It feels like a sound strategy. You have a critical GTM role to fill. You brief three agencies, maybe four. More recruiters means more coverage. More CVs means more choice. Competition between firms means everyone works harder. The role gets filled faster, and you pay nothing until someone starts.
This logic is intuitive. It is also almost entirely wrong.
The multi-agency model is one of the most persistent false economies in executive hiring. It feels like it reduces risk. In practice, it compounds it. And for companies trying to hire top GTM performers, not just people who can do the job, but people who will genuinely move the needle, it is one of the most reliable ways to ensure you end up with second-best.
When you brief multiple agencies on the same role, you do not create a competitive process that drives quality. You create a race. And in a race, the only thing that matters is speed.
Every recruiter in that race knows the same thing: the first firm to get a CV in front of the hiring manager has the best chance of placing the role. So every recruiter optimises for submission speed, not candidate quality. They reach into their existing database. They approach the people they already know. They send CVs that are close enough to the brief rather than precisely right. They move fast because moving fast is the only competitive advantage the model allows.
The result is a hiring manager buried in CVs, most of which are not quite right, from candidates who have often been approached without a proper briefing on the role, the company, or why this opportunity is genuinely compelling. The process looks busy. It is not progressing.
This is not a criticism of individual recruiters. It is a structural problem with the model. The bun fight incentivises the wrong behaviours. No recruiter can justify spending three days mapping a market, building a longlist from scratch, and having ten exploratory conversations with passive candidates when there is a 75% chance another firm places the role before they do. The economics do not work. So they do not do it.
The people you are trying to hire are being approached constantly. A VP of Sales at a Series B SaaS company might receive fifteen to twenty recruiter messages a week. They have learned to filter ruthlessly. Most of what arrives in their inbox is noise: generic messages, roles that do not fit, approaches from recruiters who have clearly not read their profile and are simply casting wide to see what sticks.
That is spray and pray. It is not recruitment. It is luck dressed up as process.
When a top performer receives the same role from three different agencies in the same week, they have already formed an opinion about the company doing the hiring. The message it sends is unambiguous: this company does not control its own process, does not know what it wants, and is not serious about how it hires. The best candidates, the ones who are not actively looking and who will never respond to a generic message, quietly remove themselves from consideration. They do not reply. They do not ask questions. They simply move on.
Strong Search does not operate that way. Every approach we make is the result of genuine research: a real understanding of the candidate’s career trajectory, a considered view on why this specific opportunity represents a meaningful step forward, and a conversation that puts their interests at the centre. We are not submitting CVs. We are consulting. We are having the kind of conversation that earns the right to be heard, because we have done the work to deserve it.
When a top performer receives a single, well-considered approach from a recruiter who clearly knows their background and can articulate exactly why this role is worth their time, they listen. That is not a coincidence. That is the result of doing this properly.
The multi-agency model is sold as low risk because you only pay on success. But the true cost of the bun fight is never captured in the fee. It is captured in everything else.
Consider what the process actually costs. Multiple briefing calls with multiple agencies, each requiring the same investment of time from your leadership team. Weeks of CV review, much of it duplicated as the same candidates appear through different firms. Conflicting feedback loops that create confusion rather than clarity. Internal resource consumed managing a process that feels like momentum but is not producing the right outcome.
And then there is the cost of the vacancy itself. As we have explored in previous analysis, an open sales headcount at a $1 million quota costs approximately $19,231 in lost revenue generation every single week it remains unfilled. A process that takes twelve weeks because it was structured as a race rather than a search costs $230,769 in vacancy impact alone, before you account for the cost of a hire who is merely adequate rather than exceptional.
The contingency model does not save money. It defers the fee and multiplies every other cost.
This is the point that gets lost in the conversation about fees and timelines. The goal is not to fill a seat. The goal is to place a top performer.
There is an enormous difference between a candidate who can do the job and a candidate who will excel at it. The difference shows up in quota attainment, in pipeline quality, in how quickly they ramp, in how they represent your brand to prospects, and in whether they are still with you in two years. Our own data shows that candidates placed through a rigorous, consultative search process achieve 123% of quota on average, compared to 74% for those placed through a less disciplined approach. That gap is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a hire that transforms your revenue function and one that merely occupies the headcount.
Top performers are not found through speed. They are found through depth. They require a recruiter who understands the nuances of the role well enough to assess cultural fit, leadership style, and growth trajectory, not just technical competence. They require a process that gives both sides enough time and information to make a genuinely confident decision. And they require an approach that treats them as professionals whose career matters, not as CVs to be submitted before a competitor does.
The bun fight cannot deliver this. It is structurally incapable of it.
When you work with one recruitment partner on an exclusive or retained basis, the entire dynamic changes.
The recruiter can afford to invest properly in the search. They can spend the time to truly understand your business, your culture, your leadership team, and what “exceptional” looks like for this specific role. They can map the market from scratch rather than reaching into an existing database. They can approach passive candidates with a compelling, well-prepared narrative rather than a generic message. They can have the honest conversations with you when the brief needs adjusting, when the market is telling them something important, or when a candidate they have spoken to has raised a concern worth addressing.
That depth of engagement is impossible in a multi-agency environment. It only exists when the recruiter knows they have the time and the mandate to do the work properly.
