Freelance recruiter work, matched to your network — keep 60% of every placement

The problem isn't your network. It's everything around it.

Sit with what actually happens when an experienced recruiter goes independent.

Your contacts are real. You placed the plant maintenance head at that auto ancillary in Pune, and he still takes your call. You know a handful of good Tally-fluent accountants in Thane who would move for the right role. That knowledge is genuinely worth money.

Then the month starts and nothing comes in.

The agency you left had a business development team, a client list and a name on an email signature. Alone, you have none of those. Cold-calling HR heads to ask for a mandate is a different job from recruiting, and it's a job most good recruiters are bad at, because it rewards persistence over judgement. So you take whatever mandate you can get. A logistics role when your domain is BFSI. A CXO search when your strength is mid-level engineering hiring. You work it badly, you don't close it, and three weeks are gone.

Meanwhile the infrastructure that made you effective has quietly disappeared. No ATS, so candidates live in a spreadsheet and a WhatsApp thread. No sourcing licence, because a paid recruiter seat costs more than most independents will spend on a maybe. No brand, so a candidate who searches your name finds nothing and treats your call as a possible scam.

And when work does come through a subcontracting arrangement, the split is decided by whoever holds the client. You do the sourcing, the screening, the salary conversation and the joining follow-up. You see a fraction of the fee, sometimes late.

None of that is a skill problem. It's a distribution and tooling problem. It's fixable.

How a role reaches you

When a company posts a role, matching starts with a hard gate on country, then ranks eligible recruiters on industry, seniority band, function and location, with your track record on the platform acting as the fine sort. A specialist network works each role in parallel, mixing recruiters local to the job with a smaller outstation set, so no single desk becomes the bottleneck and no single person's queue decides how fast the shortlist arrives.

If a recruiter working a role goes quiet, someone else from the matched pool backfills the slot automatically. Nobody holds a role hostage by doing nothing, and nobody's inactivity costs you the work.

You work a capped number of roles at a time, and each one carries a submission cap — a short, considered list of candidates, not a flood. That's a deliberate design choice. A desk juggling dozens of roles is how agencies end up spraying CVs at anything with a salary attached, which is exactly the behaviour employers left agencies to escape. A small, focused workload is roughly what one person can actually work properly.

You are competing for the placement on every role you take, against other matched specialists. The competition is winnable, because everyone in it was selected for the same specialisation you were, and nobody can flood the pipeline to win on volume instead of fit.

What does a placement actually pay?

The company is charged 8.33% of the candidate's accepted annual fixed CTC — roughly one month's salary, and a figure the Indian market already understands. It's charged on the accepted offer, not on the range in the job description, and there's no subscription fee, no per-post fee, and nothing charged to the candidate.

That fee splits three ways:

| Share | Who gets it | As % of CTC |

|---|---|---|

| 60% | The placing recruiter | 5.00% |

| 10% | Pool, shared among recruiters whose candidate reached shortlist and interview but wasn't hired | 0.83% |

| 30% | Platform | 2.50% |

Put a real number through it. A role at ₹12,00,000 fixed CTC gets the company invoiced 8.33%, which is ₹99,960. Your 60% as the placing recruiter is ₹59,976. The pool takes ₹9,996 and the platform keeps ₹29,988.

Run it across the band you actually work in:

| Accepted fixed CTC | Fee to company (8.33%) | Your share (60%) |

|---|---|---|

| ₹6,00,000 | ₹49,980 | ₹29,988 |

| ₹8,00,000 | ₹66,640 | ₹39,984 |

| ₹12,00,000 | ₹99,960 | ₹59,976 |

| ₹18,00,000 | ₹1,49,940 | ₹89,964 |

| ₹25,00,000 | ₹2,08,250 | ₹1,24,950 |

Two honest notes. The fee is calculated on fixed CTC, so variable pay, bonuses and stock don't inflate it — which is why the number on your side is predictable rather than optimistic. And Indian tax rules apply to the payout: TDS under section 194-O is deducted, and GST treatment depends on your registration status. The gross number is what you see above. Your bank credit is that number after statutory deduction, like every other professional fee you've earned.

