Over Twenty Years on Both Sides of the Desk
Why Retained Search Beats Running the Field for Mining's Mid-Level and Technical Talent
Why I'm Writing This
I spent the first decade and a half of my career as a contingent recruiter in the mining industry before transition into Executive Search. For the last six years, I have run a retained and executive search practice. I have sat on all sides of the exact decision this paper is about (high volume labour hire consultant, contingent permanent recruiter, retained search consultant and now firm owner) and I want to make that clear before I say anything else, because it changes how you should read what follows. This is not a theoretical argument built by someone who has only ever sold one model. I have competed against three other agencies for the same mandate, I have run a team mobilising over 600 labourers in 4 weeks for disaster recovery work, and I have been the agency a client trusted to give the whole search (sometimes all their searches) to. I know which one produced the better hire for the situation, and I know why.
The pitch a lot of companies hear when they're under pressure to fill a technical role is simple: put it out to a few agencies, let them compete, and you'll get more candidates faster with no downside because you only pay if someone gets placed. I understand why that sounds sensible. I sold that pitch myself, years ago. It is also, in my experience, close to the opposite of what actually happens once you're hiring for the kind of mid-level technical role (the metallurgist, the mine superintendent, the process engineer, the senior geologist) where the real, qualified candidate pool is small and everybody in it already knows everybody else.
I also want to be upfront about something else: I don't have peer-reviewed studies that prove every part of this argument, and I'm not going to pretend I do. Some of what follows rests on hard data such as the scale of the mining talent shortage, the documented cost of a bad hire, the research on candidate experience is all real and cited. Some of it rests on twenty plus years of being in the game and watching this play out, which I think counts for something, but I'll tell you plainly when it’s my lived experience and that of various colleagues I'm relying on, rather than dressing up an opinion as a statistic.
1. What “Running the Field” Actually Looks Like From the Inside
Contingent search and retained search are not two versions of the same service with different price tags. A contingent recruiter gets paid only if their candidate gets hired — nothing for the work, nothing for the weeks spent building a shortlist, nothing if the client fills the role through someone else. In my contingent years, fees generally ran somewhere in the 15–25% range of first-year base salary, and every one of those placements was a fee I had to win outright. Retained search flips that. The client pays for the process, usually staged across engagement, shortlist, and placement, in a fee more commonly in the 20–35% range of total compensation, and in exchange for that certainty, I owe the client my full, exclusive attention and I am accountable if the search fails. Those percentages move around by firm and region (nobody in this industry quotes off a fixed rate card) but the structural trade is the same everywhere: contingent buys you a shot at a fee; retained buys the client my time and the resources and time of my team.
When a client puts a role out to four or five contingent agencies at once, here is what I know happens: nobody controls the process. Nobody owns the outcome. Every recruiter working that role is racing to be first with the name of a candidate they can “sell’ into the role, because being second with a better candidate gets you nothing. That is not a flaw in any individual recruiter's character — it is exactly how the incentive is built, and I built my early career succeeding inside that incentive. It just isn't the incentive that produces the best hire for a scarce, technical role.
2. The Cost Math I Wish More Clients Would Actually Run
Let me kill one bad argument before I make a better one. Running a role through five contingent agencies instead of one doesn't usually mean paying multiple fees — in normal circumstances only the agency that submits the successful candidate gets paid, so the direct fee line often looks the same either way or even a slightly higher percentage for retained search. If someone tells you multi-agency search is more expensive because you're stacking fees, they're wrong.
The real cost is the one that never shows up on an invoice. It's the extra weeks the role sits open while four agencies each treat it as a low-priority side project (they are likely focussing on exclusive or retained mandates). It's the elevated odds of a bad hire when everyone involved is optimizing for speed of submission over depth of assessment, you have been sold someone that can do the job, not the best person for the job. It's the hours my clients' HR teams have spent — I've watched this directly — managing five different vendor relationships, chasing five different candidate lists, and adjudicating disputes over who introduced a candidate first. None of that is hypothetical to me. I priced my early business around winning that race and selling in a decent candidate, and I know exactly how little attention a non-exclusive mandate got from me when a better-paying exclusive one landed on my desk the same week.
