What it is
Retained search is a recruitment engagement model in which the client pays the agency an upfront fee, often billed in stages, at engagement, at shortlist and at placement, in return for exclusive commitment to the role. Only one agency works the brief. Contrast this with contingency search: the agency invests time and resources with no guarantee of a fee, often competing against other firms or the client's own applicant flow, and gets paid only if and when a candidate is placed.
The trade is symmetrical. The client gives up optionality, one agency instead of five, and pays before delivery. The agency gives up the freedom to hedge across many roles and commits real hours to one search. Retained is most common for senior, hard-to-fill or confidential roles, where the cost of a wrong hire or a leaked search is higher than the retainer itself.
Retained search is not the same job at a higher fee. It is exclusivity bought with commitment on both sides.
Why it matters
The fee structure changes behaviour, not just cash flow. A contingency recruiter, paid only on placement, is rational to spread effort across many live roles and submit the fastest plausible shortlist. A retained recruiter is paid to go deep on one brief: a full market map, direct approaches to passive candidates, a slower but more thorough process. Retained is not simply the same job at a higher fee, it is a different way of working the search.
For an agency, retained mandates matter commercially beyond the single fee too. They are typically won with the accounts an agency knows best, often the same accounts already on a PSL or close to one, and they tend to carry higher average fees and firmer commitment than contingency work. A desk with a healthy share of retained mandates has steadier, more forecastable revenue than one running purely on contingency.
How boilr handles it
boilr does not decide whether a mandate should be retained, that is a commercial conversation the consultant owns, but it makes the accounts most likely to justify a retained conversation visible. Signals such as a confidential leadership hire, a newly funded company building out a function, or an account with a track record of paying for exclusivity are exactly the kind of buying signals your AI sales employee is watching for, and it surfaces them with the context needed to make the retained pitch rather than the contingency one.
Once a retained mandate is won, it is tracked through the BD pipeline like any other account, but the exclusivity and staged commercial terms are recorded in the Company Brain, so the whole desk knows which mandates are exclusive, what fee stage they are at and which accounts have paid for retained work before. That history makes the next retained conversation with the same client easier to win.
