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Contingency recruiting pays for speed. You are buying fit.

Permanent recruitment rewards being first with a plausible candidate, not right with the correct one. MENTARA structures engagements so those interests align.

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The decision in front of you

Most permanent recruitment is contingency: the agency is paid only on placement, competing with other agencies for the same role. The rational strategy under that model is volume and speed — submit early, submit often, and invest as little unpaid assessment time as possible, because most of it will not convert.

You are buying something different. A senior hire who is wrong costs months of salary, the opportunity cost of the role sitting unfilled again, the disruption to the team, and the credibility of the hiring manager who championed them. The interests are misaligned at the structural level, and no amount of relationship management fixes that.

The failure mode

The requirement everyone agreed to and nobody examined.

Most hiring failures are traceable to the brief rather than the search. A role gets specified as a list of technologies and a seniority label, because that is quick to write and easy to circulate, and it omits the things that actually determine success — what this person will decide, who they must influence, what state the codebase or the function is in, what the last person in the role found difficult, and which of the listed requirements are genuinely required.

A supplier paid on speed has no incentive to interrogate that brief, because interrogating it delays submission and might reveal that the role as written should not be hired at all. So the brief goes unchallenged, candidates are matched against it, and the mismatch is discovered at second interview.

The second failure is candidate experience, which directly determines who you can hire. Strong candidates are not desperate; they are evaluating you throughout. Slow feedback, unclear process, an interview panel that has not read the CV, or an offer that arrives three weeks after the final stage will lose you the people you most wanted — and the agency will report this as the candidate having other offers rather than as a process failure you could have fixed.

How MENTARA works

What we do differently.

01The brief gets interrogated firstBefore sourcing: what this person decides, who they influence, the real state of what they inherit, and which listed requirements are genuinely required. This regularly changes the role.
02Fewer candidates, actually assessedA small shortlist of people spoken to properly about this specific role, with stated reservations. We would rather send two than eight.
03Reservations disclosedWhat we did not verify, and where each candidate is weaker against the brief. A shortlist where everyone looks uniformly excellent has been curated rather than assessed.
04Process honestyIf your interview process is losing you candidates — too slow, too many stages, unprepared panels — we tell you. It is the most common fixable cause of failed searches.
05Guarantee terms agreed upfrontThe qualifying period and what happens if the hire does not work out, defined in the framework before the search starts.
06No candidate feesCandidates are never charged by MENTARA for anything, at any stage.
Approach

How a search runs.

  1. 01 Rewrite the brief

    Turn a technology list into a description of the work, the decisions and the context. Frequently the most valuable part of the engagement, and it sometimes concludes the role should be structured differently.

  2. 02 Agree the process before sourcing

    Stages, panel, timelines and feedback commitments settled first — because a process that cannot move at pace will lose the strongest candidates regardless of sourcing quality.

  3. 03 Source and assess

    Direct approach and network rather than volume advertising, with real conversations about the role rather than keyword matching.

  4. 04 Support to offer and start

    Honest expectation-setting on both sides through offer, notice and onboarding — the period when accepted offers are most often lost.

Questions

What buyers ask.

Do you work contingency or retained?

Both, and we will tell you which suits the role. Contingency is reasonable for roles with a deep candidate market. For senior, scarce or hard-to-specify roles, a retained or partially retained arrangement produces materially better work, because the assessment time is actually funded.

If we think a role is a poor fit for contingency, we will say so rather than take it on and under-invest in it.

You are new — how do you have a candidate network?

Through direct sourcing and professional networks rather than a large proprietary database, and we will not claim scale we do not have. For senior and specialist roles this is often the more effective route regardless.

For high-volume hiring across many roles at once, an established agency has a real advantage and we will tell you that.

What if the hire leaves quickly?

Guarantee terms and the qualifying period are agreed before the search begins. What we will also do is tell you honestly what we think went wrong, including when the answer implicates the role definition or the onboarding rather than the candidate.

Will you tell us if we should not hire?

Yes. Sometimes the honest answer is that the role as specified will not attract who you want at the budget available, that two roles have been merged into one nobody can fill, or that the work should be contracted rather than hired. All of those cost us the placement fee and all of them are the right advice.

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Where MENTARA fits best.

Scope

We fit senior, specialist and hard-to-specify roles where getting it wrong is expensive and where the brief itself needs challenging before the search starts.

Volume hiring campaigns, graduate intakes and recruitment process outsourcing need infrastructure at a scale we are not built for.

Where this connects

Bring the role you have struggled to fill.

Share the business context, constraints and expected outcome. MENTARA will identify the relevant accountable route.

Submit your requirement

One partner. One plan. Measurable outcomes.