What the numbers I can point to actually say
SHRM's 2025 benchmarking data puts average cost-per-hire at $5,475 for non-executive roles and $35,879 for executive roles. (SHRM, 2025 Benchmarking Report) SHRM is explicit that this captures direct recruiting cost only, not the cost of the vacancy itself, onboarding, or the hours your team spends managing it. I also have to infer that this cost is based on direct hire, i.e. not using the services of a recruitment or search firm, considering industry standard fees in North America range from 15-35% depending on the type of service used.
SHRM's 2026 recruiting benchmarking survey of 4,657 organisations found a median time-to-fill of 39 days for non-executive roles and 45 days for executive roles. (SHRM, 2026 Recruiting Executives Benchmarking) I'll say plainly this figure isn't broken out by sourcing channel, I can't hand you a study that proves multi-agency mandates run slower than this baseline, only twenty years of watching it happen.
74% of employers surveyed admitted they'd made a bad hire, with average losses reported around $17,000 for entry- and mid-level roles, rising to as much as $240,000 at the executive level. (CareerBuilder, State of Recruiting survey series) Every client I've worked with who's lived through a bad technical hire recognises these numbers instantly.
One mining-specific estimate puts the all-in cost of a single bad technical hire at up to $2 million once you account for onboarding, contract penalties, lost team output, and the fee itself. (Globe 24-7, 2025) I haven't independently audited that figure, it comes from another firm in this business, but it lines up with what I've seen a bad superintendent hire do to a site team's output over a bad six months.
So here's the honest version of the cost argument, from someone who has been paid under both models: spreading a technical search across several contingent agencies rarely inflates the fee. What it reliably does is raise the odds of the two most expensive outcomes in hiring — a longer vacancy and a wrong hire — while burying real cost inside your own team's time that never gets billed back to the search.
3. The Incentive Problem, From Someone Who Chased the Incentive
I don't have an independent study that measures whether contingent recruiters screen candidates less thoroughly than retained consultants, as a class. I can tell you what I did when I was a contingent recruiter working three live mandates at once: I prioritised the search most likely to pay me fastest. That is not a confession, it is rational behaviour inside a model that only pays for outcomes. Every contingent recruiter I respect does the same math. The industry commentary on this is consistent with what I lived: a recruiter paid only on placement, running several roles across several clients, will rationally favour speed of submission over depth of assessment, because a slow, careful search that a competing agency might win first has a low expected return on the time invested. At the end of the day we are all just people trying to pay our bills.
“Five firms' worst effort doesn't come anywhere close to one firm's best effort.”(Talent and Sarcasm, industry commentary) I didn't write that line, but I could have, it is a fair description of what a non-exclusive client gets: whatever attention is left over after exclusive relationships are served.
Where I do have real research to point to is on the value of a structured, consistent process — and this is the part of my argument that doesn't depend on taking my word for anything. Decades of selection-science research show that structured, standardised assessment produces measurably better predictions of job performance than ad hoc evaluation.
Schmidt and Hunter's landmark meta-analysis of 85 years of selection-method research found structured assessment methods have substantially higher predictive validity for job performance than unstructured approaches. (Schmidt & Hunter, Psychological Bulletin, 1998)
That study doesn't mention retained or contingent search; I want to be honest about that. What it proves is that one consistent process, run against one scorecard, beats several different people running their own informal version of an interview against the same brief. Connect that to a multi-agency search, where five recruiters are each running their own process with no shared standard, and you can see why I don't need the study to say the word “contingent” for it to be relevant.
4. The Speed Paradox: More Agencies, Slower Fills
This is the claim I get pushed back on most, so let me be precise about what I can and can't prove. Nobody — not SIA, not SHRM, not any neutral research body I've found — has published a study directly comparing time-to-fill for exclusive retained mandates against open multi-agency contingent ones. That gap is real, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
What I can tell you is what happened every time I watched a client split a technical mandate across several agencies rather than give it to one: the role didn't get filled faster. It got filled slower, because none of the four or five recruiters working it were treating it as their priority, and because a small, specialised candidate pool, mining engineers, geologists, metallurgists, etc, got approached by multiple recruiters within days of each other, burning through the same short list instead of expanding it. A single retained search, in my experience, can actually map that finite pool properly, once, rather than having five different people half-map it in parallel.
