell you they would never poach from a client... considerably fewer can tell you their revenue would fall if they did.
If you need sourcing help we will introduce you to recruiters we rate, and we take nothing at all for the introduction. No referral fee, no rebate, no commercial arrangement of any kind, because accepting one would put us straight back into the position this page exists to avoid.
What we do at the hiring stage
Once you have chosen someone, we carry out in-person verification, which is compliance work and sits squarely inside our remit. We meet your candidate face to face, check their identity documents and credentials against the originals, and witness the contract signing. Document fraud is a real risk in this market and a video call will not catch it, so somebody has to be in the room, and in Indonesia that somebody is us.
We also handle the negotiation of terms once you have set the budget, because the net-versus-gross confusion described in our guide on how salaries are quoted here derails more offers than any other single factor. Establishing the basis correctly is employment work that belongs with the employer, and we are better placed to do it from Jakarta than you are from another timezone.
The trade-off, stated honestly
This position does cost you something real, and we would rather name it than gloss over it. A full-service provider that recruits and employs gives you one contract, one contact and one invoice, and there is genuine convenience in that arrangement. Working with us means finding candidates yourself or through a recruiter you engage separately, which is one more relationship for you to manage.
We think the trade is worth making, and we would sooner you understood it upfront than discovered it later. If a single supplier for everything matters more to you than the incentive question, there are good firms that do both and we will happily point you at them. What we will not do is take both fees and tell you the conflict does not exist.
