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How Long Should a Recruitment Replacement Guarantee Period Be?
A fair recruitment replacement guarantee period runs 30 to 90 days for most hires, with the shorter end for junior or high-volume roles and the longer end for senior or niche mandates. The right length depends on the seniority of the hire, how the clock starts, and what counts as a covered exit. Write all three into the agency contract.
| Term to set | What to write | Benchmark or pass mark |
|---|---|---|
| Guarantee window | Days from the candidate's joining date | 30 to 90 days on CBREX placements; longer only for senior or niche roles |
| Covered exits | Resignation and dismissal for performance within the window | Name exclusions in writing (for example role changes or redundancy) |
| First shortlist | Hours from role posting to first CVs | 24 hours on CBREX; 24 to 48 hours for one UAE role |
| Interview-to-offer ratio | Maximum interviews per offer | 1:3 to 1:4 after 3-level screening on recent CBREX searches |
| Time to hire | Days from opening to accepted offer | 15 to 45 days for India-based roles on CBREX |
| Duplicate submissions | Who owns a candidate two agencies send | Blocked at upload on the CBREX platform |
| Escalation | Who is told, and by when, after a missed target | Named contact at each step, written response times |
Most replacement guarantees should run 30 to 90 days from the candidate's joining date. Use about 30 days for entry-level or high-volume hires, 60 days for mid-level roles, and 90 days for senior, leadership or niche roles where a refill takes months. CBREX placements are covered for 30 to 90 days.
That range is a starting point, not a rule. Published procurement paperwork shows the same pattern. A University of California systemwide contract summary for retained search firms lists a clause covering a placed candidate who quits within 30 days, so even large buyers write short, specific windows rather than open-ended promises.
Ask one question: how long would it take you to notice a bad fit, and how long would a replacement search take? If a new joiner shows real performance signals within six weeks and a refill takes three weeks, 30 to 60 days is enough. If the role takes a quarter to prove itself, ask for 90.
Our view: for any role you would not refill within a month, do not accept less than 60 days. For leadership and country-manager hires, push for 90. If an agency will not move off 30 days on a senior mandate, take that as a signal about how confident it is in its own screening.
Where a role is so scarce that a refill would take longer than the guarantee itself, a longer window matters more than a lower fee. That is the one case where we would trade price for time.
No single number is right for every country. Notice periods, probation rules and local employment law differ across the markets CBREX covers, and a 90-day window in one country may be shorter than the candidate's notice period in another. Check the local norm with the agency on the ground before you copy a window across borders.
Vague terms let fulfilment slip because nobody can prove a breach. If the contract never defines a shortlist deadline, a quality bar or a start date for the guarantee, a slow agency has nothing to miss. The buyer absorbs the delay as lost time, not as a recoverable failure.
The pattern is familiar to any TA team running many agencies. Each one has its own contract, its own invoice format and its own idea of what "guarantee" means. Chasing them uses up recruiter time, and the weakest terms usually belong to the agency you use least.
One CBREX client consolidated 54 agency contracts into a single CBREX contract. Before that, its time to hire ran 60 to 75 days. For India-based roles on CBREX, we typically see 15 to 45 days from opening to hire. The terms did not shrink the calendar on their own, but one set of enforceable clauses made slow vendors easy to spot. For more on that move, see how recruitment vendor consolidation works.
On CBREX the third gap is closed by design. The duplicate check is built into the platform, so an agency sees at the moment of upload that a candidate is already submitted and cannot add that candidate again.
Start the guarantee on the candidate's first day of work, not on offer acceptance. Offer acceptance can sit weeks before joining, and a candidate who never joins is a different problem from one who leaves. State the end date as a number of calendar days after joining.
Spell out what triggers a replacement. A workable list covers resignation by the hire, termination for performance or conduct, and failure to complete probation. Then name the exclusions you accept, such as redundancy, a change in the role's scope, or a relocation you requested.
Decide up front whether you want a free replacement search, a refund, or a choice between them. A sample employment agency contract guide from NC State notes that agencies may limit liability to a partial refund, with 50% given as an example, so a "guarantee" can be much weaker than it sounds. Ask which remedy applies and in what share.
For the full list of what a guarantee does and does not usually cover, read our companion piece, Recruitment Replacement Guarantee: What It Covers, What It Doesn't.
Put a number of hours on first shortlist and a number of days on time to hire. Without them, speed is a promise, not a term. Our own benchmarks give you a realistic starting point so you do not ask for the impossible or accept far too little.
Speed varies by country and role, so write the target per role tier and per market, not as one blanket number. Our time-to-fill FAQs explain what stretches a search.
Set a grace rule: if the first shortlist is late by more than half the target, the agency must tell you why in writing and send a revised date. If it is late twice on the same role, reassign the role to another agency. Without a reassignment right, you wait out the clock.
Define a quality bar you can measure: the share of shortlisted candidates who reach interview, and how many interviews it takes to produce one offer. A ratio is harder to argue with than a phrase like "high-quality candidates".
