A placement that ends at eight months is not a placement. It is a cost shared between three parties who all expected something else.

The recruitment industry is structurally biased toward speed. Fees are triggered by starts, not by tenure, and rebate periods are typically short enough that a hire only has to survive a few months for everyone to be paid. It is not difficult to see how that produces volume over fit.

We built our register the other way round, and the reasoning is practical rather than moral.

Mismatch is expensive in ways nobody invoices for

When a hire leaves early, the visible cost is the fee and the re-hire. The invisible costs are larger: the projects that stalled, the team that absorbed the work, the manager who spent three months onboarding and now starts again, and the quiet damage to the employer's reputation among the small number of people qualified to do that job.

In specialised sectors this last point matters enormously. The pool of people who genuinely understand ethical supply chains in fashion is not large. Word travels.

Verification changes the conversation

When we examine an employer before listing a role — governance, supply chain, certification, and an annual reassessment — the exercise produces something more useful than a pass or fail. It produces an accurate description.

We can tell a candidate what the organisation has actually achieved, where it is still weak, and what the role can realistically influence. Candidates who accept a position on that basis arrive without illusions, which is the single best predictor of whether they will still be there in two years.

Honest briefs filter better than screening ever does

Counterintuitively, describing a role's limitations attracts stronger applicants rather than fewer. Experienced people are wary of briefs that sound frictionless, because they know the work is never frictionless. A brief that says "the supplier data is incomplete and fixing it is the first year of this job" reaches exactly the person who finds that interesting.

The candidates deterred by that honesty were usually the ones who would have left.

Resilience comes from alignment, not enthusiasm

Teams that hold together through difficult periods — a missed target, a supplier failure, a restructuring — tend to share an accurate understanding of what the organisation is trying to do and how far along it is. Teams built on enthusiasm alone fracture when the enthusiasm meets reality.

Alignment of that kind is created at the point of hiring or not at all. It cannot be installed afterwards through culture initiatives.

What we ask of both sides

  • From employers: documentation rather than assertion, and a willingness to have weaknesses described accurately to candidates.
  • From candidates: honesty about experience, and consent before any introduction — we never send a CV without asking first.
  • From ourselves: a smaller register than we could otherwise operate, and the discipline to say no to roles we cannot describe truthfully.

This is slower. It is also the only version of the work we think is worth doing, and the retention figures across our placements suggest it is not merely a nicer way to operate — it is a more effective one.