Over time, the value compounds. A partner who has placed your VP Sales, your Head of Presales, and your first Customer Success leader knows your business at a level no new agency ever will. They understand your culture from the inside. They know what your best performers have in common. They know what has not worked and why. Each search builds on the last. Each hire gets better. Each process gets faster. The relationship becomes a genuine competitive advantage, not just a transactional service.
The model matters because it determines the behaviour.
Contingency recruitment, where the fee is only paid on a successful placement, creates the race dynamic described above. It is not that contingency recruiters are less skilled or less motivated. It is that the model does not allow them to behave differently. They cannot invest in a search they might not win.
Retained or exclusive recruitment changes the incentive structure entirely. The recruiter has a commitment from the client and can make a commitment in return: a defined process, a defined timeline, a defined quality standard. They are not racing. They are searching.
Strong Search operates on a retained and exclusive basis because it is the only model that allows us to deliver what we promise. We are not interested in being one of four agencies hoping to get lucky. We are interested in being the partner that finds the right person, every time, and stands behind that outcome.
A specialist partner with genuine depth in your sector will have a stronger network for your specific roles than four generalist agencies combined. The question to ask is not “how many recruiters do I have?” but “how deeply does my recruiter know this market?” If the answer is genuinely not deep enough, that is a signal to find a better specialist, not to add more agencies.
The retained model creates accountability through commitment, not competition. A recruiter who has taken on an exclusive mandate has staked their reputation on the outcome. They have more to lose from a poor result than any contingency recruiter who can simply move on to the next role. The question is not whether they will work hard. It is whether the model allows them to work smart.
No. And this is where the assumption falls apart most completely. Strong Search spends day one mapping the market properly. The average time from brief to qualified shortlist is twelve days. That is not slower than a multi-agency contingency race. That is faster, and it is thorough. Speed and quality are not in conflict when the process is right.
Everything. Placements made through a rigorous, consultative process, where both sides have been properly assessed and properly informed, stay. Placements made through a rushed, competitive process, where speed was prioritised over fit, do not. Strong Search’s placement retention record is a direct reflection of the model we use, not a coincidence.
The fee structure differs, but the total cost of hiring is almost always lower. When you account for the cost of the vacancy, the internal time consumed managing multiple agencies, the cost of a suboptimal hire, and the risk of the process failing entirely, the retained model is consistently the more cost-effective choice. The question is not what you pay the recruiter. It is what the hire costs you in total.
We understand that trust is earned, not assumed. That is why we offer a two-week window for any new client relationship. Give us two weeks on an exclusive basis and we will show you the work: the market mapping, the candidate conversations, the shortlist taking shape. If after two weeks you are not confident we are getting the job done, you are free to go elsewhere. No hard feelings, no obligation. In eighteen years of hiring, not one client has needed to take us up on that offer. But the option is always there, because we are confident enough in our process to put it on the table.
The companies that hire best are not the ones that move fastest in any individual search. They are the ones that build a repeatable, high-quality hiring process and protect it.
Every time you brief multiple agencies, you reset the relationship. Every new recruiter starts from zero: learning your business, learning your culture, learning what good looks like. You pay that cost in time and in quality, every single time. The institutional knowledge that a long-term partner builds never accumulates because the relationship never deepens.
The companies we work with at Strong Search have discovered that the relationship itself becomes an asset. When a new headcount opens, the conversation starts from a place of shared understanding rather than a blank briefing document. The search is faster not because we cut corners, but because we already know the answer to half the questions before they are asked.
Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that the multi-agency model has its place. For high-volume, lower-seniority hiring where speed and coverage genuinely matter more than depth, and where the cost of a slightly suboptimal hire is manageable, contingency search across multiple firms can be appropriate.
But for GTM leadership and senior individual contributor roles in SaaS and AI companies, where the cost of a bad hire runs into hundreds of thousands of pounds and the cost of a mediocre hire is measured in missed quota and lost momentum, the multi-agency model is not a risk management strategy. It is a risk amplification strategy.
The roles that matter most deserve the process that delivers best.
The companies that consistently hire top GTM performers are not the ones that rely on the market to deliver. They are the ones that take control of the process, invest in the right partner, and refuse to leave the outcome to chance.
Spray and pray is not a strategy. It is an abdication of one. The bun fight does not find the best candidate. It finds the fastest one. And in a market where the difference between a top performer and an average hire is measured in hundreds of thousands of pounds of revenue, fast is not good enough.
Strong Search was built on a different premise: that the right hire is findable, that finding them requires skill and commitment rather than luck, and that the companies we work with deserve better than a process that treats their most important decisions as a numbers game. We spend day one mapping the market properly. We deliver a qualified shortlist in twelve days on average. We offer every new client a two-week window to see the work before committing. And in eighteen years, not one client has needed to walk away.
Our placement retention record is not a marketing claim. It is the outcome of doing this properly, every time.
If you are ready to stop relying on luck and start making your own fate, we would welcome a conversation.
The right hires don’t just fill roles—they accelerate revenue, strengthen culture, and unlock new markets. Partner with Strong Search to secure the GTM talent your SaaS business needs to grow faster and smarter.