“The supply of real candidates — candidates that are truly qualified, a good fit, and at a point where they may consider the change — is finite,” and a single retained engagement allows that pool to be mapped fully rather than fragmented across competing firms chasing the same short list. (Globe 24-7, 2023) Another mining search firm making the same point I'd make myself.
I'll say this as directly as I can: I believe the deprioritisation effect is real because I created it myself for years as a contingent recruiter. But I'd rather you hear it from me as informed experience than have me dress it up as a statistic that doesn't exist yet.
5. Employer Brand and Candidate Experience — The Part That Actually Has Data Behind It
This is where I can stop leaning on my own war stories, because the research on candidate experience is genuinely strong. How a candidate is treated during a search measurably affects whether they'll consider that employer again, refer someone else, or, in a small technical community, mention the experience to the three other people who are also potential candidates for your next search.
47% of job seekers said poor communication during a hiring process would cause them to withdraw from consideration entirely. (Monster Work Watch Report, 2024, via SHRM)
In CareerBuilder's national candidate-experience study, 44% of candidates who got no response said their opinion of the company worsened; 78% said they'd tell friends and family about a bad experience; and 56% of employers reported candidates rejecting offers specifically because of a poor process. (CareerBuilder national survey)
A peer-reviewed study confirmed that an employer's visible reputation on public rating platforms causally shapes whether job seekers apply at all — reputation isn't just a feeling candidates have, it measurably changes their behaviour. (Schaarschmidt, Walsh & Ivens, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 2021)
None of those studies were measuring multi-agency contingent recruiting specifically. But I've sat across the table from senior mining professionals who told me, unprompted, that they'd been contacted by two or three different recruiters about the same job at the same company within a week, and every single one of them read that as a company that didn't have its act together. In a sector as small as ours, where the geologist you're trying to hire has probably worked with, or knows, half the other people on your shortlist, that reputation cost is not abstract to me. I've watched it cost clients candidates they never even got the chance to properly approach, because the market had already decided the search looked chaotic.
6. Market Intelligence — The Part of the Job Nobody Pays For Directly
One of the things I didn't fully appreciate until I moved from contingent to retained work is how much intelligence a real, ongoing client relationship generates that a transactional one never will. When a client is one of many transactional relationships I'm juggling, I have no reason to invest in understanding their broader talent strategy — I'm executing against a job description, nothing more. When a client is a retained, exclusive relationship I'm building over years, I have every reason to bring them compensation intelligence, tell them who's about to be back in the market, and flag when their offer is out of step with what I'm seeing everywhere else. That is not charity on my part, it's how I keep the relationship worth having on both sides.
I don't have a study that quantifies this and I honestly doubt one exists, because it's a hard thing to measure. What I can tell you is that in nine years of retained work, the value my clients get between searches, from the market intelligence that accumulates in an ongoing relationship, is something none of my contingent clients ever got from me, because I had no reason to give it to them.
7. Why This Matters More Now Than It Did When I Started
I've watched the mid-level technical talent pool in this industry shrink for two decades, and it is not slowing down. This is the part of the paper where I'm not asking you to trust my read of the room, the data on this is about as solid as it gets in our industry.
