Partner Programs in Recruiting & Offshore Staffing

01 · the headline
Flat dollars are the anomaly in Marco's own category

02 · flat bounties
One-time payouts, ranked

03 · percentage programs
The model that dominates Marco's category

04 · recurring per-seat
Pay monthly for as long as the placement survives

This is the structure that most directly answers "how do I make a partner care about retention." Four companies in this category do it, and two have no end date at all.

04b · offshore VA & BPO
The deepest category, swept separately

60+ companies checked in this cluster alone. 34 publish real economics, 12 have a program page with no numbers, 30+ have nothing. This is Marco's nearest neighbourhood, so it gets its own table.

Recurring revenue share — the offshore VA cluster

Flat fee — the offshore VA cluster

05 · the direct competitor
Somewhere.com, in full

Nick Huber's company, formerly Support Shepherd. 4,500+ clients, 7,000+ placements, ~250 placements/month, 180 employees. The closest mirror Marco Hire has, and the weakest program in this document.

Who they say they want, verbatim: HR consultants and recruiters, business coaches and advisors, entrepreneurs with a network of business owners, freelancers embedded in scaling companies. And the tell: "You don't need a large audience or a formal partnership agreement. You just need one good introduction."

06 · EOR & payroll
The most mature programs in the adjacent space

Deel — best tier design found anywhere

deel.com/affiliates · $500 per Sales Qualified Opportunity + $1,000 on conversion. 90-day cookie. PartnerStack, paid by the 15th. 10+ separate tracks including Accounting, Brokers, VC, PE and System Integrators.

Note how low those gates are. Gold — a dedicated human and a private Slack channel — is five qualified opportunities. Built to move partners from "signed up" to "produced once," not to ration rewards.

The 10% / 12-month convergence

Remote, Oyster, Near and Outstaffer independently landed on 10% for 12 months. Four companies, no coordination, same answer. That is the closest thing to a market rate in this space.

The rest

07 · candidate-side
A different product, priced differently

Enterprise staffing pays almost exclusively for candidates, gated on hours worked. Useful context, but not Marco's channel.

08 · the deep dive
What commission structures actually look like

1. Flat bounty, one-time

Range found: $150 (Juicebox, Virtudesk) to $5,000 (Revelo). Cluster: $1,000-$1,500.

Why it dominates: trivial to explain, perfectly predictable cost.

The flaw nobody has fixed: it is indifferent to deal size. For any company whose fee scales with salary, a flat bounty pays the same for a $14k VA hire and a $60k engineer. It actively punishes partners for delivering the better client.

2. Percentage of revenue or fee — the category norm

Range: 2% (Braintrust) to 40% (Justworks). Cluster in staffing: 5-10%.

The convergence: Remote, Oyster, Near and Outstaffer all landed on 10% for exactly 12 months independently.

The clever variants:

• HireLATAM gates the rate on cumulative revenue collected: 5% → 8% at $25,000 → 10% at $50,000. The partner's rate rises with the money they have actually produced, not a placement count.
• Outstaffer recomputes the tier monthly: 10% below $2,000 referred revenue that month, 15% above. Not a permanent status, a monthly performance dial.
• BairesDev floors it: "our smallest engagements guarantee a total annual payout of $10K." A percentage with a published minimum removes the partner's biggest objection to percentages, which is uncertainty.
• MultiplyMii pays 10% of deal value but explicitly strips salary, 13th month and benefits from the base. Honest, and worth copying if the fee is bundled.

3. Percentage, perpetual or long-tail — rare and powerful

• DistantJob — 25% every month, every client, forever. Most aggressive published rate found.
• BoldX — 10 years, decaying 10% → 7.5% → 5%. A decay ladder, not a growth ladder.
• RecruitiFi — 20% of net for 3 years.
• The BPO Network — 10% for 2 years, minus a 30% "service fee" haircut, so ~7% effective.
• Braintrust — 2% of every invoice forever. Produced >60% of enterprise clients.

4. Recurring per-seat — the retention-aligned model

Mira $400/mo + $150/mo per extra VA, indefinite · Virtual Workforce $200/mo per employee, indefinite · Kinetic $100/mo per client · Career Connections $0.50 per hour worked for 12 months.

These pay the partner only while the placement survives, which makes the partner care about fit rather than volume. No clawback needed, ever.

5. Escalating ladders — and the two questions everyone gets wrong

Gusto $300→$1,000 · Ontop $1,000→$2,000 · Virtual Latinos $250→$625 · HireLATAM 5%→10% · Marco $500→$1,000

• Marginal or retroactive? Marco's is marginal — 12 placements pays 4×$500 + 5×$750 + 3×$1,000 = $8,750, not $12,000. Retroactive reads far more generous for a modest real cost.
• Gate on what? Marco gates on 10 cumulative placements. Deel's Platinum is 10 opportunities. Gusto's Bronze is 3 clients. HireLATAM gates on dollars collected, which is the fairest version — it rewards the partner who brings big clients rather than many small ones.
• Does the ladder reset? Randstad's does, and it is worth knowing about. Their tiers are multipliers on a base amount — Tier 2 = 1.5x, Tier 3 = 1.75x, Tier 4 = 2.0x — but the terms state: "If a referral bonus payout crosses into another calendar year, the tier is reset to the base amount." An annual reset creates urgency inside the year and resentment at the start of the next one. Nobody else in the study resets.

