What recruiters actually charge, the three ways a search firm can be engaged, and which model fits a given hire. Every fee in this piece is either a published market convention with its source or one of Recruitmint's three published models.
Recruiters are typically paid one of two ways: contingency, a percentage of first-year pay owed only on placement, or retained, a fee spread across the search regardless of outcome. Newer models split the difference: sourcing-only fees for shortlist work, and embedded fees for ongoing capacity across roles.
Key numbers
A recruiter fee is not just a finder's charge. It is payment for calibration (figuring out what the role actually needs), sourcing (finding and engaging people who are not applying to job posts), qualification (screening for fit, not just resume match), and process management (interviews, offer, close). How much of that work a fee buys, and when the fee is due, is the entire difference between the models below.
The two oldest models, contingency and retained, describe when the money moves. Sourcing-only and embedded describe how much of the process is included. A reader comparing recruiters needs both axes, not just a headline percentage.
Contingency recruiting is pay-on-delivery. A recruiter (often several, working the same role) is paid only if their candidate is hired, and the fee is calculated as a percentage of the role's first-year cash compensation. SHRM's guidance on working with an executive search firm puts that percentage at a typical 20-25% band, with the range widening for senior or scarce roles. Nothing is owed if no placement is made, which is why contingency work tends to cluster around roles with a reasonably liquid candidate market: the fee has to be worth the risk the recruiter is carrying.
Retained search inverts the risk. The client pays a fee across the engagement, commonly in installments tied to milestones (kickoff, shortlist, placement), regardless of whether the search closes on the recruiter's first slate. SHRM's reporting describes the retained-search industry standard as roughly one-third, 33%, of the role's total first-year compensation including bonus and signing bonus. That fee buys exclusivity and depth: a retained search firm is usually working the role alone, with more calibration time and a mandate to go find people who are not looking, which matters most for executive, board-level, or highly specialized hires where a bad decision is expensive to unwind.
Both are market figures, cited here from SHRM, useful for sizing what a founder should expect to see quoted by a contingency or retained firm before comparing it against a different pricing structure. For a direct look at the two side by side, see retained vs. contingency search.
Recruitment process outsourcing is a different category from either contingency or retained search, and conflating the two leads to bad comparisons. The RPO Association describes RPO pricing as structured around three approaches: a management fee (a recurring charge covering staff, technology, sourcing, and overhead, regardless of hiring volume in a given month), a pay-for-performance model (an open fee charged per requisition plus a close fee per hire), or a blended model combining both.
RPO is built for volume and infrastructure: a company standing up a recruiting function it does not want to build in-house, hiring dozens of roles a year across similar profiles. A single hard-to-fill executive search is rarely the right use case for RPO pricing, and a single junior role almost never is. Readers weighing RPO against a search firm's success-fee model should read that pricing on its own terms, covered in RPO pricing explained.
We publish three engagement models on the Hiring Scorecard, and the fee footnote applies to all of them: success fees vary based on role seniority, search complexity and hiring volume, and executive-level, highly specialized and unusually complex searches may be quoted individually.
| Model | Fee structure | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Sourcing Sprint | Shortlist only, pricing on request | You already know what the role needs and can run interviews internally. We identify, engage and qualify candidates and hand over a calibrated shortlist. |
| Full Search | Launch fee plus a success fee on placement | End-to-end management of a high-impact or hard-to-fill hire, from calibration through assessment, interviews, offer and close. |
| Embedded Partner | Monthly fee plus a reduced success fee | Dedicated recruiting capacity across multiple active roles, working as an extension of the hiring team. |
None of these models is priced as a percentage of salary the way contingency or retained fees are quoted, and none carry a published flat rate. The launch fee and monthly fee cover the search work itself; the success fee, where one applies, moves with seniority, complexity, and volume, exactly as the footnote states. A founding engineer search and a Chief People Officer search are not priced the same way, and pricing for both is available on request.
The fastest way to see which shape fits is to separate two questions: how many roles are open, and how much of the process you want to run yourself. That is the same logic our Hiring Scorecard uses to score Role Clarity, Hiring Readiness, Talent Market Fit, and Recruitment Capacity before recommending a model.
A fee model is not a preference, it is a match against the actual hiring problem. Getting the match wrong wastes money in both directions: paying for a full search when a shortlist would have done it, or trying to run a hard-to-fill executive hire on shortlist support alone.
Contingency fits a role with a reasonably active candidate market, moderate urgency, and tolerance for multiple recruiters working it in parallel. It does not fit a search where confidentiality matters, where the market is thin, or where the client needs one recruiter's full attention rather than a race among several.
Retained search fits an executive, board-level, or highly specialized hire where the cost of a wrong decision is high and the candidate pool is not applying to job posts. It does not fit a role with plenty of qualified inbound applicants, where paying a fee regardless of outcome buys little the client could not get from a simpler process.
A Sourcing Sprint fits a team that has a clear mandate, runs its own interviews well, and just needs qualified people surfaced faster than an internal search could manage alone. It does not fit a role the team has not yet defined clearly, because a shortlist built against an unclear mandate produces the wrong candidates regardless of how well they were sourced.
