Three ways to fill a Facilities Management role.
Most FM appointments are made in one of three ways: contingency recruitment, retained executive search, or by the organisation's own team. Each works well in the right conditions and badly in the wrong ones. The choice should follow the role, the market and the cost of getting it wrong, not habit.
This page sets out how each route works, where it fits and where it struggles, so you can choose before you brief anyone. That includes us.
Contingency recruitment
How it works: the agency is paid only if its candidate is appointed. Clients often brief several agencies at once, and each submits candidates from its own database, network and advertising.
- Fits: well-defined roles, an active candidate market, mid-level and operational appointments, and hires where several good candidates are likely to be looking.
- Struggles: the incentive is to submit quickly, so time spent on the brief, on market mapping and on approaching people who are not looking is limited. With several agencies involved, the same candidate can reach you more than once, and confidentiality is harder to hold.
Retained executive search
How it works: one firm is engaged on an exclusive basis, with the fee committed in stages. The firm defines the role with you, maps the market and approaches the people best suited to it directly and confidentially, whether or not they are looking.
- Fits: senior, director and board-level appointments; confidential replacements; scarce or specialist skills; roles created during a restructure, mobilisation or transformation; any appointment where a wrong hire is expensive.
- Struggles: the cost is committed before a candidate is presented, and the definition stage takes time at the start. For a role that many suitable people are actively applying for, it can be more process than the appointment needs.
Hiring in-house
How it works: your HR or talent team advertises the role, uses its own networks and runs selection.
- Fits: organisations with a strong employer brand in FM, roles that attract good direct applicants, internal promotions and sideways moves, and teams with the time to run the process well.
- Struggles: reaching FM leaders who are not looking, judging technical and compliance depth in a specialist field, benchmarking the market, and finding the time when the team is already stretched.
The questions that decide it
- How senior is the role, and what would a wrong appointment cost you over the next two years?
- Are the people you want likely to be looking, or will they need to be found and approached?
- Does the search need to stay confidential, inside or outside the organisation?
- Is the brief settled? If not, none of the three routes will fix it. Test it first with the Role Readiness check, or the FM Talent Scan check if the question is wider than one role.
- Does your own team have the time and the specialist market knowledge to run it?
How Maxwell Stephens works
We work both ways. We run retained executive search for senior, director and board-level FM appointments, and contingency recruitment for roles where that is the better fit. We will recommend the route that suits the role, not the one that suits us. Before a senior search we assess the environment the role sits in, then each candidate. How we assess senior FM leaders.
If the role does not need us, or your own team is better placed to fill it, we will tell you. If the structure needs settling before anyone is hired, we will tell you that too.
Related tools
- Vacancy exposure calculator: what an unfilled leadership role is costing you
- Hiring trade-off simulator: how pay, location and experience requirements interact
- Hire, develop or interim planner: whether the gap needs a hire at all
Talk to Maxwell Stephens
If you are deciding how to fill an FM role, talk to us before you brief anyone. Call 0207 118 4848.