Most hiring conversations start with the percentage. That is the wrong end of the deal. A cheap fee on a hire that walks in week six costs you the fee, the onboarding, the lost productivity, the team disruption and the whole search again.
A recruitment guarantee is the only part of the agreement that puts the agency's money where its judgement is. If an agency will not stand behind the placement for a meaningful period, that tells you what they think of their own shortlist.
Our standard guarantee is straightforward: if you move the person on within the first 90 days, we replace them. No argument, no invoice for the second search. It is extendable to 180 days for a small additional fee where a role carries a longer ramp-up.
Ninety days works because it maps to reality. It covers the first full cycle of real deadlines, real pressure and real team dynamics — the conditions under which a mis-hire becomes obvious. Thirty days only tests whether someone can be pleasant in an induction.
Automated screening rewards keyword density and penalises careers that do not run in a straight line. The tradesperson who moved into supervision, the operations manager who came out of a different industry, the returning parent with a two-year gap — all routinely filtered out before anyone reads a word.
We read every application. We look for transferable skills, because content can be taught and judgement usually cannot. That takes hours we do not bill separately, and it is the single biggest reason our shortlists are short.
Posting an ad collects whoever is actively looking. Searching finds the person who is doing the job well somewhere else and has never seen your role. We invest the hours in searching rather than in ad spend, and we ask non-standard questions to get at what actually motivates a candidate to move.
We only present candidates we believe fit. We do not pad a shortlist with maybes to hit a quota — a three-name shortlist you can act on beats ten you have to wade through.
We invest time up front to understand the role properly, then present 'pilot candidates' — an early calibration shortlist that tells us whether we have read the brief the way you meant it.
It adds a few days at the start and usually removes weeks at the end, because the second round is aimed correctly instead of guessing.