The gap between contingent and search is closing. Here's how to win on both sides of it.

Something I keep seeing more and more of. (Plus what I think will continue to rise in value in the AI + tech world)

Recruiters are positioning themselves at the centre of their markets. Not just filling roles in their industry, but also driving the bringing together of their industry peers.

Events, dinners, podcasts, community groups. The vehicle changes, but the idea is the same.

And every time I see it, I think the same thing:

Nobody is better placed to do this than a great recruiter.

You already speak to more people across your industry than almost anyone else. You understand it from every angle.

If you would love to feel more inside your industry vs outside looking in, then take action on the idea you may have always had but not yet acted on.

Start the event idea, host your first dinner, start the community group or even start the podcast.

Be a catalyst for bringing your industry together. There is no better-positioned person to do so than a niche, passionate recruiter in a particular market.

There's a gap opening up in the market, and the best contingent recruitment businesses I've spoken to over the last 12 months are walking straight into it.

Here's the pattern.

Old-school executive search firms are losing ground. Not to average contingent agencies firing CVs and hoping one sticks. To world-class contingent businesses who've repositioned themselves as something in between.

Search-led contingent recruitment.

They're not trying to become traditional search firms. Long timelines, huge upfront fees, over-engineered reports, that's not the model. But they're not transactional either.

They've built the discipline of search into a contingent delivery model. Market mapping. Advisory conversations. Process control. Pushback on weak briefs. All of it, but moving at a contingent speed.

Why does this matter?

Because clients are tired of choosing between two flawed options.

Traditional search can feel slow, expensive, and overcomplicated. Clients sign up for it because they think senior or difficult roles demand it, then sit through a process that takes months and costs a fortune before a CV even lands on their desk.

Transactional contingent recruitment has the opposite problem. Fast, but shallow. No real market knowledge. No advisory value. Just volume and hope.

The clients who used to default to search firms for their senior, high-value, or difficult roles are starting to realise they don't have to choose between slow-and-deep or fast-and-shallow. 

They want a partner who knows the market properly, who can challenge the brief, who can manage senior candidates with confidence, and who can still move when speed matters.

That's the gap. Search discipline. Contingent speed. And the historically contingent agency businesses getting this right aren't just picking up scraps from search firms.

They're winning roles that two years ago would have gone straight into a retained search process with a big search firm without a second thought.

There is no reason why you can’t win those searches if you want them.

So what does this actually look like on a desk?

It's not a rebrand. It's not new templates or a fancier pitch deck.

It's a commitment to how you run the process.

Before you take a brief, you're mapping the market properly, not just searching your database.

You're pushing back on the client when the brief is vague or the comp is wrong, the way a search consultant would, not just taking the job and hoping.

You're presenting a longlist + a shortlist with real commentary on why each person is there, not just a stack of CVs, and you're still moving at the pace clients expect from contingent, because that's still your edge.

If you're reading this, you're probably already doing a lot of these things. The process discipline, the market knowledge, and the way you manage clients. You might not be calling it search. But a lot of it already is.

Which means the gap between you and winning big searches with big fees for your recruitment desk isn't as wide as you think.

A lot of this comes down to positioning. How you describe what you do. Who you have that conversation with. Whether you back yourself enough to put your hand up for the kind of brief you've previously assumed was out of reach.

Because the businesses consistently winning right now, taking larger fees and more committed briefs from clients who historically handed that work straight to traditional search firms, aren't doing anything magical.

They're just willing to position themselves at that cross-section of search/world class contingent and ask the question.

If you're proud of how you run your process, start telling people. Start competing for those searches. They're not out of reach. Not even close.

And if you do, the outcome can genuinely be transformative for your desk, your career and your bank account.

This week, I sat down with Sam and Ulli, husband and wife and co-founders of a performance marketing recruitment business operating in Germany.

Ulli runs delivery with an almost search-like level of thoroughness. Sam leads the BD.

And after three years of grafting, staying in their lane and compounding their reputation in a tight niche, they're heading into their best financial year yet.

A great one to listen to if this week's Debrief resonated.

Do this today. Get a blank piece of paper and write down your recruitment process, start to finish, in your own words.

Not a job spec. Not a pitch deck slide. Just you, a pen, and an honest account of what you actually do from the moment you take a brief to the moment you place someone.

Every step. Every touchpoint. Every thing you do that you haven't put a name to yet.

Most recruiters are running a better process than they realise. They just haven't written it down, so they can't articulate it, and if you can't articulate it you can't sell it.

When you can walk a client through exactly how you work, step by step, with confidence and clarity, it changes the conversation. You stop sounding like every other recruiter. You start sounding like someone worth paying more to work with.

Write it down first. Everything else follows.

Keep smashing it & honing your craft!

Hishem x

Know a recruiter who needs to hear this? Send it their way.