Field note · August 2026

The Multi-Agency Tax

A hiring manager who lists a senior role and starts fielding calls from five recruiting firms usually reads that as leverage. More options, more candidates, better odds of a fast fill. In practice it tends to produce the opposite: longer cycles, worse candidate quality, and fees that get negotiated down regardless of firm quality — a cost every party in the transaction quietly pays.

The mechanism is simple. Once a role is visible to five recruiters instead of one, no single firm has enough at stake to prioritize it. Each is running it alongside a dozen other open searches, submitting whoever’s available rather than whoever’s right, because the odds of any one submission landing have dropped along with the exclusivity. The company ends up reviewing more resumes of lower average fit, taking longer to find someone worth an offer, while believing the extra vendors bought them speed.

Competition among recruiters doesn’t make a search faster. It makes every recruiter treat it as less worth their best effort.

The recruiters feel it too. A firm that’s one of five is negotiating from a weaker position than a firm that’s the only one in the room — fee pressure goes up exactly when exclusivity goes down, which is backwards from how most hiring managers assume urgency works. “More recruiters working the role” sounds like more urgency. It’s actually the moment urgency starts leaking out of the process, because now everyone’s optimizing for whoever delivers fastest rather than whoever delivers best.

None of this is an argument against using multiple recruiters ever. It’s an argument for noticing when a role crosses from “one firm, real commitment” into “several firms, diluted effort” — and for recognizing that the crossing point is usually earlier than it looks, often the moment a role goes fully public rather than staying inside a direct relationship.

— Faris Abbas connects funded, actively-hiring companies with a specialist recruiter before the role becomes a five-firm search.