When a financial services firm runs a search through multiple recruiters simultaneously, they often get the same candidates from multiple firms, lower quality engagement from all of them, and a process that takes longer and produces worse results than a focused exclusive search would have.
At a recent industry conference, I had a conversation with the head of HR at a mid-sized private equity firm. She had just finished a search for a senior finance role that had taken six months, involved four recruiting firms, and produced what she described as a parade of mostly the same several candidates presented by different people in different orders.
I asked her how that happened. She said she had been told by her management that using multiple firms was the best way to maximize coverage and create competition. It is one of those things that sounds completely logical until you actually live through it.
Here is what actually happens when you give the same search to four or five firms simultaneously.
Every one of those firms immediately goes to the same places. LinkedIn. Their existing databases. The obvious names in the market. Within forty eight hours all four firms are calling the same pool of candidates. Those candidates start getting multiple calls about the same role from different recruiters. Some of them get annoyed and disengage entirely. Others figure out quickly which firm has the relationship and ignore the rest. The result is not broader coverage. It is noise.
Then there is the effort problem. A recruiting firm working on an exclusive search knows that their work will produce a result. The fee is tied to their performance alone. They have every reason to go deep, to reach out to people who are harder to find, to spend the extra hour on a Thursday afternoon chasing down a lead that might or might not go anywhere.
A recruiting firm working on a five way contingency search is doing a very different calculation. They know there is a high probability someone else fills the role before they do. So they focus their energy on the candidates they can present fastest, not the candidates who are best. Speed beats quality because speed is what wins in that model.
This is not a knock on the firms. It is just economics.
The candidates you actually want, the ones who are performing well somewhere and are not actively looking, are also the hardest to recruit. They require more conversations, more trust building, more time. They are not going to respond to a cold LinkedIn message from a recruiter who does not know them and has a financial incentive to present them as fast as possible before someone else does.
They will sometimes respond to someone who has a relationship with them, knows their background, and can have an honest conversation about whether a specific opportunity is actually worth exploring.
That kind of recruiting does not happen in a competitive multi-firm environment. It happens when a recruiter has enough confidence in the engagement to invest the time it takes.
The HR head I mentioned called me about two months after that conversation. They had restarted the search, this time exclusively with one firm. The role was filled in eight weeks with a candidate none of the original four firms had ever contacted.
That candidate was not hiding. They just required a different kind of effort to find.
Ramax Search & Staffing works on an exclusive or semi-exclusive basis wherever possible. Not because of how we structure our fees but because of how we do our best work. If you want to understand what that looks like in practice reach out for a conversation.
