Retained vs contingent: why the model matters

Every founder who's hired a senior leader badly has a version of the same story: we got candidates fast, but none of them were quite right. The fast bit is the problem.

That story is structurally produced by the contingent-search model.

The commercial logic of contingency

Contingent recruiters are paid only on placement. Brief quality doesn't affect their fee — what affects their fee is how quickly they can put a body in the seat. So the rational behaviour is:

• Get the brief in 30 minutes, by phone, while the founder is between meetings.
• Open the search wide — multiple firms, hundreds of CVs.
• Push speed over fit. First-mover advantage on candidates.
• Hope. The placement either lands quickly or doesn't land at all.

This works fine at the operator and mid-management level. The market is liquid, the variance between candidates is moderate, the cost of a bad hire is recoverable.

At the senior level, every one of those defaults is wrong.

What changes when the seat is senior

• The brief is harder. The candidate isn't a function — it's a phase. The right CFO for raising is rarely the right CFO for exit. Pressure-testing the brief takes weeks of conversation, not 30 phone minutes.
• The pool is hidden. The best senior candidates are not on job boards, not actively looking, and not reachable through LinkedIn outreach. Reaching them takes direct named relationships and patience.
• The cost of a miss is catastrophic. A failed C-suite hire costs not just the search fee — it costs the company twelve months of trajectory, an internal credibility hit, and often the board's appetite to fix it again.

Contingent search optimises for speed. Retained search optimises for the right hire. At senior level, those are different jobs.

Why retained costs more — and why it should

The retainer pays for the work the contingent model can't afford to do. Two weeks pressure-testing the brief. Reference operators consulted before the search opens. Direct named outreach into the operating network. Three to five fully-referenced candidates with a written point of view from us on each. Stay-through-onboarding accountability.

The fee is real money — typically £25k–£60k all-in. It's also typically less than 1% of the first two years of the hire's compensation, and an order of magnitude less than the cost of getting it wrong.

If you're filling a seat where any of the above sounds familiar — brief a search.