They don't take a cut of your earnings, they get a commission from the employer - it's a subtle but very important distinction. If there's a $150k job out there and a recruiter gets $30k for a placement, guess how much that job would pay without the recruiter? $150k. It's an expense to the business and one that doesn't impact how much you're going to get paid at the end of the day.

Pretending the recruiter takes "a cut" of your salary creates an unnecessarily adversarial tone.

> It's an expense to the business and one that doesn't impact how much you're going to get paid at the end of the day.

That's how it looks from an accounting point of view but it is not how it works in reality. Employers have no interest in what your take-home pay is, they only are interested in what it costs to hire you.

Those costs are compared with what value you provide to the company. The (value - cost)/cost is the "opportunity cost", and market forces tend to push this to be around 1.15, or 15%.

The cut paid to the recruiter, as well as benefits, so-called "employer contributions" to social security, etc., all come out of your take-home pay one way or another.

That's not always the case, where they would only pay the $150k. It's situational, but if the company has some process in place where they basically only work through one recruiting agency, the scenario you spelled out is the practical implication. But if the company is also open to other avenues (referrals, etc) they may pay more than they would via a different channel.

FWIW, this doesn't always have to be the case if you're a good negotiator and you came in through a non-recruiter contact. (I have successfully negotiated this, using this argument, to go above their normal salary band. Maybe I would've gotten it anyway. But it didn't hurt.)

Exactly correct, except in contracting in which often the recruiter is trying to sell high (to the employer) and buy low (from the contractor) and the recruiter pockets the difference, and often tries to hide the true numbers to each side of the deal.

Yes absolutely, I've been on both sides of this (the contractor being "sold" as well as employing short-term contract developers through an agency like this). I will say though that a couple of times where I was able to find out how much the client was paying for me, there wasn't as big of a gap as I had expected - I think the largest was about 6%, and when I was a lead my employer was losing about $15/hr on me. I have to assume the team as a whole was profitable enough that they weren't that concerned with it.

That seems awfully low. The times when I've found out that info, it's tended to be ~15-20-25%.

All the times I was able to find or figure out both numbers it was state government related, so that probably played a role. Wouldn't surprise me if private sector was 2-3x higher margins across the board, for everyone.

have dealt with state govt too, and yeah... that makes a lot more sense.