by John Lyle | Read time: 6 minutes
"You guys do a great job of really sticking to your process. One of the key things for me through this is to make sure I'm learning from you as well. How you implement, and how you treat your clients."
A client said that to me near the end of a long call last week. She runs a growing staffing firm and needed no lesson from me in how to hire. She had watched a method hold its shape under pressure, and she wanted to bring the same discipline to her own team.
That compliment meant more to me than any fee, because the process we trust has been honed over many years of trial and improvement.
The candidate who got away
Earlier in the same call, she told me about a candidate she had lost. A top performer who had every reason to move. She took him all the way to the finish line. Then he pulled back.
"I usually land the majority of the people I talk to," she said. "He was not one of them."
She had done nothing wrong. On paper, nothing was wrong with him either. We say a placement needs three things to line up: quality, intentions and timing. His quality was beyond doubt (a consistent top biller). His timing looked good (recent loss of major client to offshoring). But in my view, his intentions had never fully turned the corner. In our language, he had the intentions of a 2.
A 1 and a 2 sound exactly the same. Only their behavior tells them apart.
1s and 2s
A 1 is a candidate who says they are willing and motivated to change jobs, and whose behavior proves it. A 2 says the same words, which is what makes 2s beguiling.
Somewhere along the way, a 2 shows it. They take longer to reply. They are less available for the next interview. When the numbers come up, they are suddenly less flexible than they were a week ago, and a hiring manager who wants the hire badly reads each slip as a scheduling problem.
Average recruiters treat those signals as objections to overcome. They push. They try to close a 2 into a 1, and they get a lot of candidates to the finish line who never cross it. The best billers I have worked with do the opposite. They find out early. When the behavior changes, they name it: "It took you a bit longer to get back to me than usual. Has something changed?" People usually answer that question honestly. You have to ask it.
A shortlist of five 2s gets a client nowhere. Everyone reaches the offer stage and leaves the client disappointed.
Why the pool is smaller than it looks
The numbers make intent matter more. LinkedIn lists more than 56,000 staffing and recruiting companies in the United States, and more than 650,000 people working inside them. Our clients would only consider a fraction of that population, and would only pay a fee for a smaller share again.
In our experience, the people in that top tier move about once every three years on average, and a move takes roughly a month. Do the arithmetic and about one in thirty-six of the people a client wants is in motion at any given moment. Under 3%.
When the pool is that thin, every moment spent on a 2 is time taken from a 1 somewhere, and puts your hire at risk.
Not every search runs this way
The process in this post belongs to two kinds of search, and choosing between them and a third is the first decision I make with a client.
When a client needs an individual contributor or a manager, has no hard deadline, or wants to meet strong people as we find them, we work on a contingent basis. We learn the strategy, take the cream off the top of the market and make introductions when someone fits. The client pays only when a hire starts. A fee paid only on success rewards speed over coverage, and for those roles a map of the whole market is more than the job needs.
A retained search is for one critical leadership hire: the person who will build or run something. We map everyone in the market who could do the job, instead of whoever happens to be looking this month. A contained search is for two or more critical hires in the same function, team or build-out. A small fee up front secures an exclusive, time-bound search, and the rest is paid as each hire starts.
I was lucky enough to train with Louise Archer at Retrained Search, and her rule for when to move a client off contingent has stayed with me. If contingent is giving a client what they want, when they want it, leave it alone. Retained earns its fee where contingent leaves too much to chance.
Choosing between retained and contained comes down to whether one set of criteria holds. On another engagement, a prospective client described two needs: several account managers, and a leader to build something new. The account managers looked close enough to share one set of criteria. The builder did not. My instinct was to run that one as a separate retained search, with its own criteria and a full map of the market.
What the process is
Every retained and contained search runs through the same six phases: discovery, planning, sourcing, screening, authentication and commitment. Discovery never ends. We keep learning until the hire starts.
Before we source anyone, we agree on the five qualities that predict success in the seat, and the evidence we will accept for each. We call these Key Matching Criteria. Every candidate is scored against them, by us and by the client, and each interviewer owns one or two of the five, so nothing gets covered twice and nothing gets missed. Scoring every candidate against agreed criteria is what makes an interview structured, and the research rewards it. A 2022 review of decades of hiring studies, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, ranked the structured interview as the strongest predictor of job performance of any method it examined.
Alongside the criteria sits a written Search Charter: promises from each side. Ours include a fresh market map, our reasoning written down for every candidate, and weekly updates. The client's include scheduling interviews within five business days and giving feedback within 24 hours. Those two client promises keep a 1 from cooling into a 2 while they wait.
Both sides commit. Exclusivity and a fee up front buy a fixed plan and a named team. In return, the client co-owns the criteria and keeps to the charter.
We agree at the start when the offer will land. Too soon and it can feel unserious, or leave questions the candidate never got to ask. Too late and it is a banana left on the shelf too long. Our rule of thumb is at least one weekend inside the process, ideally no more than two.
As I told that prospective client, when you are hiring for critical positions in your org, you want to leave as little as possible to chance. We stick to the process, and we stay flexible about what it takes to win. Through every stage, we watch behavior as closely as we listen to answers.
Where it gets tested
A process proves itself when something threatens to break it. A brilliant candidate appears late but doesn't have the right intentions. An investor suggests someone whose timing doesn't fit our schedule. A hiring manager who closes almost everyone wants another round with the 2 who isn't ready.
Those are the moments a strong methodology holds and keeps the search on track. Design a process worthy of your trust.
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Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., and Lievens, F., "Revisiting Meta-Analytic Estimates of Validity in Personnel Selection: Addressing Systematic Overcorrection for Restriction of Range," Journal of Applied Psychology, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000994
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LinkedIn Sales Navigator, account and lead searches filtered to the United States and the Staffing and Recruiting industry, October 2026. https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/sales-navigator
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Archer, L., guest on "EP118: Retrained Search – Identifying Clients for Retained Model," All-In Recruitment podcast, Manatal, 2024. https://www.manatal.com/blog/ep118-retrained-search-louise-archer
