Contingency Search for Engineering and Technical Hiring

Contingency search is the efficient instrument for roles where the candidate pool is real and the requirement is well understood: a controls engineer for a second shift, a machine learning engineer joining an established team, a manufacturing engineer for a line launch, an embedded developer with a defined stack. You carry no upfront cost, we carry the risk, and the economics only work for us if we move quickly and present accurately. That alignment suits straightforward searches well.

How our contingency work differs

Most contingency recruiting is a volume game. The same resumes forwarded to five employers, minimal screening, and pressure on you to move fast because the recruiter is racing other agencies rather than covering the market. We run contingency differently, because our reputation in a narrow specialist market is worth more than any single fee.

• Every candidate has a technical conversation with a partner before submission
• Candidates are never submitted to more than a small set of relevant employers
• We confirm interest, compensation expectations, and logistics before you see a resume
• Written summary with each submission, not a bare attachment
• Replacement guarantee on every placement
• No fee of any kind until your hire starts

Where contingency fits

Contingency search works best when three conditions hold. First, the role is not confidential, we can name your company in outreach. Second, the compensation band is genuinely competitive for the market, because we cannot invest weeks persuading candidates to accept below-market offers on a speculative basis. Third, your interview process can move within a couple of weeks; strong engineers in these disciplines hold multiple conversations at once, and slow loops lose them regardless of who sourced them.

Where those conditions do not hold, a confidential leadership replacement, a cleared program role with a bounded pool, a first-of-kind hire, or a search that two other firms have already failed at, a retained engagement is the honest recommendation, and we will make it.

Retained vs. contingency at a glance

• Retained: exclusive, milestone-billed, exhaustive named market coverage, confidential mandates, leadership and cleared roles, weekly written reporting, partner capacity committed in advance.
• Contingency: non-exclusive, fee on placement only, targeted rather than exhaustive coverage, best for individual contributor and mid-level roles in a healthy market with a competitive band.

Roles we place on contingency

Controls and automation engineers, PLC and SCADA programmers, robotics software engineers, machine vision engineers, machine learning and data engineers, embedded and firmware developers, manufacturing and process engineers, and technical project engineers. These span our robotics and automation, AI and machine learning, and industrial manufacturing practices, and each search still runs our four-step process.