What it is
Contingency search is a recruitment engagement in which the agency is paid only if and when a candidate is successfully placed. There is no upfront fee and no payment for hours worked if the search goes nowhere. Fees are typically calculated as a percentage of the placed candidate's first-year base salary, commonly in the 15 to 25 percent range, invoiced once the candidate starts.
Most contingency work is also non-exclusive. A client can run the same brief with several agencies at once, or alongside its own direct applicant flow, and whichever source delivers an acceptable hire first gets the fee. Everyone else who worked the role gets nothing. Contrast this with retained search, where the client pays upfront for one agency's exclusive commitment.
Contingency search pays for outcomes, not effort. Every hour spent on a search you do not win is an hour you do not get back.
Why it matters
Because there is no guarantee of a fee, the economics push a consultant to run many contingency searches in parallel rather than going deep on one. Speed matters more than in a retained engagement: the agency that gets a credible shortlist in front of the client first is usually the one that gets paid, regardless of who eventually started the search.
That same logic is also the trap. A desk that spreads effort evenly across every contingency role it is offered ends up racing hard on briefs it was never likely to win, and under-serving the ones it could. The consultants who bill the most on contingency are not the busiest, they are the ones who pick their races and move fastest on the ones worth running.
How boilr handles it
boilr does not decide your commercial terms, but it changes which contingency races are worth entering. ICP fit and live buying signals tell you which accounts are actually likely to hire and likely to hire from you, so your hours go toward briefs you can realistically win rather than every one that lands on your desk. A multi-touch cadence keeps outreach and follow-up moving automatically, which is what gets a shortlist in front of the client first.
Every contingency mandate is tracked through the BD pipeline like any other account, and the Company Brain remembers which clients have a history of running contingency versus paying for exclusivity. That history is exactly what tells you which relationship is ready for a retained or PSL conversation instead of another three-way race.
