Use a recruiter when the person you need is not applying to job ads. That is the whole case, and everything else is detail. If your open role attracts a steady flow of qualified applicants, you do not need one.
If the role has been open three months and the resumes arriving are not close, a recruiter is usually the cheapest way to fix it. Our fee is 25 percent of first-year base salary, which is real money: $31,875 for a tax manager at the national midpoint. Whether that is worth paying comes down to two questions. How much is the empty seat costing you, and is your offer competitive before anyone starts searching?
What a recruiter costs
Most accounting recruitment runs on contingency. The fee is owed only if you hire someone the recruiter introduced, it is calculated as a percentage of the hire's first-year base salary, and it is usually payable on start date with a replacement guarantee attached. Across the market that percentage typically falls between 20 and 30 percent. Ours is a flat 25 percent, published on our engagement models page rather than held back until you ask.
Applied to midpoints from our Public Accounting Salary Guide 2026, a 25 percent fee looks like this:
| Role | Base salary midpoint | Fee at 25% |
|---|---|---|
| Tax Senior Associate | $92,500 | $23,125 |
| Audit Senior Associate | $89,000 | $22,250 |
| Tax Manager | $127,500 | $31,875 |
| Audit Manager | $122,500 | $30,625 |
| Tax Senior Manager | $162,500 | $40,625 |
For a 30 person firm those are not trivial sums. Treat them as real and make any recruiter, including us, justify them.
The comparison that matters is not fee against zero. It is fee against the cost of the seat staying empty: unbilled hours that seat should be producing, work redistributed onto people already at capacity, and in the worst case a second resignation from whoever absorbed the overflow.
We do not publish time-to-fill benchmarks, so we are not going to hand you a tidy break-even figure. Run it against your own realization rate on the billable hours the role should generate. Most firms who do that arithmetic find the fee is smaller than they assumed relative to a vacancy running past two or three months.
What you are actually buying
Access to people who are not looking. This is the only thing a recruiter provides that you cannot replicate internally given enough time. A tax manager who is reasonably content, adequately paid, and not on a job board will take a call from someone who knows their market. They will not answer your advert, because they are not reading adverts.
Screening conversations, not screening resumes. A recruiter worth the fee has already established compensation expectations, notice period, license status, commute tolerance, and the real reason someone is open to moving, before you spend an hour on a first interview.
Market intelligence. What competing firms are paying right now, what candidates are turning down, and whether your range is the actual problem.
Counteroffer handling. Counteroffer frequency has risen across the market, and a candidate who accepts one costs you the entire process. Our piece on why counteroffers in public accounting usually fail covers what to watch for.
When a recruiter earns the fee
The senior associate to manager band. A five year decline in CPA exam candidates has made this the tightest part of the market, and the people who fill these seats are rarely active applicants.
Confidential replacements. If you are replacing someone who does not yet know, you cannot post the role.
Your first hire into a new service line. Standing up a CAS practice or adding state and local capability means hiring for something you cannot assess well yet, in a market you do not know.
Competing against a well-funded acquirer. Private equity backed consolidation has created buyers recruiting hard from mid-size regional firms, particularly at senior manager and director level. If you are losing people to them, you are in a fight where market knowledge matters.
A role open past 90 days. At that point the accumulated cost of doing it yourself has usually overtaken the fee.
When you should not use one
This section matters more than the one above, and most recruiters leave it out.
Entry level roles with healthy applicant flow. If you have campus relationships and a functioning pipeline, do not pay a percentage on a $60,000 to $80,000 hire you could make yourself in six weeks.
When your offer is below market. A recruiter cannot fix an uncompetitive range, only tell you it is one, and you can establish that for free by reading the salary guide. If your tax manager ceiling is $105,000 when the national range starts at $110,000, the search fails regardless of who runs it. You will simply have spent two months finding out.
When you have a referral network you have not worked. Referral hires are cheaper, faster, and tend to stay longer. Exhaust that first. If your people will not refer their friends, you have a different problem, and a recruiter will not solve that one either.
When your process cannot move quickly. Four interview rounds spread over six weeks around a partner's travel schedule will lose good candidates whoever sources them. Engaging a recruiter does not speed up your process. It means you lose people more expensively.
When you want to see a few resumes without committing. Nobody is served by this. The recruiter works speculatively, candidates get approached about a role you are not serious about, and a month disappears.
Contingency or retained search?
Contingency suits most roles at small and mid-sized firms. No upfront cost, no exclusivity, and the recruiter carries the risk.
Retained search, where part of the fee is paid up front, makes sense in narrower cases: partner, principal, or director level hires, confidential replacements, or roles specialized enough that the search needs weeks of market mapping before anyone is approached. The argument for it is commitment on both sides. The argument against is that you are paying before you have seen anyone. For a routine manager level hire, contingency is the right answer, and a recruiter pushing retained search for one is selling rather than advising.
Questions worth asking before you sign
- How many people at this level have you placed in the last twelve months, and in which markets?
- Am I working with you exclusively, or are three other firms seeing the same candidates?
- What is the replacement guarantee, and what voids it?
- Will you tell me if my salary range is wrong before we start, or after the search fails?
- Who actually works my role, you or someone else?
The fourth one matters most. A recruiter who accepts an uncompetitive assignment without saying so is not working in your interest.
Frequently asked questions
Contingency fees across the market typically run 20 to 30 percent of the hire's first-year base salary, payable on start date. Tallero charges a flat 25 percent. For a tax manager at the national midpoint of $127,500, that is $31,875. Retained and engaged searches split the same fee, with a portion paid up front.
Contingency means you pay only if you hire someone the recruiter introduced. Retained means part of the fee is paid up front in exchange for exclusivity and a more thorough search. Most roles at small and mid-sized CPA firms are best handled on contingency.
When you have healthy applicant flow at the level you are hiring, when your compensation range sits below market, when you have not worked your referral network, or when your interview process is too slow to compete. A recruiter multiplies whatever your hiring process already is. It does not repair it.
Only by telling you. Check your range against a current salary guide before engaging anyone. If it is low, correcting the range will do more for the search than any recruiter can.
It varies widely by level and market, and we do not publish a benchmark we would stand behind. Be skeptical of anyone quoting you a confident average, particularly for senior associate through manager roles where the candidate pool is tightest.
Most offer a replacement guarantee. Ours is 90 days: if a placed candidate leaves or is let go for performance reasons in that window, we run the replacement search at no further fee. Terms vary between firms and some guarantees are voided by changes to the role after the hire starts, so read what voids it before you sign.