Clients on CBREX saw interview-to-offer ratios of 1:3 to 1:4 per recent search after 3-level screening. That means roughly three to four interviews for each offer. Treat 1:3 to 1:4 as the pass mark. If an agency's candidates need many more interviews per offer, the problem sits in its pre-screen, and your contract should let you act on it.
If you run agencies outside a platform, ask each to show how it screens before submission. A refusal to describe the process is the walk-away answer. For a deeper look at this, see our guide on how 3-level candidate screening works.
The most common mistake we see from India-based GCC heads in a first hiring brief is not benchmarking the level of talent they want against market salaries. They ask for very high-quality talent but do not pay at that level. No guarantee clause can fix that, and the ratio will suffer.
Escalation should be a short ladder with names and deadlines: a named contact at the agency, a response time, a consequence at each step, and a final right to remove the agency from a role. Write it so that a missed target triggers action without anyone needing to argue.
This mirrors the common structure in service level agreements, where a first breach reaches a team lead and a second breach within 30 days reaches a director.
The fee mistake we see most is calibrating fees by years of experience alone, not by how hard the hire is. A scarce 8-year engineer can be harder to land than a 15-year generalist. Our guide to agency fees as a percentage of salary covers how percentages work. Fees also vary by the country of the hire, so agree both with the market in mind.
Use a simple tier table to avoid renegotiating clause by clause on every role. Group roles by seniority and by refill difficulty, then attach a window and a remedy to each tier. The numbers below are our suggested starting points within the 30 to 90 day range CBREX placements carry.
| Role tier | Suggested window | Why | Extra clause to ask for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry-level or high-volume | 30 days | Fit shows quickly; refills are fast | Replacement within a set number of working days |
| Mid-level specialist | 60 days | Performance needs a full ramp-up | Written list of covered exits |
| Senior, niche or leadership | 90 days | Refill takes months, so a longer window protects you | Guarantee restarts on the replacement |
| Confidential GCC head role | 90 days | Discretion and a narrow talent pool | Named search partner and confidentiality terms |
Our confidential option for GCC head roles maps only boutique search firms whose owners are industry veterans with more than two decades of experience. They know how to stay discreet and bring their own industry networks. For roles like these, a longer window fits, because a failed hire is public and costly. We have completed more than 50 country-manager and head-of-market placements, including one in Japan.
Check each market's rules before you set a window. In Singapore, for example, we ask agencies for their licence documentation at onboarding, and 18 active MOM-licensed agencies handle Singapore roles on our platform. Licence checks belong in the contract as a condition, not as a favour. Our guide on how many agencies to use per role helps you decide how many to brief in each market.
A guarantee is a safety net, not a quality measure. The better question is how often it is needed. More than 90% of our local hires stayed at least 12 months. Ask any agency for its own 12-month retention rate, and treat an unwillingness to share it as a walk-away signal.
This is a hypothetical example, not a real client. A company hires a mid-level engineer through an agency under a 60-day guarantee that starts on the joining date. The engineer resigns on day 52. Because the exit falls inside the window and resignation is a covered exit, the agency owes a free replacement search.
The clause might read: "If the placed candidate resigns or is dismissed for performance or conduct within 60 calendar days of the joining date, the Agency will begin a replacement search within five working days of written notice and will not charge a further fee." Change the number of days and the notice period to suit your role tier.
Now suppose the same engineer had resigned on day 64. Nothing is owed, and the argument is over before it starts, because the dates were written down. That is the point of a precise clock.
Send this checklist to each agency before you brief a role. If an agency will not agree to the dates and the remedy, that is a cheaper lesson than a disputed fee.
The most common range is 30 to 90 days from the joining date. Junior or high-volume roles usually sit at 30 days, mid-level roles at 60, and senior or niche roles at 90 or longer. CBREX placements carry a replacement guarantee of 30 to 90 days.
Only if the contract says so. Many agreements cover dismissal for performance or conduct but exclude redundancy or a change in the role. Always list covered exits and exclusions in writing, because unwritten cases become disputes after the hire has already left.
A free replacement suits you if the role is still open and the agency is strong. A refund suits you if trust is gone. Ask for your choice of either. Be wary of partial refunds, since a clause may cap the amount at a share of the original fee.
Yes. A single-contract model sets one guarantee structure across all agencies and markets, with local adjustments by role tier. CBREX runs this through one agreement. See our explainer on how single-contract recruitment works.
A sound recruitment replacement guarantee period is only one clause in a contract that also needs shortlist targets, interview ratios and an escalation ladder. CBREX gives you one contract and one set of terms across 4,000+ specialist agencies in 55 countries, and you pay only when a hire is made.
Book a demo to see how the 24-hour shortlist and the 3-level screening work on a live role. To see what scattered agency terms already cost you, calculate your hidden hiring tax. Prefer a conversation first? Let's talk about your guarantee terms and which role tiers need which window.
