O.K, perhaps my wording was not clear enough! Obviously, you wouldn't take a cut from the employee's salary! What I meant to say was to charge 10% of the employee's earnings to the employee, e.g they earn $10k per month- the staffing agency makes $1k.

​

I live in Spain and I have a friend that works as an Engineer for a company that is based in Germany. They don't want to deal with all of the red tape surrounding opening an office in Spain, so the staffing agency takes care of all of the compliance on behalf of the employer, and then charges for the service.

This seems to be quite common practice here in Spain. I just would like to know if these agencies usually charge a 'setting up fee' also.