Contingency Recruitment covers most recruitment transactions. A contingency recruiter, or recruitment agency, is only paid when a candidate is successfully placed in a job.

TOPCHEFS Careers & Recruitment operates as a contingency recruiter, which means we will only invoice you if we successfully place a chef with you.

This is different from “Retained Recruitment.” In contingency recruitment, any fees are paid by the client and never by the candidate, so the recruiter works exclusively for the client. Fees are calculated as a percentage of the candidate’s first-year remuneration.

No, we cannot obtain work permits on behalf of clients. However, we can often help locate excellent quality chefs from abroad and are happy to advise clients, to the best of our abilities, on how they should go about obtaining a work permit for such chefs.

Yes, we do! You will receive a full copy of our refund schedule before we begin working on your vacancy. Additionally, we customarily attach a copy of our up-to-date refund policy and our full Terms of Business (T.O.B.) to each candidate CV we send to you.

At the time of writing, our refund period extends to 12 weeks, with the amounts subject to refund decreasing over time. Currently, we offer a 100% refund/replacement guarantee if the candidate and employer part ways within two weeks of the start date. By the final two weeks of the 12-week refund period, this amount will have reduced to 10%.

The relevant version of our recruitment refund schedule will be attached to the CVs we send to you. Therefore, any reference to specific figures on this website is indicative only.

No, we do not. It’s difficult to be good at everything, so we focus on doing the best job possible in finding and placing full-time, contract, and, on occasion, seasonal chefs. There are agencies that specialize in providing “temps,” but we’re not one of them.

This depends on the nature of the chef’s job, seniority, specialization, etc. We strive to only forward CVs of chefs who are worthy of consideration for the role and have expressed an interest in the job. This can take some time, so we normally advise clients not to expect CVs to arrive immediately.

If there is a particular urgency in filling the position, then we ask clients to inform us of this, and we’ll try to prioritize your project.

If your requirement is very urgent, then it would be best for you to consider hiring a chef on a temporary basis. There are recruitment firms that specialize in providing emergency staff on a short-term basis. Our aim is to find you a longer-term solution.

You will only be charged if we have placed a chef with you. We get paid when we have successfully met your recruitment needs.

In situations where we are approached by a client with whom we do not have an established working relationship and who tasks us with filling multiple positions, we may, by prior agreement only, agree to a schedule of expenses to cover job marketing costs.

The only other exception to this rule is when we’re tasked with pure Search or Headhunting assignments. However, in the overwhelming majority of situations, our clients are only asked to pay us once we’ve found them a chef who they agree to hire.

As soon as you’ve interviewed the candidate and, when applicable, discussed the interview with the other decision makers we’d like your feedback As soon as possible. Ideally this will be on the day of the interview. If that’s not possible for you then the next day is ok too.

If we’ve not received any feedback by lunchtime of the next day then we’ll be following up with you. So what’s our urgency?
Firstly we put ourselves in the shoes of the candidate(s), we wouldn’t, as a chef, like too much time to pass before the people we’ve been dealing with give us some indication as to how our interview went and Let us know what, if any, step will come next.

As time passes chefs often become unsettled by the radio silence.
Secondly the better the chef the shorter the odds that we will end up competing for their services. In such situations time is not on our side and thus it favours those employers who are prepared to offer feedback early and often.
Too long a delay and the decision, as to whether you’ll hire this chef, or not, might taken out of your hands. This does happen and so we would encourage you to follow up after interviews promptly.

In contrast to “Contingency Recruitment” in retained recruitment the recruiter, or agency, gets paid for both the process of recruitment and successfully delivering the desired result.

Usually the deal is structured in three thirds, 1/3 of the fee up front, another 1/3 upon delivery of an agreed number of suitable qualified candidates CVs and the final third after the successful candidate has started work.

Usually retained recruitment is reserved for more senior positions and higher salaries. The fee structure is designed in this way to enable the recruiters to deploy more manpower and resources to the search process than in contingency recruitment, where all the risk is borne by the recruiter.

We operate a scale of fees according to role seniority and remuneration. Clients can rest assured that we agree this fee with them upfront.

If candidate specific fees apply these will appear in the footer of chef candidate CVs forwarded to clients.

If you would like like more information please tell us about the position you need to fill.

When it comes to finding quality Chefs we’re very comfortable competing for your business.

Typically you won’t be charged if we don’t find you the chef you want. However high quality chefs are very good at recognizing patterns in advertising copy and can often tell when a chef job is being marketed by several sources.

While this increases job visibility it does nothing to raise the perceived value of your vacancy in the eyes of the highest quality chefs, some of whom will determine that this must be a problem job, if so many agencies are working on it at once
That’s why using multiple agencies might not be as good an idea as it at first seems.

No! While there is no legal bar to this practice as members of the National Recruitment Federation we’ve signed up to a code of code of conduct which forbids this practice.
This is something clients are advised to take into consideration when choosing a Chef Recruitment Agency.