Tom is a guy who grew up in the contingency recruiting business. He sold his businesses in 1993 primarily because he felt that clients' needs were not being effectively served. In today's more competitive, candidate poor market, the best candidates are generally doing well and have to be recruited out of their current situations. Contingency firms don't take the time to recruit for your positions. They work as many positions as possible using candidates they have previously gathered, and in these candidate poor markets they obviously become less useful. It is limiting and risky to rely on either corporate job posting sites, or contingency/ database recruiting to find the very best talent. On the other hand, committing to retained search has its own uncertainty, as fees are paid all the time with no results. When he created the Luciani Group, Tom wanted to develop a way of doing search that would combine the best of both worlds, i.e. the commitment, perseverance and process of retained search with the lower risk, productivity and results orientation of contingency. Our hybrid approach calls for an up- front retainer, but makes the other two search payments subject to specific deliverables including a hire that we cause. If we don't produce, or if the client locates the successful candidate, we don't get paid.