At Irving Knight, we speak to a range of partners and our search process is flexible to fit these partners’ needs. Most of the time however, we advocate going down the Retained Search route. We have explained this method in slightly more depth here.

Retained Search involves an up-front engagement to cover overhead costs including advertising and enlisting the assistance of our research team. This initial cost is taken off any completion fee. Should the role close for any reason, the engagement can be reallocated to any role at any point in the future-it doesn’t expire!

There are several reasons for using the Retained Search model for your next hire and it has benefits throughout the search process:

The benefits of the Retained Search method begin as soon as we have an engagement. The Retained Search immediately becomes our priority and will go to the top of our workload. We appreciate that the hiring process for executive candidates may be extensive and we love being able to get to work as soon as possible on Retained Search roles.

With the guarantee of business that a Retained Search brings, we can invest our time before we even begin headhunting for candidates, by coordinating with our research team to map the state of the market. This enables us to approach candidates in a calculated way to ensure we are finding the best fitting candidates immediately.

Having contacted every single person who may be a fit for the role, the Retained Search method allows us more time to interview candidates to ensure that we are only sending partners the top few profiles to review. When we do provide these profiles, we will attach detailed feedback so that partners can find out an extra level of information that a CV can’t account for.

We ensure that any candidate submitted for a retained search role will not be submitted for any other process that we are working on. Whilst candidates may be in processes with other companies, we will do everything in our power to ensure that they will accept our partners’ offer.

It’s perhaps counter intuitive to think that an increased level of dedicated service would cost less but this is the reality! Because we have a guarantee of business with an upfront engagement, we are able to offer our partners a significantly lower rate.

All in all, the Retained Search method provides benefits for both sides. Partners get the best service at the lowest cost whilst we can invest more time and resources into finding fantastic candidates. By allowing us to show exactly what we can do, we hope to form lasting partnerships with the best companies in the industry. We find that once a partner works retained, they don’t look back and we become the first person they call for any hiring needs- this is what every recruiter strives for!