How Fair Pay, Better Training, and Less Exploitation Could Transform Indonesia’s Recruitment Sector
Indonesia’s recruitment sector isn’t broken by clients, but by internal economics. Here’s why better pay, training and fairness are the real solution.
The Indonesian recruitment industry, in all its unruly enthusiasm, has birthed something called a “recruitment union” or association. It’s being pitched as a professional body, but the pitch is where the professionalism seems to end. Think less CIPD, more cosplay.
Its primary mission, surprisingly, is not to protect recruiters, or train them, or push for higher ethical and operational standards. It’s not even pretending to care about the internal exploitation rife across the industry. No. Its central goal, apparently, is to standardise prices. Translation: price fixing.
Because when your industry is riddled with knowledge gaps, crumbling internal economics, and toxic comp structures, why not skip all that and try a little light cartel activity?
It’s a classic local formula. Spot something admirable abroad. Misunderstand it. Replicate the surface elements while skipping the hard parts. Declare success on LinkedIn. When it doesn’t work, blame the cultural context.
The tragedy isn’t that Indonesia can’t have a world-class recruitment sector. It absolutely can. The tragedy is that the self-appointed “leaders” trying to shape it are stumbling forward with blind confidence and no map, insisting the compass is wrong when it clearly isn’t.
Recruitment in Indonesia Isn’t a Profession, It’s an Accident People Survive
In places where recruitment is a real industry, like London, New York, and Hong Kong, it’s a career path. Not a fallback. It attracts people who are sharp, relentless, emotionally bulletproof, and just self-aware enough to enjoy the pain of the chase. These are individuals who, in many cases, could have gone into banking, law, tech sales or consulting. They chose recruitment because the upside is massive. It offers prestige-adjacent money without having to wear a tie every day.
We’re talking real incentive systems.
Commissions at 40–50%.
Fees at 25% and above.
Structured training.
Systems that work.
Career development plans that mean something.
Actual prestige.
Now pan the camera to Indonesia.
Here:
The average recruiter is on 5–8 juta per month.
Their commission? A generous 2%, once they’ve billed enough to justify their continued employment.
Thresholds that look like bad jokes: 8x or 10x base.
Database? LinkedIn.
Training? Here’s your desk. Here’s your KPI. Good luck out there.
This is not a talent problem. It’s not a cultural issue. The whole model is broken. When your system rewards people like they’re shift workers at a factory but demands emotional resilience, commercial dexterity and client relationship mastery, you lose everyone with options.
People don’t leave agency for internal TA because it’s more sexy. They leave because it’s stable, less exploitative and doesn’t feel like being slowly chewed alive.
Until the economics are rebuilt, until incentives reflect the intensity of the work, Indonesian recruitment will remain what it is now: an unintentional rite of passage for people still deciding what they want to be when they grow up.
Wealth Extraction, Hierarchy, and the Magical Vanishing Commissions
What’s actually hollowing out the recruitment industry in Indonesia? No, it’s not just “cheap clients.” It’s the top-down, extractive economics that define how most local agencies run. When you strip away the LinkedIn humblebrags, what’s left is a model where the owners vacuum up most of the revenue, and the people doing the actual work are left with little more than a headset and a headache.
Here’s an example compensation scenario.
A recruiter racks up 1.2B in fees.
They survive the chaos, the client whims, the counteroffers, the 11pm candidate therapy calls.
They pass the 8–10x base threshold that only makes sense to people who mistake exploitation for economics.
For this superhuman output, they receive a grand total of 24 juta. Two percent.
Meanwhile the owner, who’s long since forgotten what a cold call feels like, pockets 1.176B and explains with a straight face that “the company brand contributed.” Yes, the same brand whose LinkedIn posts consistently gather three likes from staff who were required to engage.
This is the logical outcome of a rigid hierarchy where the boss is the self‑declared source of all value and the recruiter is the grateful apprentice. The commission scheme exists mainly to maintain the illusion that contribution and reward are connected.
When these owners call for a union to “fight client pressure,” what they really mean is they need a distraction from the fact that they cannot squeeze their recruiters any harder without triggering human rights concerns.
Universal Principles for a Healthy Recruitment Industry
Fixing recruitment isn’t complicated. It just requires abandoning the idea that people will work like professionals while being treated like unpaid interns. You don’t need an MBA or a UN grant to figure this out. The fundamentals of a functioning, healthy recruitment ecosystem are universal, regardless of geography.
