Am I the only one who thinks it's ridiculous to ask for a 15% of annual salary recruitment fee? Why would any reasonable company agree to pay a website $15,000 just because they indexed their new 100k/year hiree's résume?. I think they're way over-valuing the service they provide. A smart recruiter who found someone they really wanted on Developer Auction would simply look them up elsewhere and make them an offer outside of the site.
The site is creative, sophisticated, well built, and could easily charge some sort of monthly service fee akin to a dating site, but the notion that companies would willingly toss 15% of a highly paid employee's salary out of pure laziness boggles me.
If an employer is smart they'll calculate the hours wasted interviewing candidates * avg hourly pay and likely realize that this cost is far greater than the $15K fee they'd pay a recruiter. Not to mention the delays in your projects as a result of your best engineers being distracted with interviewing candidates.
Even if your recruiter suggested some potentially strong candidate, you still have to interview them to be sure they are a good fit and to be sure they actually have the skills they claim. I'm not sure how this saves you time in that respect.
The site is creative, sophisticated, well built, and could easily charge some sort of monthly service fee akin to a dating site, but the notion that companies would willingly toss 15% of a highly paid employee's salary out of pure laziness boggles me.