Comparison
Contingency, retained, flat fee or subscription — which recruitment model fits your hiring
Contingency suits occasional, easy-to-fill roles where you are happy to take the risk that nothing happens. Retained search suits senior or confidential roles where you need committed capacity. Flat-fee advertising suits employers with the time to screen. Flat-fee managed search suits employers who want the agency service without the salary-indexed price. A monthly subscription only makes sense once you are hiring continuously — below roughly one hire a month it costs more than paying per role.
The five models, side by side
| Model | How you pay | Typical UK price | You are buying |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contingency | Only on a hire | 15–25% of first-year salary | A chance, at no risk |
| Retained search | Instalments from instruction | 20–33% of package | Committed capacity |
| Flat-fee advertising | Up front, per role | £399–£599 +VAT | Reach — you do the rest |
| Flat-fee managed search | Up front or on instruction, per role | £1,500–£4,000 +VAT | The agency service, fixed price |
| Subscription / embedded | Monthly | From £1,995 +VAT a month | Continuous capacity |
Contingency
The trade: the agency takes all the risk, so it also takes the right to prioritise. Your role sits in a consultant's list alongside a dozen others, and the ones that are easiest to fill get worked first. That is not cynicism, it is arithmetic — an unfilled role pays nothing.
Where it works: roles that are genuinely attractive and reasonably common, where you are relaxed about timing and would rather pay more on success than anything up front.
Where it breaks: hard roles. The searches that need 150 candidates worked rather than 25 are exactly the ones a contingency desk cannot justify finishing.
Retained search
The trade: you pay something before you have anything, and in exchange the search is scheduled, resourced and reported on. For a role where only forty people in the country qualify, that is the only structure that reliably works — nobody speculatively maps a market for free.
Where it works: senior appointments, confidential replacements, and roles where the market has to be mapped rather than advertised.
Where it breaks: ordinary roles. Paying an instalment up front for a vacancy that a good advert would have filled is buying process you did not need. We only take retained search from £80,000 for this reason.
Flat-fee advertising
The trade: the cheapest way to get a role in front of active jobseekers, on the condition that everything after "an application arrives" is yours — screening, phone calls, scheduling, offer management.
Where it works: roles with a healthy active market, and an employer with someone who genuinely has the hours. Our funnel data suggests budgeting for around 26 candidates screened per hire.
Where it breaks: when nobody has those hours. The failure mode is not that the advert produces nothing — it is that 40 applications sit unread for two weeks and the good ones take other jobs.
Flat-fee managed search
The trade: the same work as contingency — writing, advertising, headhunting, screening, interviewing, shortlisting — priced as a fixed amount per role instead of a share of the salary.
Where it works: most permanent hiring between £25,000 and £80,000, and especially any role where the salary is high enough that a percentage starts to look arbitrary. At £55,000 a 20% fee is £11,000; the work is not £11,000 of work.
Where it breaks: genuinely exceptional searches. A flat fee assumes a distribution of easy and hard roles; a role that is hard for everyone belongs on a retained basis.
How the risk is handled: ours carries a 100% refund if the role is not filled. That is the mechanism that stops a fixed fee becoming "paid whether or not anything happens" — and it is worth checking exactly what any provider's guarantee refunds, and when.
Subscription and embedded
The trade: you stop buying roles and start buying capacity. A number of slots are worked continuously, and as one closes another moves in.
Where it works: continuous hiring. If you have three or four roles open at any time, per-role pricing is more expensive and more admin.
Where it breaks: stop-start hiring. A quiet quarter is paid for at the same rate as a busy one, which is why a monthly arrangement should always have a real cancel right rather than a twelve-month lock.
How to choose, in four questions
- How often do you hire? Continuously — look at a subscription. Occasionally — pay per role.
- Who will screen? If the honest answer is nobody, do not buy advertising.
- Is the role scarce or just unfilled? Scarce means retained. Unfilled usually means the advert or the salary.
- What does the salary do to the price? Above roughly £35,000, a percentage and a flat fee start to diverge sharply, and the work does not.
The one that costs most
The model nobody lists: leaving the role open. A vacancy that stays unfilled for a quarter costs the overtime, the missed work and the manager's time absorbing it — and none of that appears on an invoice, which is precisely why it rarely enters the comparison.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between contingency and retained recruitment?
Contingency is paid only on a successful hire, so the agency carries the risk and works your role alongside many others. Retained is paid in instalments from instruction, so you carry some risk and the search gets committed, scheduled capacity. Neither is better — they are different trades.
Is flat-fee recruitment any good?
It depends entirely on which flat-fee product you are buying. Flat-fee advertising puts your role on job boards and sends you the applications — cheap, and all the screening is yours. Flat-fee managed search is the full agency service at a fixed price. They are often marketed with the same words and are not remotely the same thing.
When is a recruitment subscription worth it?
When hiring is continuous rather than occasional. A monthly retainer for slots worked continuously beats per-role pricing once you are consistently filling roles every month; below that it is capacity you are paying for and not using.
Can you mix models?
Yes, and most employers should. Advertise the roles that attract good applicants on their own, and hand over the ones that do not. The mistake is using one model for everything because it is what you have always done.
Sources
Want the fixed price for your role?
Advertise it yourself from £399 +VAT, or hand the whole search to a dedicated recruiter with Guaranteed Hire — a flat fee by salary band with a 100% refund if the role is not filled.
See Guaranteed Hire Advertise a job
Or call 0161 327 2895.