We all understand gambling (i.e. the house wins) and its high risks and long shot rewards, but what many people don’t understand is that most recruiters do it everyday and lose.

Contingency search is the bread and butter of our industry allowing companies to view prospective candidates and only incur a fee if they hire the candidate and on the surface it looks like a win-win. However, with the state of the economy many companies are unintentionally using this search model against recruiters by first engaging there services, and then sometime into the search (when energies and efforts have already been expended) they pull the job requisition, put the search on hold or worse yet decide that after interviewing your candidates they really just can’t pay a fee.

Now every recruiter should be schooled in qualifying a job order, but the best and fastest way that we’ve found to qualify one in this market is to ask the company to share in the risks by moving it to a retained search (or some form of up front engagement fee). This instantaneously crystallizes a companies thinking and sincerity to fill this job while also putting the recruiter into a search were they have very little if no competition, and let's face it who among us can argue with that in a market with fewer jobs.