This is not laziness, but a rational response to a broken incentive structure. And it is costing the clients who commission this work considerably more than they realise.

How the Model Works Against You

Most IT recruitment operates on contingency: the agency earns its fee only when a candidate is successfully placed. No placement, no invoice. On the surface this sounds like a performance-aligned arrangement. In practice, it produces exactly the wrong behaviour.

When payment depends on speed and volume rather than quality, volume becomes the strategy. An agency working a £100k role on contingency has every incentive to submit eight CVs fast and hope two stick, rather than spending three hours identifying and properly approaching the two candidates who are genuinely exceptional. Time invested in rigorous pre-screening is time that might yield nothing if a competing agency places someone first - and in most contingency arrangements, multiple agencies work the same role simultaneously.

The race-to-submit dynamic is not a character flaw in recruiters. It is an entirely predictable consequence of the structure clients have agreed to.

The Candidates You Never See

Here is the measurement problem at the heart of this: you have no visibility into who ignored the outreach.

A top engineer with many years of experience, currently employed, passively open to opportunities - they receive a generic "Hi, I have an exciting opportunity" message with a request to send a CV. They have already been approached four times this week by people who clearly have not read their profile. They archive the message.

Your hiring manager sees eight CVs. They do not see the nine engineers who filtered out on the quality of the outreach itself. The process appears to have worked because it produced candidates. The negative selection - the systematic loss of people with enough options to be discerning - is invisible.

This is not a hypothetical concern. The more senior and in-demand a candidate, the less tolerance they have for low-effort approaches and the more alternatives they have available. Low-effort recruitment is therefore a mechanism that selects against the candidates you most want.

Where the Money Actually Goes

The budget problem is structural. Recruitment fees come out of one line; the cost of a bad hire comes out of several others.

A placement fee for a £100k role sits somewhere between £15,000 and £25,000. That is visible, approved, and closed when the invoice is paid. What does not appear on anyone's budget sheet is the following:

• Onboarding cost for a candidate who leaves within six months, or quietly underperforms for twelve

• Manager time spent on performance management that should have been pre-screening

• Team disruption from a poor cultural or technical fit

• Re-recruitment cost when the process has to restart

These costs are diffuse, delayed, and rarely attributed back to the quality of the original recruitment process. The person who approved the contingency arrangement has usually moved on by the time the consequences become visible. Most agency contracts include rebate clauses for early leavers, but almost none account for the slower, more expensive failure mode: someone who stays, is mediocre, and nobody does anything about it.

The result is that the true cost-per-hire for low-quality recruitment is substantially higher than the invoice suggests. It just never appears as a single number on anyone's spreadsheet.

What Good Looks Like

None of this is structurally inevitable. The retained executive search model exists precisely because at a certain seniority level, clients eventually notice that the contingency approach produces poor results and start paying for something different. The solution does not require invention - it requires applying what already works at the C-suite level one or two rungs lower.

Practically, if you commission external recruitment for senior technical roles:

Pay for exclusivity, or at least limit agency count. Multiple agencies working the same brief simultaneously creates the race-to-submit pressure that destroys quality. One retained agency with a genuine brief produces better results than five contingency agencies producing volume.

Require evidence of candidate engagement before CV submission. A recruiter who has spoken to a candidate for thirty minutes and can summarise their motivations, notice period, and technical background is doing a different job than one who has forwarded a PDF. Make this a submission requirement.

Define quality-of-hire as a metric, not just time-to-fill. If your only feedback to an agency is "placed" or "not placed," you are not giving them the information they need to improve. If you track twelve-month retention and performance review outcomes against source of hire, patterns become visible quickly.

Put a number on the cost of a bad hire. Even a rough internal estimate - onboarding, ramp time, management overhead, re-recruitment - gives procurement a basis to evaluate whether the cheapest fee is actually the cheapest option.

Summary

The IT recruitment market, as currently structured for mid-to-senior technical roles, optimises for throughput rather than quality. This is not because quality is impossible to achieve, but because the incentives do not currently reward it, and the costs of poor quality are successfully hidden across multiple budgets and time horizons.

The candidates worth hiring are evaluating your recruitment process as evidence of how your organisation operates. An impersonal, high-volume approach to finding someone you will pay £100,000 a year sends a signal. Some of those candidates will draw conclusions from it.

The firms that treat recruitment as a quality problem rather than a logistics problem tend to find better people, faster, with lower total cost. They are also, notably, not the majority. Which means there is still a meaningful competitive advantage available to any organisation willing to do it properly.