The delineation between being paid on a contingency basis and being a retained recruiter is fading fast. The philosophy that has prevailed for years is that you can’t successfully o-mingle these two methods of search, where one is paid for the product (contingency) and the other is paid for the process (retained). It has also been thought that the transition from contingency to pure retained is almost insurmountable…a mythology, which we suspect, has been promulgated by the retained community.