RAYE Waited Seven Years to Be Told She Was Good Enough. Most Recruitment Business Owners Are Still Waiting.

Friday afternoon. The owner of a search firm is on the phone with a hiring manager he's placed four people with in two years.

New role. Head of Engineering. The biggest search this client has run.

He asks, carefully, whether they'd consider working with him on an exclusive basis this time.

"Let's see how you get on with this one first. If it goes well, we can talk about that next time."

He's heard that line from this client twice before. He says that makes sense. By Monday the role is with three other agencies.

Seven years in a folder

In 2014 a 17 year old from Croydon signed a four album deal with Polydor. Her name is RAYE.

Seven years later she still hadn't released an album. She'd put out EPs, singles, a mini album, and her vocals on other people's dance hits. No album.

In June 2021 she put it all on Twitter. Seven years on a four album deal, and no album to show for it. Three weeks later she and the label had agreed to part ways, and she went independent.

What she described in those posts will sound familiar to anyone who has run a recruitment firm on contingency.

The deal most owners are on

Most recruitment and search business owners are on a version of RAYE's deal.

You do the work up front. The briefing call where you tell the client what the role really needs to pay. The market map. The longlist. The candidates you've spent years building relationships with.

A client who's hedging can take all of that, run three other agencies alongside you, and pay only whoever crosses the line first. Some of your best candidates get hired through someone else. Some get hired direct, eighteen months later, off the back of a CV you sent.

RAYE described the same thing. She said she had songs piling up that never came out, and that some were going to A-list artists while she waited to be told she was good enough to make her own record. By then she'd written for Beyoncé, John Legend and David Guetta. Other people's records, built on her work.

That's your folder. Good work that never got released, or got released under someone else's name.

And when you ask for better terms, you get the line she got. She said she'd been told the album could happen if her next single did well enough. Prove yourself on this one and we'll talk.

Most owners take it. We've all taken it at some point. It sounds reasonable, the client stays happy, and you avoid the uncomfortable conversation for another quarter.

Nobody hands you the green light

The industry treats retained and exclusive terms as a reward. Do enough good contingency work for a client and one day they'll offer you the better deal.

They won't.

Look at it from his side of the desk. Contingency gives him four firms working for free, and he pays the one that lands. Every time you fill a role brilliantly on those terms, you prove to him that the arrangement works. You're making his case for him.

RAYE's label had her songs either way. Seven years of waiting didn't change that, and waiting politely didn't change it either. In the end she stopped waiting. "I'm done being a polite pop star."

Owners who get retained terms ask for them before the work starts, and they're ready to lose the client who says no.

What changes once the terms are yours

Most recruitment business owners who wait to be offered better terms are in the same place five years later. Bigger client list, same fee model. Busier every year and no more secure. One quiet quarter away from dropping the fee again to get something over the line.

RAYE's debut album came out two years after she left. The following spring it won Album of the Year at the Brits. She took six awards that night, a record for a single ceremony. One of them was Songwriter of the Year, and she was the first woman to win it. The songwriting she'd been handing to other artists was now winning her trophies.

Since then she's had the first UK number one single of 2026 and a number one album, with every track written or co-written by her.

The talent was there in 2014. What changed in 2021 was who set the terms.

Owners who make the same move run a different business. Roles arrive with money committed before the shortlist goes out. They work five searches properly instead of fifteen as a race. The brief stops going to three other firms, because the client is now invested in you finding the person. The fee is agreed before the work starts, so nobody is haggling at offer stage.

It moves faster than most people expect. One owner we work with went from 100% contingency to four retainers in three weeks.

The shift

Before, you have fifteen live roles and you're competing on most of them. Every Friday you look at the board with no real idea what next month bills. You defend your fee at the end of every placement, because nothing was agreed at the start.

After, you have fewer roles and each one is paid for. You know in January what the first quarter looks like. Owners we work with have gone from no retained business at all to more than half their revenue retained inside a year. Others now win work at five to six times the fees they used to accept.

Then there are the hours. Sunday night stops being the night you re-send CVs on a role you're racing three agencies to fill. You stop checking your phone at your daughter's parents' evening to see whether a client has gone quiet. When a search is yours, you can put it down for an evening.

It isn't free. Some clients won't pay for a search up front, and you'll lose them. RAYE said recently that being independent costs her a lot more, and that the reward is choosing where the money goes. Retained works the same way. You stop chasing the clients who only ever wanted you on spec, and you put your time into the ones who've committed to you.

One thing to do this week

List your live roles. Next to each one, write how many other agencies you think are working it.

Then go back over last month. Add up the hours you spent on roles that went to someone else, or went nowhere.

That number is your folder.

Over to you

RAYE was told to prove herself on the next single.

The last time a client told you to prove yourself on this one and you'd talk terms next time, did next time ever come?

Tell me in the comments.

Where to go next

Moving your best clients off contingency is what we call Fee-Structure Freedom™. It's built into the APEX System™, and it doesn't work in isolation. The terms you can hold depend on how clients see you before the first conversation, and on what's in your pipeline if one of them says no.

The free training at makemoreplacements.com/vsl shows how that fits together and where the biggest opportunity in your business probably sits. Under an hour. No fluff.

Watch it before you take the next role on someone else's terms.