Retained vs. Contingency Search: Which Is Right for Your F&B Brand

"Should we go retained or contingency?" It's one of the first questions a founder asks me, usually right after they've decided they can't fill a senior role on their own. It sounds like a pricing question. It isn't. It's a question about how much rigor your next hire deserves.

Both models can work. They're just built for different jobs. Pick the wrong one for the role in front of you and you either overpay for a hire that didn't need the firepower, or you under-resource the most important decision your brand will make this year.

Here's how each model actually works, where each one fits, and the question that matters more than the model itself.

How Retained Search Works

In a retained search, you engage one firm exclusively. You pay in installments across the life of the search — typically a portion up front, a portion at a milestone, and the balance on placement — and the firm commits to working the role until it's filled. You're not buying a resume pile. You're buying dedicated, exclusive effort.

Because the firm is paid regardless of how fast it finishes, the incentive is to get it right rather than get it quick. That's why retained is the standard for senior, confidential, and hard-to-fill roles. The Association of Executive Search and Leadership Consultants, the industry's trade body since 1959, holds member firms to professional standards around research depth, candidate care, and conflict management — the things you're actually paying for when you go retained.

The model dominates the senior end of the market for a reason. Retained engagements accounted for roughly 63 percent of executive search activity in 2025, according to Mordor Intelligence's market research. When the stakes are highest, companies want one firm fully accountable.

How Contingency Search Works

In a contingency search, you only pay the firm that successfully places a candidate. There's no retainer and no commitment on either side. You can hand the same role to several firms at once and the first to deliver a hire collects the fee — usually 20 to 30 percent of first-year compensation.

On paper that sounds like a great deal. No risk, no upfront cost, pay only for results. And for the right role, it is. Contingency shines when you're filling higher-volume positions where a wide, fast net beats deep, deliberate research — think a regional sales rep, a plant supervisor, or a brand manager where there's a deep active candidate pool.

The catch is what that incentive does to behavior. A contingency recruiter only eats if they place someone, and often they're racing other firms for the same fee. That rewards speed and volume. They'll send you the candidates who are already applying, fast, rather than spend three weeks headhunting the one executive who isn't looking at all.

The best candidate for a senior CPG role is almost never applying to it. They're running a brand somewhere else and have to be approached directly. Contingency economics quietly discourage exactly that work.

Why the Choice Hits Harder in F&B and CPG

Every industry has this debate. Food and beverage and CPG make the stakes sharper, for a few reasons I see play out constantly.

The talent pool is narrow and relationship-driven

The person who has scaled a better-for-you snack brand from $20M to $80M, navigated a co-man transition, and survived a category reset at a national retailer is not a common profile. There might be forty of them in the country who fit your stage. You don't find that person in an applicant pile. You find them through research and a direct, credible approach — the core of retained work.

An empty senior seat is expensive every single day

This is the part founders underweight. SHRM's benchmarking puts the average cost to fill an executive role near $36,000 in direct spend, well above the roughly $5,500 it costs to fill a typical position. But the direct fee isn't the real number. A vacant VP of Sales seat during a retailer line review, or a missing COO during peak production, costs you opportunity you never get back. A slower, cheaper search is not cheaper if the seat stays empty two extra months. You can model your own version of this in our executive compensation calculator.

Confidentiality often matters

Sometimes you're replacing someone who's still in the seat, or you don't want competitors and retail partners to know you're between leaders. Contingency, by its nature, spreads your role across multiple firms and lots of inboxes. Retained keeps it contained.

So Which One Is Right for You?

Here's the simple version I give founders.

Go contingency when the role is mid-level, the candidate pool is deep and active, speed matters more than depth, and a misfire is recoverable in a quarter. You're optimizing for reach and cost.

Go retained when the role is senior, the candidate pool is thin, the right person is passive, confidentiality matters, or a bad hire would set you back a year. That's most VP, C-suite, and founding-team-adjacent hires in this industry. If you're scoping one of those, here's how we open a search.

If you're still unsure, ask yourself one question: if this hire fails, how long until we recover? If the answer is "a few weeks," contingency is fine. If the answer is "most of next year," you want one firm fully accountable for getting it right.

The Question That Matters More Than the Model

Here's what most "retained vs. contingency" articles miss. Once you've decided a role deserves retained search, you face a second choice that affects your wallet far more: how the retained firm charges.

The traditional retained model bills 30 to 35 percent of the hire's first-year total compensation. On a $250,000 executive, that's $75,000 to $87,500 — and notice what that does to incentives. The higher the salary you agree to, the more your search firm earns. Your recruiter is quietly motivated to push the offer up. That's the same misalignment contingency has, just dressed in a nicer suit.

We built High Altitude Partners to remove that. We run retained searches — full exclusivity, deep research, written candidate evaluations, a 90-day guarantee — but at a published flat fee instead of a percentage. The cost is identical whether the final salary lands at $200,000 or $320,000, so the only thing we're incentivized to optimize is fit. Every search is priced the same way, publicly. That combination — retained rigor without percentage pricing — is the whole reason the firm exists, and it's spelled out in how our search process runs.

So the honest answer to "retained or contingency?" is usually: for a senior F&B or CPG hire, retained — but make sure you understand how that retained firm gets paid before you sign anything.

The Bottom Line

Contingency is a fine tool for the right role. For the leadership hires that determine whether your brand hits its next stage, you want exclusivity, real research, and a firm whose paycheck doesn't depend on inflating your offer or beating three other agencies to an inbox.

Match the model to the stakes, then look hard at the fee structure underneath it. Get both right and the search stops feeling like a gamble and starts feeling like what it should be — the most leverage you'll buy all year.