Dear Caleb,
Greetings and Best Wishes for your New Venture,
The general trend here in India for charging your customers for providing candidates who get selected is to charge 8.33% of the CTC (Cost To Company) offered by the customer to the new recruit, which works out to about 1 month's salary. However, if such selected recruit referred by the Placement Agency leaves employment within 3 months, the Placement Agency needs to provide a replacement acceptable to the hiring Company free of charges.
From my personal experience many fledgling Placement Agencies just grab Resume's from Job Portals and forward them for evaluation of their Customer (Hiring Company), in which case I believe that their charging a hefty 8.33% fees is unreasonable because there is no value addition by them in this process.
I haven't understood exactly what you mean by forms?. In our case, we have a system wherein, irrespective of the source of the Candidate, fro our independent data base or through referrals, after short listing the candidates for Interviews, prior to the actual interview, we make them respond to a Questionnaire which has 3 portions: 1. Personal Information of the Candidate 2. Questions to judge his/her aptitude and 3. Technical Questions related to the Job / Position for he/she is to be interviewed.
If you need more information from a person who is having her own Placement Agency, please let me know your email ID which I will forward to her, so that, you can communicate independently with each other.
Have a successful start ...raj