Most businesses don’t know these are two different models. They think some agencies are just better than others. That’s not quite right.
Most businesses have no idea there are two fundamentally different recruitment models.
They think some agencies are faster. Some are more thorough. Some are better connected. They assume the difference between a search that works and one that doesn’t is down to effort, or luck, or the state of the market on a particular Tuesday.
That’s not quite right. The difference is usually structural, and it starts before a single call is made.
What contingent recruitment actually is
Contingent recruitment is the dominant model in Northern Ireland. You brief an agency, sometimes several at once, they search for candidates and you pay a fee only when you hire someone. No placement, no fee.
It’s fast to start. There’s no upfront cost. For the right kind of role, it’s entirely appropriate. If you’re hiring at volume, if the candidates you need are actively looking and easy to reach, if speed is genuinely the priority, contingent can work well.
The problem isn’t the model. The problem is the incentive it creates.
A contingent recruiter only gets paid if someone accepts an offer. That means every hour spent interrogating a brief that might be wrong, benchmarking a salary that might be off-market or mapping a talent pool before approaching it is an hour that generates no fee. The commercial logic pushes toward speed. Send CVs quickly. Move to the next instruction if this one stalls. Don’t spend time on the work that would prevent a bad outcome, because there’s no payment for prevention.
Nobody is being dishonest. The model just doesn’t reward the work that would fix the problem. It rewards the work that looks like progress.
Contingent recruitment for a specialist role is like awarding the tender to five contractors and telling them you’ll only pay the one who delivers the work you like. The result is five contractors building for what they think you want at speed, not what you actually need. And when none of them get it quite right, you wonder why the market let you down.
The market didn’t let you down. The model did.
What retained search actually is
Retained search requires an upfront commitment. The client pays a portion of the fee before the search begins, agrees to exclusivity and enters into a structured engagement rather than a transactional one.
It starts slower. There’s a diagnostic phase before any candidates are approached. The brief gets interrogated, the salary gets benchmarked against live data and the talent pool gets mapped before a single approach is made. To a business that wants CVs in their inbox by Friday, this can feel counterintuitive.
The difference is alignment. In a retained search, the recruiter is committed to the outcome, not the placement fee. There’s no incentive to send speculative CVs to keep the client warm. There’s no reason to skip the uncomfortable conversation about a salary that won’t attract the right person. The engagement is built around getting it right, not getting it done quickly.
The search is slower to start and faster to finish. That’s not a coincidence.
When contingent is the right answer
I want to be clear about this, because a sales pitch dressed as an article is exactly what I said this wouldn’t be.
Contingent recruitment is appropriate for mid-level roles where the candidate pool is genuinely active and accessible. It works well for volume hiring. It works when the business has a strong employer brand, a competitive salary and a straightforward brief that doesn’t need interrogating. If you’re hiring a junior buyer and you’re offering the right money in a location people want to work in, with market leading benefits, contingent will find you candidates. It’s the right tool.
The question isn’t which model sounds better. It’s which model fits the problem.
The Northern Ireland reality
The Northern Ireland procurement and supply chain market is small, specialist and, in recruitment terms, around a decade behind GB and the Republic of Ireland in sophistication. The talent pool isn’t large. Passive candidates, those who aren’t actively looking but who would consider the right opportunity, make up the majority of the people you actually want. They don’t respond to job boards. They don’t appear in the first wave of a contingent search. They’re reachable through direct, intelligent, research-led outreach.
That’s not what a contingent model is designed to do.
For procurement and supply chain in Northern Ireland, where the talent pool is thin, the roles are specialist and the cost of getting it wrong is significant, retained isn’t a premium option. It’s the appropriate tool for the problem.
A retained search for a specialist procurement role isn’t more expensive than three rounds of contingent fees, management time lost to a process that goes nowhere and the eventual cost of the wrong hire. It just feels more expensive upfront, because part of the fee comes before the result rather than after it.
My position
I work on a retained basis. Not because it’s the only model that exists, but because it’s the only model that aligns my interests properly with my client’s. I’m not going to tell you retained is right for every role, because it isn’t. But I am going to tell you that if you have a specialist procurement or supply chain role in Northern Ireland that has been live for more than eight weeks without a credible shortlist, the model you’re using is at least part of the reason.
If you’re using contingent recruitment for a hard-to-fill procurement or supply chain role and it isn’t moving, I can usually identify why in about 30 minutes. No commitment required.
Kelly Jennings is the Director of Kelly Jennings & Associates, a specialist search consultancy focused exclusively on procurement and supply chain recruitment across Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland and Great Britain.
