It's a tricky one. Technically speaking it already works like this for contractors.
Example: Say I place you in a 6 month contract where you get paid £500 per day (I'm an optimist!) in such a deal my fee to the client, your employer, would be anywhere from £50 to £100 per day meaning I could place 4 good people and make £2k a week before costs. I work for an agency currently but if I was self-employed (and a lot of successful recruiters are) that would be £2k a week in my pocket.
Your next question will probably be 'Why aren't more recruiters doing exactly that?' and the answer is simple, it's the same as launching a start-up. You become self-emplyed and your income isn't secure. More importantly it is almost impossible to get traction as a self-employed recruiter unless you've been in the game for at least 5 or 6 years and have a littany of highly successful relationships with hiring managers that regularly recruit.
Incentives for the recruiter to place someplace that's most beneficial to the developer. The person paying for the service is the employer. YOU might not make an bad placement, but many other recruiters I've worked with don't know how to tell a good one from a bad one, and if the employer is initially happy, that's all that matters. If the placement doesn't work out, I've found employers tend to blame the employee more than the recruiting firm (maybe that's not always the case though?).
Long term relationship with the placed candidate. There's no incentive for a recruiter to keep moving someone from company to company every year because they'll get a bad rep with the hiring companies. If the person paying the recruiter is the employee/contractor, the focus would be more on making them happy vs making the employer happy. In an ideal world, all parties are happy, but if it comes down to making a decision, people will come down on the side of the money.
The interesting element to this is taking the cost away from the employer and moving it to the candidate.
Pro's: Employers will be a lot more keen on dealing with an agent if they no they won't ever have to pay extra for their fees.
Cons: When the market changes (and it's already starting to), jobs will become plentiful and the need to use a professional to find you a new opportunity becomes less of a priority.
Employers will be a lot more keen on dealing with an agent if they no they won't ever have to pay extra for their fees.
Maybe, but they may end up back in having to weed through hundreds of agents instead of hundreds of applicants. I suspect that won't be the case entirely, as an agent would have more incentive to be selective about placement opps - they don't want to waste their time either.
Example: Say I place you in a 6 month contract where you get paid £500 per day (I'm an optimist!) in such a deal my fee to the client, your employer, would be anywhere from £50 to £100 per day meaning I could place 4 good people and make £2k a week before costs. I work for an agency currently but if I was self-employed (and a lot of successful recruiters are) that would be £2k a week in my pocket.
Your next question will probably be 'Why aren't more recruiters doing exactly that?' and the answer is simple, it's the same as launching a start-up. You become self-emplyed and your income isn't secure. More importantly it is almost impossible to get traction as a self-employed recruiter unless you've been in the game for at least 5 or 6 years and have a littany of highly successful relationships with hiring managers that regularly recruit.