Uncovering The Truth About Contingent Pricing

If you’ve ever worked with a recruitment business, chances are you’ve engaged them on a contingent basis.

Your recruiter will find, interview and assess candidates for your vacant role and you pay a fee if they find the successful candidate.


Because you only pay a fee if they find the successful candidate, perhaps you briefed more than one contingent recruiter on your role. In essence, you created a resume race - but we’ll come back to that later.

Let’s start with what the word contingent means: liable to happen or not; uncertain; happening by chance; accidental.

Hiring the best talent is the most critical challenge facing leaders today.

Kingston Human Capital is deeply committed to supporting you to recruit game-changing talent and transform your business with the people you hire.

This doesn’t happen by accident or chance - which is why we don’t do contingent recruitment.

The reality of contingent recruitment.

Contingent recruitment is a casual arrangement - if a recruiter is successful, they charge a fee. If not, no fee is charged. They may invest significant time working on your role, but there could be no return on that investment.

We know that people are the heart of everything and can ‘make or break’ an organisation. We also know that recruitment, when done in a deeply consultative and strategic way, can be a game-changer.

We care too much about these things to do contingent recruitment.

The average contingent recruiter in Australia and New Zealand successfully fills 1 in every 5 jobs they work on.

This means 80% of their time is spent working on jobs that they won’t fill.

No matter how good a recruiter is, they only have 40 working hours in their week. If they’re very good at their job and super efficient, they might be able to evaluate up to 20 candidates in a standard working week.

If they’re working with you on a contingent basis (and you’ve probably listed your role with a couple of other recruiters too), they can’t spend all of those 40 hours working on your role. Because they only fill 20% of the roles they work on, they’re probably working on an average of 8-12 roles at any one time.

With only 40 hours in the working week, your role is only getting a fraction of their time and attention.



Contingent recruitment creates a continuous loop of bad practice, poor client service and discontent.

If you’ve ever felt like a recruiter grabbed three CVs of their database and flung them at you - contingent recruitment is the reason.

In most cases, contingent recruitment will get you a service based on speed (aka the resume race) and often nothing else. You don’t get the hiring outcomes you need, candidates get treated poorly, your employer brand and reputation suffer.

Risky business

Think about the most important strategic decisions you make as a leader. The *big* decisions that keep you awake at night.

Do you leave those decisions to chance?

Hiring the best talent is game-changing. You can literally transform your organisation through the people you hire.

Why would you hedge your bets on a decision that important?

Contingent recruitment with multiple agencies is just that: Hedging your bets.

A contingent recruiter simply must work on multiple roles, which means you’ll only ever have a fraction of their commitment. You will never get 100% of a recruiter’s commitment in a contingent arrangement.

Contingent recruitment is a counterproductive model that yields poor outcomes for everyone involved.

Recruitment is a professional service.

Good recruitment doesn’t happen by accident - it’s a highly strategic process.

Good recruiters are true consultants - experts in their field who add value and solve problems.

Your recruitment partner should work with you in a collaborative and strategic way to find, engage and help you hire the best talent.

Like any consultant providing a professional service, you should expect them to give your project the time and attention it deserves - and deliver the best outcomes for your business.

You don’t give your quarterly BAS to three different accountants or your all-important employment contracts to three lawyers - why should recruitment be any different?

With all due respect to the legal profession, hiring game-changing talent shouldn’t be a ’no win no fee’ service.

Building a recruitment partnership.

We have established that contingent recruitment is risky business - and unfortunately, hiring managers who list their vacancies with multiple recruitment firms are part of the problem.

Each time you recruit a new team member, you have an opportunity to upgrade your talent and your organisation.

Do you want to waste this opportunity by listing your vacant role with two or three contingent recruiters who simply can’t give the search and selection process the attention it deserves?

On the other hand, when you work in true partnership with the right recruitment firm - on an exclusive basis - that’s when the magic happens.

If you don’t feel comfortable giving your role exclusively to a recruiter - find a different recruiter. Like any professional partnership, it has to be the right fit.

We care deeply about supporting you to hire the best talent. Which is why we only work on an exclusive or retained basis for permanent recruitment.

As the only recruitment partner dedicated to your search, we can allocate the resources of our full search team to your role.

You will see the difference - we promise.