The two models, briefly
Contingency means an agency runs your brief alongside several other clients at the same time, and is only committed to your search for as long as it looks winnable relative to everything else on their desk. Retained means one agency works your brief and nobody else's, for as long as it takes. Full detail on how each is structured is in what recruitment agencies actually charge in India. Here we are asking a narrower question: which one should you actually pick for the role in front of you.
Most people answer that question by comparing structures on paper. The better question is whether the market actually has the person you are describing, and whether you will find that out before or after you have burned three weeks discovering it the hard way.
What genuine scarcity looks like from the inside
A factory manager brief we ran asked for someone who owned production, operations and dispatch, the whole plant end to end. What the market kept sending back were production people who had learned to describe themselves as though they ran the factory. In Anish's own words, candidates were inflating their numbers, their scale, their scope.
The only way to tell the two apart was to interview past the fluent part of the CV. A production person talks confidently about the line. Ask about dispatch scheduling, or the trade-off between hitting a production target and honouring a dispatch commitment, and the answer thins out fast. That distinction is not visible on paper, and no keyword search finds it, because both kinds of candidate use the same vocabulary.
The numbers on that search: 100+ profiles screened, 20 to 25 shared, one hired, about 45 days intake to joining, against a mandate that also shifted partway through. That is roughly three times the submittals and nearly twice the timeline of a comparable role where the brief held still. Neither the volume nor the timeline was a failure. It was what an honestly scarce role takes to fill properly, and it is exactly the profile that argues for one agency's full attention rather than a search competing for the recruiter's time against five other open roles.
Sometimes the missing skill is not on any CV at all
A bakery products brand needed one person strong in both e-commerce and quick commerce. Dozens of profiles later, nobody had both. That is a market fact, not a sourcing gap, and it is exactly the situation where an agency under time pressure sends the closest approximation and calls it done.
Instead of doing that, we went back to the client with the screening data and asked for a revised requirement rather than force a match that did not exist. Then the search turned on something a CV cannot show: a candidate with strong e-commerce experience had no quick commerce listed anywhere on his resume, but had worked at an agency whose client list included an FMCG brand. A phone call confirmed real quick-commerce exposure that no keyword filter would ever have surfaced. He closed the role.
That search ran 30+ screened, 5 shared, 1 hired, in about two weeks, faster than the factory manager search despite being at least as scarce a combination. The difference was not which model the search ran under. It was that the search stayed open to the client rather than trying to force a match that did not exist, which is the behaviour that comes from an agency staying with a role rather than moving on to the next easier one.
Worth noticing: this particular search was fast precisely because the candidate was found through a human inference, an agency client list read carefully, and confirmed on a phone call, rather than through more searching. Volume of profiles screened is not what solved it. Curiosity about a detail that was not on the page did. That is a service, not a database query, and it is the part of a search that a recruiter juggling several other briefs has the least time to spend on.
A shorter test than picking a model on paper
Rather than start from how each model is structured, start from these four questions about the role itself:
- How many people in the country can genuinely do this, end to end? If the honest answer is "quite a few," an open search across multiple agencies is fine. If it is "I am not sure anyone has done exactly this," the role needs one agency's undivided focus.
- Is the role confidential? Replacing someone still in post, or hiring for a function the company has not announced, cannot be run as an open search across multiple agencies without risking a leak.
- Can you tell a real answer from an inflated one on paper alone? The factory manager search shows what happens when you cannot: the market supplies confident-sounding near-misses, and screening them out is most of the work.
- Would a wrong hire be expensive to unwind? Senior or single-threaded roles, where one person owns a number or a function, carry more risk if the hire is wrong, so the search is worth an agency's exclusive attention.
Three or four "yes" answers points to one agency working your brief exclusively. One or none points to running it more openly, and insisting on exclusivity you do not need just adds a step without adding a better outcome.
There is also a middle case worth naming honestly: a role that looks ordinary on the brief and turns out to be scarce once screening starts, the way the factory manager role did. Neither approach protects you from that by itself. What protects you is an agency that tells you in week one, based on what the first batch of screening actually showed, rather than waiting until week five to admit the pipeline is thin.
What we tell clients before they decide
We do not default every brief to the more demanding arrangement. If a role looks like it will draw real supply, an open search is the honest recommendation, and we say so. If the early screening looks like the factory manager search, confident-sounding candidates who do not hold up under a second question, we say that too, in week one rather than after a few rejected batches. That read is based on what we see in the first round of screening, not a guess made before anyone has looked at the market.
The pattern across both searches above is the same one we keep coming back to: the arrangement matters less than whether someone is honest with you about what the market actually contains. More on what that looks like day to day is on how we work, and on how delay shows up when a role is genuinely hard to fill is in why your search went long.
Read next: How we work, and what we commit to ยท Why your search went long