39% of mining employers expect an inability to attract talent will hinder their transformation efforts, and workforce and talent now rank among the top business risks facing mining and metals companies in 2026. (PwC, Mine 2026: Ambition to Action; EY, Top 10 Business Risks and Opportunities for Mining and Metals 2026)
75% of mining executives lack confidence in their ability to resolve labour shortages for onsite operations, with skill gaps specifically identified in mine planning, process engineering, and regulatory compliance — exactly the mid-level technical roles I spend my days on. (EY, 2026)
86% of mining executives say recruiting and retaining talent is harder than it was two years ago, and 71% say the shortage is directly holding back production and strategic targets. (McKinsey & Company, cited via Mining.com and Mining Digital)
Nearly half of mining engineers are expected to reach retirement age within the next decade; in the UK, 80% of registered mining engineers are over 50 and 40% are over 60. (Deloitte; Royal Academy of Engineering)
The educational pipeline behind this generation has not kept pace: U.S. mining engineering degree completions fell 39% between 2016 and 2020, Canadian mining and mineral engineering graduates fell by a third over the same period, and Australian mining engineering enrolments fell roughly 63% since 2014. (Aggregated from CSIS analysis, Colorado School of Mines data, and mining trade press)
Only 4–16% of workers aged 15–30 say they'd definitely work in mining, and roughly two-thirds say they probably or definitely wouldn't. (McKinsey, cited via Streetwise Reports, 2025)
I'll be blunt about what this means: the pool you're fishing in is smaller every year, and it knows itself better than you know it. That is precisely the environment where a clumsy, uncoordinated search does the most damage — not just to the search you're running today, but to how the next candidate in that same small pool thinks about you when you come back next year, which you will.
8. Where Contingent Search Genuinely Earns Its Place
I'd be doing you a disservice, and being dishonest about my own career, if I didn't say clearly where the model I started in still makes sense. Contingent recruiting's real strengths are lower upfront risk — you pay nothing until someone's hired — and rapid access to registered candidates who are already actively looking.
That's the model's home turf: high-volume, lower-differentiation roles — site labour, general operators, roles where the qualified pool is large and one good candidate is genuinely interchangeable with the next. I ran a profitable labour-hire and contingent business for years inside exactly that space, and I'd tell any client hiring at that end of the market to use it. Casting a wide net through a few agencies has low downside there, because no single candidate relationship is scarce or fragile enough to be damaged by getting a call from three different recruiters, and speed and volume of throughput matters more than depth of individual assessment.
What I won't do is pretend I have a study proving multi-agency contingent search is cheaper in total for the roles this paper is actually about — the scarce, technical, hard-to-replace ones. Nobody has published that number, on either side of this argument. I'm arguing from twenty plus years of watching both models play out, not from a spreadsheet somebody else built.
9. How I'd Tell a Client to Make This Call
Strip away whichever side of this argument someone is selling you, and it comes down to four honest questions:
How scarce is the real candidate pool? A small, specialised one — senior geologists, metallurgists, mine superintendents — favours giving the search to one partner who can map it properly, rather than fragmenting it across agencies who'll each map it badly.
What does getting this wrong actually cost you? Where a mis-hire or a stalled vacancy costs real money relative to the fee — which is almost always true of technical and mid-management roles — paying for a process and holding one firm accountable for it starts to look cheap, not expensive.
How small and reputation-sensitive is this professional community? If the candidates you want all know each other, a sloppy multi-agency approach costs you more than this one search.
Is this role actually scarce, or are you telling yourself it is because it feels urgent? If the honest answer is high-volume and largely interchangeable, everything I've argued here reverses, and a few contingent agencies working it in parallel and managed correctly is the right, cost-effective call.
Where I Land on This
I'm not going to tell you contingent recruiting is a bad business, I did it for a long time and I'm proud of the years I spent doing it well. What I will tell you, as someone who has taken a fee under both models, is that the incentive structure behind a non-exclusive, success-only search is a poor match for a role where the qualified pool is small, the cost of getting it wrong is high, and the professional community involved remembers exactly how it was treated. The strongest evidence I can point you to — the scale of this industry's technical talent shortage, the documented cost of a bad hire, the research on how badly a poor candidate experience damages your standing — doesn't need my twenty-odd years in the business to make its case. My experience just tells you why it's true in practice, and not only on paper. Treat your next technical search as the scarce-resource problem it actually is, and give it to someone who has to answer for the outcome. Don't treat it as a volume problem and hope adding more hands fixes it. In my experience, it never does.