Randstad also runs the only revenue-gated ladder among the big firms, for project and MSP leads: $500 at each of $50k, $150k, $350k and $500k in billed revenue, plus $1,000 at $1M, capped at $3,000. The catch is who qualifies — clients, prospective clients and their employees are excluded by name, so the "partner" is Randstad's own contractor base, not an outside consultant.

6. The survival gate — how mature programs handle churn

Almost nobody claws back. They design it out:

• Andela — split: $500 at month 1, $500 at month 6
• Hire Overseas, Valatam — hold until the client is 2 months active
• BruntWork, Paraform, Andiamo, BairesDev — 90-day survival gate
• MultiplyMii — 45-day maturation, then 100% release
• Braintrust, Near, BairesDev, Dev Partners — pay only on cash actually collected, so clawback is structurally impossible
• Remote — void if the customer cancels within 30 days; Outstaffer — 60 days

Only three publish an explicit clawback: Hays ("refund, upon demand at any time"), MultiplyMii (chargebacks/refunds), and Oyster (discretionary). Betts states the opposite — the recruiter keeps the money even if the placement fails.

Marco Hire's published no-clawback policy is genuinely rare and under-advertised.

7. Double-sided and choose-your-own

Double-sided: Revelo $2,500 off · Athena $1,500 off · Somewhere $500 off · Deel $500 credits · BruntWork $500 credit · Virtual Gurus $250 off · Vintti $250 · Virtual Latinos $150 off · Magic 4 weeks both ways.

Choose-your-own — the rarest and cleverest design found:

• Berry Virtual — $2,500 flat OR 7% monthly for 12 months, partner picks
• Vintti — $400 cash OR $600 in credit
• M SEARCH, Frontline — cash OR a charitable donation in the partner's name
• Gusto, Rippling, Justworks, TriNet — take the 20% as a client discount, as revenue share, or split it

8. Pay before the sale — the activation trick

Three companies pay for something that happens before anyone hires:

• Kinetic — $50 per completed demo call
• Dev Partners — $500 just for the referred client completing a Zoom meeting
• Papaya Global — $1,000 per qualified lead, before close
• Deel — $500 per Sales Qualified Opportunity, before close
• TriNet — $100 Visa card just for the referral taking a first meeting

This is the cheapest partner-activation mechanism in the entire document. It gives a new partner a paid win in week one, before the long sales cycle has resolved.

9. Cookie windows — almost nobody publishes one

Marco Hire is one of seven companies in ~60 that publishes an attribution window at all, and has the longest. Several use manual deal registration instead (Oyster, Ontop, Near, Revelo).

10. Payout speed, ranked

Glades Talent weekly · Ontop weekly (Wednesdays) · Somewhere 24-48 hrs · Outsourced.ph 14 days · DistantJob by the 13th · Papaya by the 10th · Deel / Kinetic by the 15th · MultiplyMii 45-day maturation · Juicebox ≤60 days · Marco Hire ~30-day hold then monthly batch · RecruitiFi / BoldX / South quarterly · Oyster 45 days arrears · Justworks 60 days arrears

Payout speed costs cash timing, not margin. It is one of the cheapest differentiators available.

09 · the absence
Companies with no findable program

Standard paths checked on each: /partners, /partner, /partner-program, /affiliate, /affiliates, /affiliate-program, /refer, /referral, /referrals, /referral-program, /refer-a-friend, /ambassador, /become-a-partner, plus nav, footer and sitemap sweeps.

IT staffing is the same story, and it is a wide-open lane

Ten IT staffing firms checked separately: Apex Systems, TEKsystems, Motion Recruitment, Jobot, CyberCoders, Beacon Hill, Yoh, The Judge Group, Signature Consultants (now Dexian), Akkodis/Modis.

• Nine of ten publish nothing. Motion Recruitment, Jobot, CyberCoders and Beacon Hill have no referral page and never have.
• TEKsystems and Apex have programs but withhold the number. Apex publishes the threshold (200 hours onsite) and then says "contact your recruiter." Curiously, Apex does publish the amount for its Mexico delivery center: 10,000 MXN at three months.
• Every documented program in the vertical is a candidate bounty gated on hours worked — $500 to $1,500, 30 to 90 days or 200 hours. None is a revenue share.
• The only true client-side partner program in IT staffing has been dead for about 15 years. Yoh once ran a Lead Referral Program with a finder's fee scaled to deal size, an 8-month attribution window, and Basic/Platinum partner tiers. It died around 2010. Their one live referral page today is an orphaned form with no terms on it at all.

10 · where marco lands
The scorecard