Last updated: July 2026
Three engagement models cover almost every recruitment arrangement in this market: contingent, exclusive contingent, and retained. Most hiring managers pick one by habit or by whichever the last recruiter suggested. Each model buys you a genuinely different search, and knowing the difference before you brief anyone puts you in a stronger position than most of the market.
The structure decides what work you receive, so that is what this post covers. I publish my fees and I have covered them, along with the six-month replacement guarantee, in Why I Specialise in Building Products Sales Recruitment.
What does contingent recruitment actually buy you?
Access with no commitment. You pay only if you hire a candidate the recruiter introduced. No placement, no invoice.
For some roles it works fine. What you are buying is a slice of the recruiter's week, because a contingent recruiter carries multiple live roles and gets paid on a fraction of them, so time gets allocated by probability of a fee. If your role is straightforward, in a candidate-rich segment, at market salary, you will get real attention. If your role is niche, senior, regional, or priced tight, it quietly slides down the list, and nobody tells you.
Contingent work also shapes which candidates you see. Speed decides who wins the fee, so the search runs across the active market: people applying, people registered, people one call away. Fast to produce, and the same pool every other agency has. I have written about why that pool and the best-candidate pool are usually different sets in The Best Candidate for Your Role Never Applied.
Does using multiple contingent agencies get you more candidates?
It gets you three fast skims of the same active market, because each agency is racing the other two to the same people. The CV count goes up while the depth of search goes down.
The candidate experience degrades too. Good candidates get called about the same role by three different agencies inside a week, which reads as a company spraying the market. In a niche like building products, where the candidate pool for a given role is often 30 to 50 real people nationally, word travels fast. I have watched roles become harder to fill because of how they were shopped.
There is also the duplicate-CV dispute, which every hiring manager who has run multi-agency contingent eventually meets. Two agencies claim the same candidate, the candidate is caught in the middle, and legal terms get read closely for the first time. None of it moves the hire forward.
What does exclusive contingent buy you?
Commitment without upfront money. You still pay only on a successful placement, and in exchange the recruiter gets the role exclusively for an agreed window, typically 2 to 4 weeks before anything else is considered.
This is the model I think most SME hiring in this industry should default to. Exclusivity changes the economics on the recruiter's side: the fee probability jumps, so your role earns proper time, including approaches to passive candidates who take longer to land. You keep the no-placement-no-fee protection. The recruiter stops racing and starts searching.
The discipline it needs from you is a real deadline. Exclusivity without a review date is just contingent with better manners. Agree the window, agree what you will see inside it (shortlist size, market feedback, decline reasons), and hold the review.
What does retained recruitment actually buy you?
A committed search with your name on it. A retainer is paid in stages, and the common structure in this market is a deposit around one third of the estimated fee up front, with the balance calculated on the actual package and payable when the candidate starts.
What the deposit changes is the nature of the work. A retained search starts from the market, on the basis of mapping who holds the relevant territories and relationships across the segment, approaching them directly whether they are looking or not, and reporting back on who was contacted, who engaged, who declined and why. You are buying the search itself, including the intelligence it produces, and that intelligence has standalone value. Learning that the three best-fit candidates in the state all declined over your base salary is a finding you can take to a remuneration review.
Retained suits three situations: senior roles where a mis-hire is most expensive, confidential replacements where the role cannot be advertised at all, and scarce profiles where the candidate pool is small enough that a fast skim finds nobody. For a leadership hire, the stakes justify it comfortably. A bad hire on a $120,000 to $140,000 base already costs $150,000 to $300,000, and the number climbs with seniority. I have set out that maths in The True Cost of a Bad Sales Hire, and the Cost of a Bad Hire Calculator will give you your own figure.
Which recruitment model should you choose?
Match the model to the scarcity and stakes of the role, and be honest about both.
A volume role in a candidate-rich segment at market salary: contingent works. Keep it to one or two agencies at most.
A standard BDM or rep role that matters to the territory: exclusive contingent. One recruiter, a defined window, agreed deliverables. This covers most hiring in this market.
A leadership role, a confidential replacement, or a profile you already know is rare: retained. Pay for the search, get the search, keep the market intelligence either way.
The one combination that reliably disappoints is treating a scarce, senior role as a multi-agency contingent race. The search the role needs and the model you have chosen are pulling in opposite directions, and the role stays open while they argue.
If you are still deciding who to engage before deciding how, the specialist versus generalist comparison is the place to start.