Contingency recruitment
Contingency recruitment is the no-placement, no-fee model: the agency is paid only if a candidate it introduced is hired. It is the default for most UK permanent recruitment below senior level, and it is usually non-exclusive, so several agencies may be working the same role at once.
The client carries almost no risk. It can brief three agencies, advertise the role itself and ask its own staff for referrals, and it pays one fee to whoever introduced the person it hires. The agency carries the risk instead: every hour spent on a role that is filled by someone else, or quietly withdrawn, is unpaid. Fees typically run from 15 to 25 per cent of first-year salary.
That changes how a good consultant decides where to spend time. Take a £45,000 role at 18 per cent, a fee of £8,100. If three other agencies have it and the client is also advertising, the realistic chance of placing might be one in five, which makes the role worth about £1,600 in expected terms. A role with the same fee, briefed to you alone by a hiring manager who took your call, is worth several times that for the same effort. Qualifying the role before working it is where contingent desks win or lose their month.
Because speed decides who gets paid, contingent work creates its own failure modes. Agencies race to send CVs, sometimes before the candidate has agreed; two agencies submit the same person; the client receives six CVs in an afternoon and reads none of them properly. Arguments about who introduced a candidate first are a contingent problem almost by definition.
Contingent fees carry a cash-flow cost as well. Because the fee only becomes due when the candidate starts, the agency may wait two or three months from first CV to invoice, then two to four weeks for payment, then through the rebate period before the fee is safe. A contingent desk with a strong month of offers can still have a thin month of cash, and a desk that forecasts on offers rather than starts will overstate both.
The usual ways out are to ask for exclusivity for a short period, to move a client to a retained or engaged model on harder roles, or simply to decline roles that are briefed to everyone. None of these works without terms of business signed before the first introduction.
How Vayora handles it
A deal records its engagement type (contingent, retained, exclusive, exec search, RPO or contract staffing), the fee percentage, whether it is exclusive, and the other agencies known to be on the mandate. The weighted value on the BD board is the estimated agency fee multiplied by the stage probability, not the client's salary spend, so a board full of contingent deals reads as the revenue it might actually produce. When the race to submit starts, Vayora refuses a second submission of the same person to the same client while the first is still live, checking every record that shares their email, phone or LinkedIn, so a duplicate profile is not a way round it.
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