MF Headhunters Take 30% of Your Salary??

Can anyone verify if this is true? My colleague just told me about his roommate who went from IB to work at Carlyle and has to pay his headhunter 30% of his Analyst salary. Absolutely absurd if this is industry standard 

 

They don't take it from you. The fund pays them in addition to paying you your entire salary.

If the guy is personally paying his HH he got scammed.

I think the point is that basically instead of PE fund paying you 400k, they pay you 300k and the HH 100k.

It is unfortunate that we become conditioned to think it’s not fungible…

 
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They don't take it from you. The fund pays them in addition to paying you your entire salary.

If the guy is personally paying his HH he got scammed.

I think the point is that basically instead of PE fund paying you 400k, they pay you 300k and the HH 100k.

It is unfortunate that we become conditioned to think it's not fungible…

This would only work if all of your competitors had similar hiring costs (used headhunters, etc). If your competitors pay $400k and you are paying $300k because you need to pay a headhunter then you will be screwed. 

Additionally, firms view the headhunters as an outsourced recruiting team. So instead of hiring internally (paying salaries, bonuses, etc) they hire headhunters. So if the headhunter isn’t there then it’s not like the costs disappear, they move to more internal teams sourcing talent. 

 

This is standard across most industries. I’ve been on both sides of the headhunter process. Typically good firms are going to charge ~30% of starting base salary to place a candidate. There’s then also lots of other contractual terms that can go into effect as well (I.e if you place a role, and then fill it with a candidate you found yourself, you still owe the headhunter money sometimes)

 

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