Contingency or exclusive: which business model for your recruitment agency?

Two decisions determine the profitability of a recruitment agency, and neither of them concerns your talent as a recruiter. The first: how you get paid. The second: the scope you agree to work on. Left to default, they condemn you to running faster to earn less.

Here is what each one changes, with the available orders of magnitude and their limits. If you have not yet set up your agency, start with the launch budget instead: Setting up a recruitment agency: how much does it really cost in 2026?

The three models on the French market

The arithmetic of the contingency model

There are no published French statistics on the success rate of contingency assignments. The available data comes from the US and the UK, and it varies widely from one source to another: from 10% to 35% of assignments actually filled on contingency, compared with around 95% for exclusive assignments with an upfront retainer. The same sources give a shortlist-to-interview conversion rate of 77.9% on exclusive assignments compared with 44.3% on contingency (source: RecruitBPM, JRG Partners). Treat them as orders of magnitude, not as French benchmarks.

Even with the most favourable assumption, the arithmetic is brutal. An illustration, built from the figures in this article:

In other words: on contingency, each placement has to pay for three assignments' worth of work. If you charge 20% like an exclusive agency, you are working for a third of its hourly rate. This is why contingency agencies are structurally pushed towards volume, speed and easy profiles.

What to do about it when you are starting out

The paradox is familiar to anyone who has opened an agency: exclusivity is the right model, and it is the one an unknown agency cannot get. A client agrees to pay upfront for a reputation, not for a promise.

Three ways out, in order of difficulty.

1. The token retainer. Not 40%, but €1,000 or 1,500 when the assignment is placed, deducted from the final fee. The amount matters less than what it achieves: it filters out clients who do not really have a position to fill, and it brings cash in during month 1 rather than month 9.
2. Exclusivity without a retainer, in exchange for a commitment. You stay on contingency, but you are the only agency on the position, with a committed timeframe. The client pays nothing more; they give you exclusivity in exchange for a commitment on timing. This is often accepted.
3. The guarantee in exchange for early payment. You offer an extended replacement guarantee, six or twelve months, in exchange for invoicing when the contract is signed rather than when the candidate starts. You trade a risk you control for three months of cash flow.

What does not work: accepting ten contingency assignments at the same time to “fill the pipeline”. You will work ten assignments, invoice three, and you will not have nurtured a single client relationship.

Generalist or specialist

This is the second structural decision, and it is often made by default, for want of having dared to turn down a first client outside your scope.

Let us start with what it does not change: the price. Contrary to popular belief, a specialist agency does not automatically charge more. Rates sit between 16 and 22% in both cases. The 25 to 30% rates are found in executive search and for rare profiles, in other words they reflect the difficulty of the assignment, not specialisation as such (sources: Factoriel, Talent Program).

What does change are the following four items.

The decisive item is the third one. A specialist agency often puts the same candidate forward for several assignments, and calls back a talent pool it knows. Its marginal sourcing cost tends towards zero after two years. A generalist starts from scratch for every position: it pays for its sourcing tools every month, forever.

And the fourth is the real risk. Specialising means betting on a sector. Temporary work has declined three years in a row, including 4.6% fewer temporary workers in 2025. An agency specialising in this market took the full force of that cycle. A narrow niche doubles both your good years and your bad ones.

Our recommendation for an agency that is starting out: specialise in what you already know. Not in the sector that pays best, but in the one where you have a contact book. It is the only thing that really shortens the nine months of cash flow described above, because it tackles the first link in the chain: prospecting. Broadening comes later, when your cash flow can absorb a failed assignment.

Key takeaways

The billing model is a cash flow decision, not a commercial concession. On contingency, you fund three assignments to invoice one. On an exclusive basis, the client funds part of the work, and you are no longer racing against two competitors.

Specialisation does not pay off in fees, it pays off in production cost. The rates are the same; what changes is the time it takes you to win an assignment and what each sourcing effort costs you.

In both cases, the condition for making the call is the same: knowing what each assignment really brings in, the time spent, the outcome, the time to payment. An agency that does not measure its success rate by type of assignment does not decide, it endures.

This is exactly what Nicoka CABS brings together: candidate tracking, client relationships, the sales pipeline and placement invoicing in a single tool, at €130 per month per user, for recruitment agencies and independent recruiters alike.

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Further reading

This article is the companion piece to our budget guide. If you are setting up your agency, all the figures are there: formalities, fixed costs, sourcing licences, electronic invoicing, and the nine months of cash flow you need to set aside before the first payment comes in.

Setting up a recruitment agency: how much does it really cost in 2026?

FAQ

Sources and collection dates

Data collected on 22 September 2026.