Executive Search Firms: Cube vs Mosaic for Placement Fees

A typical retained search engagement bills roughly a third of the total fee at signing, a third at slate presentation, and the remainder at placement. Say a search is priced at $90,000: that's $30,000 recognized at signing, $30,000 at slate presentation, and $30,000 at placement, spread across whatever the actual search timeline turns out to be, often three to five months.

In Cube, you build this as a milestone schedule tied to each search's actual stage, so the forecast updates the moment a search moves from sourcing to slate presentation. In Mosaic, milestone-based professional services billing isn't a native concept, since its revenue engine expects either a one-time transaction or a recurring subscription, so you'd be building a custom milestone schedule as a workaround rather than using a built-in feature.

Most retained search guarantees include a replacement or partial refund clause if the placed candidate leaves within a set window, commonly 90 days. Say a $30,000 final milestone was recognized as revenue, and the candidate leaves in month two: that revenue needs to reverse, and the recruiter hours already spent sourcing a replacement are a real, uncompensated cost that a forecast should have anticipated as a risk, not been surprised by.

Build a clawback reserve as a percentage of placement-stage revenue, based on your firm's own historical guarantee-claim rate, rather than assuming every placement sticks. Cube makes this straightforward to model as a formula-driven reserve against recognized fees. Ask Mosaic in a demo how a guarantee reserve is handled, since you may need to build it as a manual adjustment if clawbacks aren't part of its standard revenue recognition logic.

Fractional executive placements, where a client engages an executive for a set number of days a month on an ongoing basis, behave much closer to a subscription than retained search does: a monthly fee, a start date, and a churn event when the client either hires full-time or ends the engagement. This is the part of the business where Mosaic's SaaS-style logic, new, expansion, contraction, churn, actually applies with minimal adaptation.

Model fractional revenue completely separately from retained search milestones, with its own churn assumption based on typical fractional engagement length, rather than blending both into one monthly revenue number. Blending them hides which line is actually driving growth.

Say your firm books $600,000 in retained search fees and $400,000 in fractional engagement fees over a year. The retained search number is lumpy, tied to search timelines and clawback risk, while the fractional number should be relatively smooth once you have a stable roster of ongoing engagements. A combined revenue chart that shows one line will hide this completely, making a strong fractional quarter look like it's compensating for a weak search quarter when the two lines are actually telling different stories about different parts of the business.

Whichever tool you pick, keep these as two distinct forecasts with their own assumptions, and only combine them at the very top of the model for a total revenue view.

Build the two revenue tracks in this order:

1. Forecast retained search on a milestone schedule tied to each search's stage, so the numbers move as soon as a search advances.
2. Reverse recognized revenue when a placed candidate leaves inside the guarantee window, and record the recruiter hours spent finding a replacement.
3. Model fractional engagements as monthly recurring fees with a start date and a churn event when the client hires full time or ends the engagement.
4. Report the two revenue lines separately so lumpy search fees do not hide inside smoother fractional income.
5. Plan recruiter capacity separately for active sourcing and slate building versus periodic fractional check-ins.

A recruiter working a retained search and supporting an ongoing fractional placement at the same time is splitting attention across two very different workflows: active sourcing and slate-building for the search, versus periodic check-ins and relationship maintenance for the fractional engagement. A capacity plan that treats all recruiter hours as interchangeable will overstate how many active searches your team can actually run well.

Say a senior recruiter can realistically run three concurrent retained searches at full effectiveness. Adding fractional account maintenance on top of that capacity, even though it takes far fewer hours per engagement, still reduces the number of new searches that recruiter can take on. Build recruiter capacity as a weighted formula, full search versus fractional maintenance, rather than a simple headcount-to-revenue ratio, so a hiring decision reflects actual bandwidth rather than an average that doesn't hold up in practice.