Every recruitment agency will happily explain why its model is the right one. Contingency firms tell you that paying only on success is the only rational structure. Retained firms tell you that anything else is transactional CV-flinging. Both arguments are self-serving, and both contain some truth.
We run both models — Linkrs Search on a no-cure-no-pay basis and Linkrs Mandate as retained, confidential search — so we have no incentive to oversell either. What follows is the comparison we walk hiring managers through before any engagement starts, including the cases where we advise against our own more expensive option.
How each model actually works
Contingency: fee on success only
Under a contingency arrangement, you pay nothing unless you hire a candidate the agency introduced. The fee is a percentage of the first-year package, invoiced at start date, usually with a guarantee period during which a departing hire is replaced or partially refunded.
The economics shape the behaviour, and it is worth being clear-eyed about how. Because the agency carries all the risk, it must spread that risk across multiple assignments. A contingency recruiter is, rationally, always making portfolio decisions: which of my open roles is most likely to close, and where do my best candidates create the fastest fee? A well-run contingency desk manages this honestly. A badly run one races to submit CVs before a competitor does, and quality suffers.
When the model fits, none of this is a problem. For a role where the candidate market is reasonably deep — a claims handler, an accountant, a compliance officer, a mid-level underwriter — a specialist agency with a genuine network can produce a strong shortlist quickly, and you carry no cost if it fails. That risk allocation is fair and efficient. It is why contingency remains the workhorse of specialist recruitment, ours included.
Retained: a paid, exclusive commitment
Under a retained arrangement, you pay in stages — typically at engagement, at shortlist, and at placement — and the search is exclusive. You are not buying CVs; you are buying a process: a mapping of the full candidate universe for the role, discreet approaches to people who are not looking, calibrated assessment, and a partner whose time is contractually committed until the position is filled.
The economics again shape the behaviour, this time in your favour. Because the fee is secured, the search firm can afford to spend weeks approaching the genuinely best-fit people rather than the most available ones. It can work a confidential brief without ever posting anything. And because the engagement is exclusive, the firm's reputation is tied to completing this search, not to winning a race against three other agencies.
The cost is real: you pay part of the fee before seeing a single candidate, and if your organisation is not ready to run the process seriously, that money buys frustration.
When contingency is the wrong choice
This is the part most agencies skip. There are three situations in which no-cure-no-pay, whatever its surface appeal, works against you.
Confidential searches. If you are replacing an incumbent who does not know, entering a market before an announcement, or building a team ahead of a strategic move, the search cannot be visible. Contingency is structurally visible: non-exclusive briefs travel across multiple agencies, each contacting candidates, and in a market as small as Belgian financial services, word reaches the wrong person quickly. A leak on a sensitive replacement costs far more than any fee difference. Confidential work belongs under a retained mandate, full stop.
Genuinely scarce profiles. For a chief actuary, a head of underwriting or a compliance director, the realistic candidate pool might be a few dozen people across Belgium and the Netherlands, most of them settled and none of them applying to anything. Reaching them takes weeks of careful, personal approach work. No rational agency invests that effort on a no-cure-no-pay basis, because the risk-weighted return does not justify it. What you get instead, under contingency, is whoever happened to be already moving — which is precisely not the standard the role demands.
Roles where a mis-hire is catastrophic. When the cost of getting it wrong — regulatory exposure, a failed transformation, a departing team — dwarfs the cost of the search, the cheapest-looking model is a false economy. You want mapped coverage of the whole market and evidence-based assessment, not the fastest available shortlist.
There is also a subtler failure mode: sending the same brief to four contingency agencies at once. It feels like maximising coverage. In practice it signals to every good candidate that the role is being shopped around, guarantees duplicated and clumsy approaches, and gives no single agency a reason to invest properly. One specialist agency working seriously beats four working shallowly, on every metric that matters.
When retained is overkill
Honesty runs the other way too. Retained search is the wrong instrument when:
- The market is deep. If there are plausibly fifty or more suitable candidates within commuting range, paying a retainer to map them all adds process without adding outcome. A capable contingency search will surface a strong shortlist in days.
- The role is standard and visible. No confidentiality requirement, a clear job description, a known salary band — this is exactly what contingency was built for.
- You cannot commit internally. Retained search assumes a committed client: a hiring manager who gives feedback within days, holds interview slots, and moves to offer decisively. If your organisation's process is slow or the vacancy is not yet fully approved, a retainer buys you a well-executed search into a wall. Fix the internal readiness first.
- You mainly want market signal. Some employers engage search to "see what's out there" before deciding whether to hire. That is a legitimate question, but it is a market-mapping conversation, not a retained search, and it should be priced and scoped as such.
A decision framework you can apply in five minutes
Ask four questions about the vacancy in front of you.
1. How deep is the realistic candidate pool? Deep (dozens of genuine fits): contingency. Shallow (a handful of named individuals): retained.
2. Can the search be public? Yes: contingency is available to you. No — replacement, pre-announcement, sensitive restructuring: retained, without exception.
3. What does a wrong hire or a six-month delay cost? If the answer is "inconvenient," contingency's risk-free structure is attractive. If the answer is "material damage" — regulatory, financial or reputational — pay for certainty of process.
4. Are you ready to run a decisive process? If not, neither model saves you. Fix that before engaging anyone.
Two further rules of thumb. If the role reports to the board or the executive committee, it is almost always a retained search. And whichever model you choose, choose one agency and hold it to account — exclusivity, even informally granted on a contingency brief, consistently produces better shortlists than a multi-agency race.
The model is a tool, not an identity
The right question is never "which model is better?" It is "what does this specific hire need?" A pragmatic employer uses contingency for the deep-market specialist roles that make up most hiring, and retained search for the handful of appointments each year where confidentiality, scarcity or stakes change the equation. We are structured to advise on that choice honestly, because we offer both and are indifferent to which you pick — we are paid to fill the role well, under whichever structure fits it.
If you have a vacancy and are unsure which route it warrants, that is a fifteen-minute conversation, and we will tell you plainly — including if the answer is the cheaper option. Start at /employers and tell us about the hire.