Automation lets contingency recruiters send far more messages than they could a few years ago, and many of them now do. The result is that candidates get so many approaches that they ignore most of them.
Good candidates haven't stopped moving. They move through people they trust: a former boss, a colleague, a recruiter who gave them honest advice once. The approach that gets a reply is usually from someone they already know, or from someone a person they know has introduced.
That has changed the shape of the contingency market. After more than twenty years recruiting in Japan, this is how I see it now.
Three layers
The top 10 to 15% of candidates are already known. Their peers know them, investors know them, and the leaders who would hire them know them. Most of them are hired directly, through their own networks, without an agency.
The bottom half of the market won't be hired through an agency either. Those hires happen through job boards, employee referrals and direct applications. A company isn't going to pay a recruiter's fee for them, and in most cases it doesn't need to.
The middle is where the volume is, and it's where most contingency recruiters make their living. It's also where automation has made recruiters loudest and where candidates have stopped answering. I believe that volume hiring will move to platforms. Until it does, more companies will use RPO for it.
These layer sizes are my own estimate from the searches I've run. They aren't published figures, and other recruiters will draw the lines in different places. I'd still be surprised if many experienced recruiters in Japan disagreed with the overall shape.
What I mean by commoditisation
When AI can do most of the research, writing and admin behind a contingency placement, the work becomes easier to copy. More firms can do it, and faster. When a service is easy to copy, clients start to buy it on price and speed. That's what I mean by commoditisation.
It doesn't mean contingency recruitment disappears next year. Good contingency recruiters will make a good living for a long time yet. But the part of the job a client really pays for is getting smaller, and the part a machine can do is getting bigger.
I think more contingency recruiters will respond by trying to move into retained and executive search, and over time that will put pressure on fees there too. I don't see that as something to complain about. It's what happens when a market changes, and the people who plan for it will do better than the people who hope it goes away.
Where clients still pay for the work
Clients still pay for judgement. They pay for someone who understands their business, can tell them who in the market can really do the job, will tell them honestly when the brief or the offer is wrong, and can close a candidate who has three other options.
That work happens in relationships, and it's hard to automate. It's also where senior search sits.
Many of the best senior search consultants in Japan learned the job at contingency firms. I wrote about two of them in From Contingency Recruiting to Executive Search. They took about a year to learn how executive search works, and then became million-dollar billers. The move is possible, but it takes a real change in how you work, with less order taking and more understanding of the client's business.
Why we built the platform first
This view is why Aspiring Partners is set up the way it is.
Our senior people focus on executive search, where relationships decide the outcome. Below that level we don't do contingency. We run that hiring as RPO, with AI on our own platform doing most of the sourcing, screening and admin.
We built the platform before building the team because I wanted consultants to have the research, mapping and admin done for them from their first day. That lets a consultant run more searches well, and spend their time where clients still pay for it: on calls with candidates, in meetings with clients, and on the judgement that gets a search closed.
Questions worth asking yourself
If you're a contingency recruiter, these are the questions I'd be thinking about:
Which of your placements this year could a platform or an RPO team have made without you?
Do your best candidates come to you because they trust you, or because you got to them first?
Do your clients ask for your advice, or only for CVs?
If you wanted to move into senior search, who would teach you how?
If the honest answers make you uncomfortable, now is a good time to start planning your next step.
