The Benefits of Retained Recruitment

If you’re considering working with a specialist recruitment partner, there are a few ways you can go about it. Many agencies offer their services on a project-by-project basis, also known as contingent recruitment. But you can also take a different approach – retained recruitment.

Let’s take a closer look at what retained recruitment is (and isn’t), along with the benefits it can offer.

What is retained recruitment?

Retained recruitment is where the recruiter is paid a flat fee for ongoing services. This usually takes place at the top end of the job market, where employers are looking for highly or uniquely skilled talent, or to fill niche roles.

In these situations, the talent pool can often be pitifully small. It requires ongoing, dedicated work on behalf of the recruiter to supply candidates of the required calibre. You might also know this kind of work as ‘headhunting’, ‘talent acquisition’ or ‘executive search’.

This differs to contingent recruitment, where the agent’s commission is dependent on filling each vacancy. It also guarantees exclusivity, where the recruiter is the only agency working on filling your roles. As we’ll see next, this might not sound like an advantage, but it really is.

Benefits of retained recruitment

So, if you’re a company with roles to fill, why would you choose retained over contingent recruitment? Here are just a few of the main advantages of this recruitment model:

· A highly motivated recruiter

While the best recruitment agencies are motivated by more than just money, it’d be naïve to think that potential profit doesn’t come into it. With contingent recruitment, the agency won’t make any money if they are unsuccessful at filling the vacancy. But with retained recruitment, the agency stands to make a decent income from doing a great job. They are paid for the service they provide as a whole, which includes supplementary work such as pre-screening, due diligence and in-depth research – not just from placing a candidate in a role.

Also on the subject of motivation, there’s exclusivity to think about. If a recruiter knows that lots of other agencies and perhaps even an in-house team are working on filling a role, will they put in as much effort as if it was their sole responsibility to source a great candidate?

· Dedicated, bespoke service

With retained recruitment, you get 100% of the attention and focus of a recruitment specialist. This means attention to detail, due diligence, the protection of confidentiality and access to a wider network of contacts and resources. It can sometimes be a slower process, but it results in a better quality hire – which saves you time and money further down the line.

· Filling hard-to-fill roles

Some roles seem virtually impossible to fill, where it feels as if you’re looking for a skill set that simply doesn’t exist. In these situations, retained recruitment is the only viable solution. You’ll be amazed at the results, where your recruiter is able to produce that one-in-a-million candidate where other recruitment methods have failed.

Want to find out more about how retained recruitment works, and how it could work wonders for your business? Get in touch with our expert team here at UMATR.

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