A. Teach Recruiters How to Sell Value
That means consulting, advising, guiding.
Not spamming CVs at the first whiff of an open role.
Not undercutting competitors for a quick win.
Not treating hiring like a race to the bottom.
Selling value means recruiters understand how they reduce risk, improve outcomes and save time for their clients.
B. Pay People Properly
You cannot expect to attract intelligent, hungry professionals with salaries that wouldn’t cover the monthly fuel for a Gojek rider. The better the talent you want to attract into recruitment, the more you have to offer in return. It’s simple.
C. Thresholds
Early-stage firms should start with 2x base.
Scale-ups can move to 3x.
Mature firms with inbound roles might justify 3x with deficit.
Anything beyond that is not a threshold. It’s a deterrent that says, “We hope you burn out before you ever see real money.”
D. Commission
If London can sustain 40–50% splits with proper desk cost, why are Indonesian recruiters on 2–5%? What exactly are these firms spending on? Not infrastructure. Not training. Not databases. It’s a one-way street.
.
This isn’t a Western model. It’s an economic one. Wherever you are in the world, if you want professionals to treat recruitment seriously, you have to treat them seriously first.
The recruiters are the engine.
The job is brutal.
The stress is real.
The rewards need to reflect that.
Otherwise, don’t be surprised when no one sticks around.
Why a Real Recruitment Association Would Fix People, Not Prices
Imagine a recruitment association that isn’t just a group chat with a logo. One not built around fragile egos, stage-managed titles, or a burning need for some agency owner to be perceived as the Indonesian Recruitment Messiah. No theatrical panels. No nonsense about “industry unity” while silently hoarding margin from underpaid staff.
Instead, imagine an association that actually did something revolutionary: supported the people doing the work.
It would start with economic fairness. Not client-side fee collusion, but internal structural sanity. Set clear standards by maturity stage:
Early-stage firms with low brand equity? Keep thresholds modest.
Mid-stage firms? Raise them sensibly.
Mature firms? Fine, bring in deficit models if you’ve got the platform to justify it.
But no more 8x thresholds paired with 2% commissions. That’s a morality test.
Next, build a training ecosystem.
Teach value-based selling.
Teach how to run proper intakes.
Teach proper candidate communication.
Give recruiters frameworks so they aren’t just guessing.
Then, publish actual standards.
Define what ethical offer management looks like.
Set expectations for client and candidate comms.
Push for data privacy norms.
Establish a playbook for counteroffers that doesn’t involve emotional blackmail or guilt trips.
Also, mental health. Recruitment is a psychological grind. It needs real support, not memes about hustle.
Finally, elevate the recruiter. Make it a career.
Not a back-up plan.
Not something you do before you “grow up” and join TA.
A career that pays, that develops, that leads somewhere.
That is what a real recruitment body would do.
Not price tables. Not pretend standards. Not WhatsApp wars of self-importance. Just real work that makes this a real industry.
Indonesia doesn’t need a recruitment union that huddles in café meetings debating whether 15% fees are too low. It needs something closer to a recruiter advocacy alliance. One that actually interrogates how firms are structured, how people are paid, and why top talent avoids this industry like it’s contagious.
The core issue is not clients. Clients chase price when agencies can’t sell value. Nor is it “culture” or Indonesia being “unique.” That excuse has been milked dry.
The issue is internal: the people doing the work are treated as expendable, trained poorly, incentivised worse, and micromanaged by people who haven’t closed a deal since BlackBerry phones were still in fashion.
Fix that first.
Raise the floor.
Redesign compensation.
Build actual training systems.
Promote ethical practice.
Protect mental health.
Then watch how talent quality improves, how client respect grows, how fees rise. Organically, without the need for group therapy sessions masquerading as cartel strategy.
If the “union” wants credibility, it needs to stop protecting margins and start protecting professionals.
Because until then, what we really have is a small crowd of unqualified leaders walking recruiters off a cliff while paying them 2% for the privilege.
At StratEx - Indonesia Business Advisory we’re pushing for structural change that values the recruiter, not just the spreadsheet. Contact us if you’re interested in better commissions, better clients, and real upside.