A placement is an O-ring job.
By Mitch Sullivan,
An O-ring is a small rubber seal that sits between two parts and is compressed to stop anything leaking through the join.
Bear with me.
A placement is built from a chain of tasks:
the brief → the market map → the insight → the advert → the outreach → the screening → the assessment → the way the candidates are presented → the management and brokering throughout the process → the close
And the output isn't the sum of those tasks, it's the product.
Each task's quality multiplies against the rest, so the weakest link sets the ceiling for the whole job. One bad link and it doesn't matter how good the others were. Do nine of them brilliantly and one of them badly and you don't get 90% of the fee. There's no fee unless every link holds.
And the links aren't equal. Some sit at the front of the chain and everything after is built on what they produce. Take a weak brief. Now the map's searching the wrong market, the advert and outreach are selling the wrong job and the screening's filtering for the wrong things.
Every task after it can be done flawlessly and still be aimed, flawlessly, in the wrong direction.
Most of the time a weak link just silently breaks the placement without the recruiter knowing why. A poor response to the ad or outreach is one - and that often gets filed under “that's just how it goes sometimes”.
One of the loudest breaks happens at the end (the declined offer) and it’s the candidates who usually get the blame for that. This is the nature of contingency and occasionally the recruiter gets away with it.
The space shuttle Challenger didn't get away with it.
In 1986 it came apart because of a single O-ring. And it wasn't bad luck either because the engineers had warned the seal would fail in the cold and were overruled by the suits. It was a known weak link, sent up under pressure in the hope that it would hold.
But hey, that’s management for you.