Recruiters that I meet always think that having a retainer is a win-win situation for client and recruiter. I disagree. Managed correctly you can get equal delivery, if not better through a supplier in a contingent arrangement.

There is a caveat here: I do support retainers for high-end recruitment (VPs, MDs, CEOs etc), not because these people are harder to find - in fact often they are easier because of their visibility - it is because often these appointments have a confidential element and usually require a significant amount of up-front work on behalf of the recruiter, possibly even help defining the job.

Many recruiters see a retainer as their Holy Grail and pursue them irrespective of the requirement or whether it is appropriate. As a result retainers have been de-valued to the client and are dangerous for recruiters. I have discussed this with many of my peers and have heard similar stories to my own experiences; many retainers don’t get delivered against and if they do, sometimes it is a painful process (and many of these retainers will have been given to the wrong ’agency’).
When you take on a retainer you are having your Dorian Gray moment, but you are taking on much more than you think. You are not committing to delivery, you are gambling with your reputation, your company’s reputation and its future revenue stream.

This should be more of a worry with the advent of social media. I recently saw a thread on a well-known professional networking site in a private group for in-house recruiters seeking advice about a particular agency that had pitched a retainer. The recruiter asking had seemed fairly keen to move forward, but double-checking she asked her network for their opinion. To say the agency got a ’kicking’ is an understatement, lots of bad experiences were shared. She ended the thread by saying that on the advice of the forum she had decided not to go ahead.

Now this may not be a big issue, but this thread was commented on by 20 recruiters, read by hundreds and available to over a 1,000 corporate recruiters in the UK alone. The agency was a well known ’top 5’ search company. I had never used them therefore my opinion was ambivalent. Now? Well, lets just say my perception is alsomy reality.

Most corporate recruiters are now ’professional’ recruiters and not HR administrators dumped in a resourcing role. You can build relationships with them on more of a mutual understanding, and therefore another option opens. You can get work ’exclusively’ on contingent terms and you are no longer dealing with a hiring manager that tells all his suppliers that they have it exclusively. But in my mind you are being ’retained’ and they only thing that would be different is that you don’t get a call after two months asking for the ten grand back or for you to justify what you had done to earn it so far.

My experience of retained assignments is mixed, but my two most recent are not very positive. I am not saying we should undo decades of recruitment thought process and kill the concept… just be careful what you wish for.
Kevin Blair is senior recruitment manager EMEA at Oracle