We are not going to tell you what you'll make in a month. We don't know, nobody honestly does, and any platform that quotes you a monthly figure before you've worked a single role is selling you something. What we can tell you is the exact arithmetic on each closed role, which is what you actually need to decide whether this is worth your time.

When the money actually reaches you

This is the section you should judge us on, because it's the one every marketplace is tempted to hide.

Here's the full sequence. The company is invoiced on the candidate's joining date, verified by offer letter upload and a UAN or payslip check — not on offer acceptance, on the day they actually walk in.

Then a 90-day guarantee period runs. If the candidate leaves or is let go within those 90 days, you run a free replacement, and the credit only moves once the replacement is in. Where a replacement genuinely isn't possible, the client gets a credit note instead.

Your 60% is credited to your in-platform wallet after the guarantee clears and the client has paid. It's then disbursed on the last working day of the following month.

Work the timeline forward. You start on a role in the first week of January. The offer is accepted in mid-February. The candidate serves a 60-day notice and joins in mid-April. The guarantee runs to mid-July. Assuming the client has paid, the credit lands in your wallet in July and disburses at the end of August.

That's roughly seven months from your first call to your bank credit on this example, and shorter timelines are common when the candidate has a 30-day notice or is immediately available. Either way, the first placement is a long wait, and after that, placements land in a rolling sequence, so the wait stops being the thing you feel.

We are not going to dress this up. If you need money in thirty days, the first cycle here will hurt.

Two things are worth understanding about why it works this way. The 90-day guarantee is the reason employers will pay a specialist network the same 8.33% they'd pay an established agency, and it's a real obligation — without it, the fee would have to be lower and your 60% would be 60% of less. And the guarantee is enforced against a company that has already paid, rather than by holding the invoice back, which means the placement is a completed transaction rather than an open question.

There's an unresolved point here we'd rather state than have you discover. The gap between when your work happens and when your cash arrives is the hardest part of this model for an independent recruiter, and we know it. Whether that gets addressed with an advance against cleared placements, a partial release at joining, or something else, is being worked on. It isn't solved today, and we are not going to imply it is.

You stay masked, in both directions

The employer never learns who you are. You never learn who the employer's HR team is. All communication runs through the platform.

The candidate doesn't deal with you personally either. They deal with a VVeRecruit persona. You see the candidate's real identity from the start, because you can't screen a person you can't see, but they don't see yours.

Candidate and employer are revealed to each other only when an interview is scheduled, and not before.

For the conversations that can't be scripted — offer negotiations, notice buyouts, reference calls — a platform relationship manager handles them on your behalf rather than putting you in the room.

There's a trade-off here, and you should weigh it. Masking means you don't build a direct client relationship on this platform. The client is ours; the placement fee is shared. If your ambition is to build your own client book, this isn't the right vehicle for that half of your business, though plenty of people run both.

What masking gives you in exchange is the thing that's been taken from independent recruiters for decades: nobody can go around you. The client can't call your candidate directly next quarter and skip the fee. The candidate can't introduce your client to another recruiter. Non-circumvention binds both the company and the candidate from the point of interview reveal, with 12-month hire tracking. Your contribution stays attached to you because the architecture won't let it detach.

Who this suits, and who it doesn't

This suits you if:

You have genuine depth in a specific domain — an industry, a function, a seniority band — and you're tired of taking mandates outside it because that's all that comes.

You have a live network that responds when you send them something, and you've never had a clean way to turn that into a placement fee.

You'd rather work a handful of candidates properly than forward thirty.

You have enough financial runway to absorb a first cycle where cash arrives months after the effort.

You want tools and pipeline without a monthly subscription and without a business development job attached.

This doesn't suit you if:

You need money this month. The payment timeline above is real, and pretending otherwise would waste both our time.

You're new to recruitment. The approval gate exists precisely here, and paying to be told no is a poor outcome for everybody.

You want to own the client relationship. Masking makes that structurally impossible on this platform.

You work by volume. The caps on open roles and submissions are a hard ceiling by design.

You won't pay to be screened. A completely fair position, and an incompatible one.

Frequently asked questions