Contingent Recruiters. Are they the only professionals who work for free?

The flick and stick. The push and shove for fantastic candidates to fill speculative roles, or to be floated to organisations you hardly know, let alone even met. Crossing your fingers, drawing a circle of salt around yourself, avoiding ladders, broken mirrors and black cats, all to ensure you get paid for the work you have done.

This is the world of a contingent sales recruiter, and it is tough. The pressure to make something out of nothing is great, the activity levels are high, and the culture is cut throat. The recruiter may be given a computer, the yellow pages, and told to make a mint, and do it quickly. In my experience, working on a non-exclusive competitive contingent assignment is often working for free!

At Mindset, I’ve learned that retained recruitment involves selling from the beginning. Offering your professional service to a client and asking to be paid upfront for the hard work you are about to undertake. The research, mapping, screening, interviewing, testing, references and, last but not least, the general management and constant sales within the process, to ensure the client gets a candidate for the role that will deliver the right results. This all takes a considerable amount of time and effort for which, as a professional, you should be paid.

Building a retained desk from scratch, coming from years of contingent recruitment, is a daunting task. The calls are cold, the conversations are at a different, much higher level, and the sales cycle is slow. Where once the aim of a meeting was to walk away with the sniff of a job, no matter how genuine it really was, it is now to develop a long term relationship, to understand the client, their people and their culture. To have a level of engagement with your client organisation and understanding of its offering, so that when a real vacancy arises, not only do we work on it, we get paid for it!

The difference between the two models is now clear to me. With retained work you must sell yourself, the recruitment company and its process. The sale is up-front and it’s something you have control of and believe in. With contingency, you sell candidates to clients and jobs to candidates, and everyone else is trying to sell the same candidate to your client and others. It’s survival of the fittest and only the fleetest of foot will survive. Give me a retainer every time! I get paid and clients get better candidates. Win-Win!

Yes, selling retained recruitment involves a slower sales cycle, cold calls with no candidate to offer, and meetings where the “two ears, one mouth” policy was never truer, all prior to there being any job to fill. For all the extra time and skill retained assignments take, every second is worth the lower levels of anxiety, the missing butterflies in the stomach and the packets of salt purchase. When you get paid for the excellent work you have done, retained recruitment is fun!

Abby Hammerstein
Recruitment Consultant
Mindset