A Full Search fits a single high-impact or hard-to-fill role where the client wants the search managed start to finish: calibration, assessment, interviews, offer, and close. It does not fit a company opening four or more roles at once, where per-search launch fees add up faster than a single monthly rate would.
An Embedded Partner fits ongoing or high-volume hiring, several active roles, or a company that wants recruiting capacity functioning as part of its own team rather than a series of discrete engagements. It does not fit a single, well-defined mid-level role with healthy applicant flow. If that describes the opening, posting the job and running interviews directly is usually the right call, and no engagement model is needed at all.
The scorecard's own recommendation logic reflects this: requesting ongoing support or four or more roles points to Embedded Partner, sourcing-only support for a single role points to a Sourcing Sprint, and everything in between points to a Full Search.
| Criterion | What "strong" looks like | Evidence to ask for |
|---|---|---|
| Role clarity | The mandate, level, and success metrics are already written down | A one-page role brief or job scorecard, not just a title |
| Candidate market depth | Multiple qualified candidates are realistically reachable within a normal search window | A recruiter's talent map or a market read, not a guess |
| Internal interview capacity | Someone owns scheduling, assessment, and closing candidates internally | A named hiring manager with calendar availability |
| Number of open roles | One role points toward Sourcing Sprint or Full Search; several point toward Embedded Partner | A current headcount plan, not a hypothetical pipeline |
| Confidentiality or seniority | The search needs one recruiter's full attention rather than a multi-firm race | A retained or Full Search mandate rather than open contingency |
Founders and hiring leaders who are not sure where a specific role lands on this table can run the Hiring Scorecard, a short assessment that scores role clarity, hiring readiness, talent market fit, and recruitment capacity and recommends one of the three models directly.
The stakes of getting this wrong scale with seniority. SHRM's 2025 benchmarking data reported an average cost-per-hire of $5,475 for non-executive roles versus $35,879 for executive roles, roughly 6.5 times higher. That gap is why the fee model chosen for a senior search carries more weight than it does for a junior one: a mismatched process on an executive hire compounds an already expensive category of decision. It is a large part of why retained search exists as a distinct convention rather than everyone defaulting to contingency, and why our own Full Search and Embedded Partner models exist for roles where a shortlist alone is not enough.
We work across four sectors where this calculation shows up often: Government Contracting; Product, Technology & AI; Growth & Ecommerce; and Leadership & Executive Search, described in more detail under the industries we specialize in. A cleared program manager hire ahead of a contract's delivery phase and a Head of Growth hire at a DTC brand carry very different cost-of-a-bad-hire profiles, but both benefit from matching the fee structure to the actual difficulty of the search rather than defaulting to whatever a recruiter quotes first.
Contingency and retained describe when a recruiter gets paid; sourcing-only and embedded describe how much of the process is included. SHRM puts contingency around 20-25% of first-year pay and retained around 33%, both paid differently and suited to different risk profiles. Our own three models, Sourcing Sprint for shortlist work, Full Search with a launch fee plus a success fee on placement, and Embedded Partner with a monthly fee plus a reduced success fee, sit alongside those conventions rather than replacing them. Pricing for each is available on request, and the right one depends on how many roles are open, how defined the mandate is, and how much of the process a team wants to keep in-house.
Contingency recruiters typically charge 20-25% of a role's first-year cash compensation, paid only if they make the placement, according to SHRM's guidance on working with an executive search firm. Retained search runs on an industry-standard convention of about 33%, paid across the engagement regardless of outcome. Neither figure is published by every firm the same way, and the range widens with seniority and how scarce the required skill set is.
Not exactly. A contingency fee is typically the entire payment, a straight percentage of first-year pay owed only on placement. A success fee, as used in our own Full Search and Embedded Partner models, is paid on top of a smaller launch or monthly fee that already covers search work regardless of outcome, and it varies with seniority, complexity, and volume rather than sitting at a fixed percentage.
RPO pricing is structured around a management fee, a pay-for-performance model (open and close fees per requisition and per hire), or a blend of both, per the RPO Association's guide to RPO pricing models. It is designed for ongoing, higher-volume hiring infrastructure rather than a single search, which is why it is a separate category from contingency or retained fees on an individual role.
Not as a fixed, published number. Our Sourcing Sprint, Full Search, and Embedded Partner models are priced by structure rather than a flat rate, and pricing is available on request. Fees vary with role seniority, search complexity, and hiring volume, and executive-level or unusually complex searches are quoted individually rather than off a flat rate.
The clearest signal is how many roles are open and how much of the process the team wants to run itself: one role with internal interview capacity points toward a Sourcing Sprint, one high-impact or hard-to-fill role points toward a Full Search, and several active roles or an ongoing need points toward an Embedded Partner. The Hiring Scorecard walks through nine questions on role clarity, readiness, market fit, and capacity and returns a specific recommendation.
How Recruitmint's Embedded Partner model is structured, what it includes, and the volume threshold at which the Hiring Scorecard recommends it over a single search.
Embedded recruiting and RPO both provide ongoing recruiting capacity, but differ in scope and how pricing is structured. Here is an honest comparison, using Recruitmint's Embedded Partner model and the RPO Association's own published pricing categories.
The market convention for retained executive search fees, what that means in dollar terms at different compensation levels, and how Recruitmint's Full Search model compares in structure.
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