The moment your company clears regulatory, the search begins. Not the search for a VP Sales. The search begins among three or four agencies briefed simultaneously on a Monday morning, each competing to place a candidate before the others do.
That speed feels like progress. It isn't.
The agencies briefed on Monday aren't competing to find the best VP Sales in the UK medical device market. They're competing to place a candidate before the other two do. Those are different objectives. They produce different behaviours in every decision that follows.
The incentive structure is the whole argument
Contingency recruitment is only paid on placement. That single structural fact drives everything: multiple agencies briefed simultaneously, the candidate pool spread thin across three or four databases, speed prioritised over fit, no agency willing to invest the time in a thorough brief because they might never be paid for the work. At volume and at junior levels, this model is efficient. In a specialist market, at Director level and above, it reliably produces the wrong result. Not because the agencies lack capability. Because the model incentivises the wrong things.
Industry data supports this. Research benchmarks executive hire failure rates at 40–60% within 18 months. Innotech's retained-only model produces 96% first-year retention, validated across 276 placements through the Innotech SIGNAL™ assessment process. That gap isn't accidental. It's structural.
Retained search inverts this. One firm. A full brief, taken seriously, because the assignment is exclusive and the firm is committed from day one. The fee is structured in three instalments across the search, which means the search firm's financial interest is aligned with the quality of the outcome rather than the speed of the placement. It changes everything about how the search is conducted.
When an agency knows it may not be paid, it doesn't build a market map. It doesn't spend three hours on a briefing call understanding the company's commercial stage, the behavioural profile the role requires, or the specific failure modes it needs to avoid. What actually happens: a database search, calls to people it already knows, and the strongest available profiles submitted before the other two agencies do. This is rational behaviour given the incentive structure. It's also why senior contingency hires in specialist markets fail at the rate they do.
The market size problem
The pool of qualified VP Sales, Commercial Director, or VP Market Access candidates with active medical device experience in the UK isn't large. It's finite, mappable, and largely passive. The people genuinely right for a senior commercial role at a post-clearance device company are almost never on a job board. They're in roles, managing territories, building commercial teams, and not actively looking. Reaching them requires direct, credible headhunting from a firm with established relationships in the market.
Getting that kind of introduction right requires a briefing process serious enough to allow the search firm to represent the opportunity accurately to a candidate who has other options. Beyond the role description, the conversation has to address why this company, at this stage, is worth leaving a stable position for. None of this is possible when the firm conducting the search hasn't been paid a penny and may never be paid a penny if one of the other agencies places first.
A retained search firm has already received the first instalment. It owns the problem. The market map gets built because the firm will have to justify it. Passive candidates get called because the firm can represent the opportunity properly. A wrong shortlist is a professional and financial problem for the retained firm: that's why the brief gets interrogated rather than accepted.
When contingency is the right choice
This is the part most search firms won't say, so it's worth saying plainly.
Contingency recruitment works well at lower seniority levels, in larger talent pools, and at higher volumes. Fill ten regional sales roles across a broad geography and contingency is appropriate: the pool is large enough that even a fast, parallel-agency process produces good candidates, and the cost of any individual mis-hire at that level, while real, isn't existential.
The case for retained search is strongest at Director level and above, in specialist markets where the talent pool is finite, and at company stages where the wrong hire in the wrong role carries significant commercial consequence. A VP Sales mis-hire at a post-clearance medical device company doesn't just cost the salary. It costs the commercial window. The device market doesn't wait. Surgeons, procurement teams, and commissioners build relationships with whoever shows up first. A year of below-par commercial leadership isn't a recoverable loss in some markets. It's a compounding one.
Using contingency for a £25,000 regional role and retained for a £180,000 VP Commercial is a rational procurement decision. Applying the same model to both is the wrong framework for the higher-stakes hire.
What a brief looks like from the other side
There's a difference between what a retained brief looks like and what a contingency brief looks like, and it's visible from the recruiter's side before a single candidate has been approached.
A contingency brief is a job description. It lists the role title, the required experience, the package, and a summary of the company. Often provided across multiple agencies simultaneously, updated only when the client decides to change something. Designed to enable fast CV submission, not deep market intelligence.
A retained brief is a conversation. It covers the commercial stage the company is at, the specific failure modes the previous hire experienced or the organisation wants to avoid, the behavioural profile the role requires given the current structure, the stakeholders the candidate will need to manage internally, and the kind of candidate who will thrive in this environment as opposed to the kind who interviews brilliantly and struggles at six months. That conversation takes time. It produces a brief genuinely useful for identifying the right person, rather than the most available person.
The quality of the brief determines the quality of the shortlist. That shortlist determines the hire. And the hire determines what happens twelve months later.
The question to ask yourself
Before opening a search, one question is worth sitting with: if this hire goes wrong, what does that actually cost the business?
At Director level and above in a specialist market, that number is usually larger than the retained search fee. The direct cost of a replacement search, the management time absorbed by an underperforming hire in the first twelve months, the revenue not generated, the team disruption, and the reputational cost with customers who experienced the gap: these are quantifiable, and they're almost always larger than the difference between a contingency fee and a retained one.
The decision about which search model to use isn't a procurement decision about price. It's a decision about what kind of process you want running when the stakes are high. At senior level, in a specialist market, with a narrow commercial window, the incentive structure of the model you choose is the most important variable in whether the search produces the right outcome. The 40–60% failure rate and the 96% retention figure don't exist independently of each other. They're the outputs of two different incentive structures.