For recruitment
Recruitment marketplaces: success fees, guarantees, and refund cliffs
Recruitment marketplaces move the largest single tickets of any vertical on this list: placement fees of five figures against salaries of six. Guarantee clauses — candidate departs inside 90 days, pro-rata refund due — are contractual promises that become refund events against transfers recruiters have already spent on payroll. When those refunds fire without reversal flags, individual findings dwarf entire other verticals’ monthly totals.
The guarantee cliff
Standard terms: replacement or pro-rata refund if the hire exits inside the guarantee window. The refund is contractual — employers invoke it without negotiation — and it lands against a transfer made at invoice time. Modelled: 40 placements quarterly at $12,000 with a 15% platform fee and 7% guarantee invocation produces multiple five-figure refund events quarterly, each one a potential six-figure-stranding trigger at sloppy flag hygiene.
- Placements × fee
- 40 × $12,000 = $480k invoiced
- Guarantee invocations (7%)
- ~2.8 placements/qtr
- Refund per invocation
- $6,000–12,000
- Agency-side transfers at risk
- up to $10.2k each
Pro-rata arithmetic is partial-refund math
Guarantee schedules (100% inside 30 days, 50% inside 60) map directly onto proportional-reversal formulas — except the proportions come from contracts rather than refund ratios. Encode the schedule once, compute owed exactly, and resist the temptation to round generously in the agency’s favour; employers check this math.
Employer-side disputes: winnable with paperwork
Employers occasionally dispute via card networks instead of invoking contract terms. These are unusually winnable — signed agreements constitute excellent compelling evidence — provided the evidence pack assembles before deadlines. Representation-or-concede decisions tilt represent here more than any other vertical.
Payroll reality vs clawback timing
Agencies pay recruiters on commission cycles independent of your guarantee windows. By invocation, transfers frequently sit at low-or-negative balances; netting against upcoming placements becomes the primary instrument, with reversal reserved for churned agencies.
What FeeGuard does about it
Findings carry placement-sized figures with agency, role and invoice context attached; netting workflows consume them directly; and the scanner prices a year of guarantee history from pasted exports before anyone argues about whether the problem is real.
Common questions
Are guarantee refunds disputes or refunds?
Refunds when contractual — cheaper, faster, relationship-preserving. Reserve network disputes for employers refusing contract channels.
Is reversal capped on six-figure invoices?
At the transfer balance — compute owed exactly rather than assuming; partial placements mean partial transfers mean partial caps.