Next, we’ll take the low end of the range, which is 11 perm placements. That’s nearly $500,000 working as an external agency recruiter. So, stay connected in your industry, be creative in your networking and do not be intimidated in contacting a headhunter you’ve never spoken to before.Finally, one last important note to mention: no rule states that you can’t work with more than one headhunter or recruiter at a time. How do recruiters get paid? 20% of $70,000 is $14,000. As per the agreement that the recruiter has with their client, they will be paid 20% of the candidate’s first-year salary. According to Glassdoor, the average salary for an internal (or "in-house" recruiter is $45,000.Since in-house recruiters get a standard salary -- and that's the only way, outside of a bonus, they earn money, let's focus on external recruiters, who get paid in a variety of ways.First off, external recruiters don't earn a salary in a wholesale sense. This is a desperate approach taken on the part of a desperate headhunter that has a number of detrimental effects: first, it annoys the hiring companies; second, it further damages the headhunter’s already poor reputation in the employment world; and third, if your resume is included in this batch of candidate flashes, it essentially eliminates your candidacy for that job in the hiring company and may even eliminate your candidacy as an applicant in the company as a whole.Here’s the thing – if the company decides to hire you, even if they discover you and hire you outside your relationship with the headhunter, because you were included in this candidate flash, the company may still have to pay the headhunter a search fee or potentially face messy litigation. Visit PayScale to research recruiter salaries by city, experience, skill, employer and more. Above all, it will make you seem desperate, which is definitely what you do not want as a job seeker. Unless you have a very close relationship with the headhunter, their promise to keep you in mind for future jobs is really just a softening-the-blow technique.Here are a couple of somewhat sobering statistics to give you an insight into what’s going on behind the scenes when you work with a headhunter: when looking to fill a company job, a headhunter typically will consider 10 job candidates.Of those 10 candidates, the headhunter will select 3 to actually send to an interview with the hiring company. Now that we’ve discussed how external recruiters gets paid, let’s discuss the different ways in which they receive that payment. Marketing skills.