Replacement guarantees in recruiting: what to demand

Every agency contract contains a replacement guarantee, and most founders skim it at signing and study it only after a hire has walked out. Read in advance, the clause is one of the most honest documents an agency produces: it states, in enforceable terms, how confident they are in their own screening.

What a standard guarantee says

The typical clause promises a replacement search, not a refund, if the placed candidate leaves within a window, commonly around ninety days. Below that market floor, treat the agency as telling you it expects churn. The window matters because of what failure timing means: a hire who leaves in month two was a screening failure, and the agency should own it.

The terms that actually matter

Four details decide whether a guarantee is real. Coverage: does it apply if the candidate quits and if you terminate for performance, or only one? Remedy: replacement search at no fee is standard; pro-rated refunds are stronger and rarer. Conditions: most clauses void if you changed the role materially or skipped agreed onboarding, which is fair, but vague wording here is an escape hatch, so make the conditions specific. And speed: a guarantee without a committed restart timeline just schedules a slow apology.

What guarantees cannot do

A replacement search still costs you what no clause refunds: months of lost roadmap and team disruption. The guarantee is a backstop, not the product. The product is the screening that makes the clause boring. This is why we would rather show retention numbers than lean on guarantee terms; a guarantee that never triggers is the one you were actually buying. Our screening exists so that it rarely does, and when a hire genuinely does not stick early, we rerun the search.

Ask before you sign

Make agencies state their guarantee trigger rate. Firms that track it will tell you; firms that will not are answering a different way.

Want our terms and our trigger rate on the same page? Book a demo and ask.