Recruiter jobs are now free for all
We started inviting selected recruiters to post their jobs on our platform a bit more than a year ago and, despite our concerns about the response of the community, the feedback was mostly positive! Of course, the descriptions of most recruiter jobs could be improved, and the hourly rate is often close to the minimum of 75€, but over the months, we saw more and more applications and, eventually, successful engagements by our members.
For the pricing for recruiter jobs, we settled on a fee of 3%, charged to the freelancer for the initial 6 months of the project. This is less than a third of the fee we charge for our own direct jobs (10%), since we wanted to lower it so much for the recruiter jobs that the freelancer didn't feel the need to add it on top of their hourly rate or, worse, bypass Uplink and apply to the recruiter directly.
Charging a fee at all for recruiter jobs never felt completely right, though. We knew that having a recruiter present as a middleman already makes the freelancer-client relationship more complicated than it should be, and asking the freelancer to forward their invoices to us and charging them a fee (however small) is not improving the situation.
This is why we decided to stop charging a fee for all recruiter jobs, effective November 1. It will be free for recruiters to post their jobs (as it always has been), and free for our members to apply to them and work with the recruiters. (1)
We hope that this change will make it even more attractive for our members to apply to recruiter jobs, and in addition it will hopefully encourage our recruiters to post more of their jobs at Uplink.
One of the consequences of this change is that we can't invest any time in manual follow-up anymore, e.g. when a freelancer is waiting to hear back from a recruiter. Instead, we have some specific ideas to strongly encourage our recruiters to give feedback to every applicant! We will also implement a quick and simple rating system that will allow our members to give a 👍 or 👎 to every interaction with a recruiter, which will allow us to quickly respond when a recruiter does not adhere to our rules.
Our direct jobs are and will always be our main focus at Uplink! They were the main driver when Uplink was founded (to offer fair and transparent job postings as an alternative to recruiters) and we love having direct contact with the end customers (before handing over to the right candidate)! Recruiter jobs will stay "part of the mix", though, and we hope that by making them free, we can get more matching recruiters and attractive jobs on board!
(1) Please note that this new arrangement is valid for all applications to recruiter jobs after November 1, 2021. Applications that happened before that date and ongoing engagements will stay on the current 3% arrangement.