References and Sources
1. SHRM — 2025 Benchmarking Report, cost-per-hire data (Oct 2025). Cited via interviewcost.com/shrm-cost-per-hire.
2. SHRM — 2026 Recruiting Executives Benchmarking: Attracting Critical Talent (survey of 4,657 organisations, fielded Nov 2025–Jan 2026). shrm.org/topics-tools/research/recruiting-benchmarking/full-data-brief
3. HR.com — Future of Recruitment Technologies 2025–26, time-to-fill benchmarks. Cited via mitratech.com.
4. Pin.com — Retained vs. Contingent Search fee-structure and cost-comparison guide (2026). pin.com/blog/retained-vs-contingent-search
5. CareerBuilder — State of Recruiting national survey series, bad-hire and candidate-experience data. Cited via inop.ai and Forbes (Jacquelyn Smith, 2012).
6. Work Institute — 2017 Retention Report, cost-of-turnover data (n=34,000). Cited via HR Dive: hrdive.com/news/study-turnover-costs-employers-15000-per-worker/449142
7. Globe 24-7 — How One Bad Hire Can Cost a Mining Company $2M (Jan 2025) and Retained Search vs Contingency (Nov 2023). globe24-7.com
8. Talent and Sarcasm (James Hornick) — Contingent Agencies View You as Optional; The Dirty Little Secret of Contingent Recruiting. talentandsarcasm.substack.com
9. Greg Wyatt — Paying for Failure; Does It Really Matter? gregwyatt.substack.com
10. Perfect Placement UK — The Impact of Using Multiple Recruitment Agencies to Fill Your Jobs (2019). perfectplacement.co.uk
11. TruPath Search — Exclusivity: A Win-Win for Clients and Recruiting Firms. trupathsearch.com
12. Schmidt, F. L. & Hunter, J. E. — The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology, Psychological Bulletin (1998).
13. SHRM / Monster — Work Watch Report 2024, candidate withdrawal data. shrm.org/topics-tools/news/talent-acquisition/why-your-candidates-are-dropping-out
14. Talent Board — CandE Benchmark Research 2024 (230,000+ candidates, 150 organisations). Cited via SHRM and jobscore.com.
15. Glassdoor / CareerArc — Employer Branding Study; Glassdoor U.S. Site Survey. Cited via pin.com/blog/candidate-glassdoor-effect-study
16. Schaarschmidt, M., Walsh, G. & Ivens, S. — Digital war for talent: How profile reputations on company rating platforms drive job seekers' application intentions, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Vol. 113 (2021).
17. Pace Staffing Network — Is Your Recruiter a Vendor or a Partner? (2021, updated 2025). pacestaffing.com
18. PwC — Mine 2026: Ambition to Action (June 2026). pwc.com/gx/en/industries/energy-utilities-resources/publications/mine.html
19. EY — Top 10 Business Risks and Opportunities for Mining and Metals in 2026. ey.com/en_gl/insights/mining-metals/risks-opportunities
20. McKinsey & Company — mining talent shortage survey data, cited via Mining.com and Mining Digital (2024).
21. Rick Mills, Ahead of the Herd — aggregating Deloitte and Royal Academy of Engineering data, republished via Mining.com (2023).
22. CSIS — The United States Needs More Mining Engineers to Solve Its Critical Mineral Challenges. csis.org
23. Investing News Network — Exploration Phase Companies Challenged by Labor Shortage, citing Employment and Social Development Canada. investingnews.com
24. Mining Digital — Global Mining Industry Faces Severe Skills Shortage (Aug 2024). miningdigital.com
25. Streetwise Reports — Mining Industry's Massive Workforce Shortage Threatens Critical Mineral Production (Nov 2025), citing McKinsey generational-attitude survey data.
26. EisnerAmper — Retained vs. Contingency Search (2026). eisneramper.com/insights/talent-solutions/retained-vs-contingency-search-0526
27. CSG Talent — Overcoming Mining Recruitment Challenges (June 2025). csgtalent.com
28. The Northern Miner — Skills shortage tightens grip on junior explorers. northernminer.com
A note on how I've sourced this: where I make a claim backed by a named external study, it's in the reference list above. Where I'm speaking from what twenty years on both sides of this business taught me, I've said so directly rather than dressing an opinion up as a statistic. I'd rather you trust the parts that are genuinely data and weigh the parts that are experience for what they are.