The 21st Century Alternative To Appointment Fees

There is a worldwide swing towards a “retainer” payment for professional services rather than a “pay for use” fee. At Placements in Education, we have always charged an appointment fee – but we would like to move away from that for a number of reasons.

1. The appointment fee is increasingly unaffordible for smaller schools. We have kept it as low as we can, but the most expensive staff invariably resign at the most inconvenient time and the school has no choice but to spend money on replacing them. If the school is paying the retainer there is no additional cost – and no appointment fee
2. Because the appointment fee was an unwelcome expense, schools only contacted us when they could not find a new member of staff by themselves – and usually needed the person at short notice. This meant that most of our work became finding teachers for scarce subjects, and to be honest, that became boring!
3. We want to give our applicants the greatest possible possibility of finding a job. That means we need to be able to send them to as many schools as possible. When schools are paying the retainer they are happy to look at CV’s – because they know it wont cost them anything extra.

At present we only offer the Retainer to Gauteng schools, because we want to be sure that we can maintain a steady supply of applicants for our Retainer Clients. In time we hope to expand the retainer to the whole of South Africa and perhaps even schools overseas.

Right now, the Retainer covers the appointment of

• Teachers
• HODs
• Admin Staff
• Any appointment in a school where the salary is under R500 000 pa.

We will only take forty schools onto the Retainer this year. We would love your school to be one of those schools!