What to do when agencies want to know your bottom line

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What to do when agencies want to know your bottom line

Bottom Line

While putting contractors forward for roles, agents generally ask them what rate they are looking for and precisely “What’s your bottom line? What’s the lowest rate that you will take? We’ll obviously try to get you as much as we can though”. They won’t.

The catch is, once you’ve quoted your bottom line is, you’ll never get any more than that. If by any chance, they are making more from the company, they’ll keep it themselves.

Set Percentage

The best deal you can strike in this situation is to get the agency to agree that they will take a set percentage, which implies that if they happen to extract more from the client, you will also be in a position to get more. Even this is not agreeable to me, as the agent will solely focus on getting the business without any qualms, even if it means putting you in cheaper than anybody else to get the business.

Don’t Quote Rate

The wisest thing to do though is to try to avoid giving a rate in the beginning.

This will enable you to dictate terms even if you go for a job interview and the company wants you. Once a client has zeroed in on the none who fits the bill, they’ll be hard put to accept the second best.

The agent will pester you to quote a rate though, before he or she submits a CV. Before they have got you an interview, you should play your card intelligently.

You can choose to say that you would need to factor in many intangibles before you are able to say exactly, that you would need to know how many hours you are expected to put in, where the location is (there’s traveling and even living away from home expenses), and what new skills are you expected to learn.

The agency won’t have a problem accepting this, especially if you tell them that you will be able to come up with a more accurate figure when they do put you forward to an actual job with an actual location.

Rate Range

When they actually put forward your CV, they will usually need to know what kind of rate you are looking at. You should still try and avoid it at this stage by saying that if the job is right then they’ll find that you are in range.

If they really get too insistent for you and say they won’t put you forward before they have a fair idea of what you want, give them a range where the low figure is within the range for the job and the high figure falls outside.

Quote A Range

If they tell you that the rate for the job is 500 quid per day, tell them that the range you are looking at is 500-575 pounds (500 if you don’t think, after the interview, that you'll get the contract and 575 if you think you will), but if you like the job, you will be not tough to deal with.

The agency will normally put you forward now. Generally, there is no set rate for the job from a company, although there sometimes is.

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