What it means in practice
A recruitment firm sits, structurally, at the intersection of two distinct customer relationships — the client company and the candidate — and every placement decision already requires reconciling potentially different interests between them. Layer organisational growth on top of that, adding specialist desks, regional offices, and central functions like compliance or marketing, and the number of internal boundaries where a decision can stall multiplies quickly. A pricing decision might stall between a central commercial function and an individual desk; a candidate experience decision might stall between recruitment consultants incentivised on speed and a central quality function focused on long-term reputation.
A concrete version of this shows up around fee negotiation. A desk consultant close to a client relationship may know that a modest fee concession would secure an important mandate, but if pricing authority sits centrally, the consultant must either escalate — introducing delay a competitive market may not tolerate — or quietly work around the boundary in ways that create inconsistency between desks facing similar situations. Neither option is satisfying, and the firm often experiences the resulting friction as a personnel or process problem rather than recognising it as a structural consequence of where authority and information have been separated.
Why it happens
Decision bottlenecks of this kind are rarely the result of any individual’s poor judgement. They emerge because authority and information are not always held by the same person or team. A desk consultant closest to a specific client relationship may have the most current information about what that client actually needs, while formal authority over pricing or process sits with a central function several steps removed. Neither party is wrong; the structure simply has not made clear where the decision actually belongs, and in the absence of clarity, the default is delay, escalation, or quiet inconsistency across different parts of the firm.
This connects to Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull’s broader research on strategy execution, which found that only 9% of managers across more than 250 companies believed they could reliably count on colleagues in other functions and units. Their finding was that vertical alignment — plans, targets, cascaded objectives — tends to be reasonably sound in most organisations, while horizontal coordination across boundaries is where execution actually breaks down. A growing recruitment firm’s boundaries — between desks, between front-line consultants and central functions, between client-facing and candidate-facing teams — are a direct, recruitment-specific instance of exactly the coordination gap their research describes at a much larger scale.
Where this varies
The pattern shows up differently depending on a firm’s structure. Firms organised around highly autonomous desks tend to see bottlenecks concentrate at the boundary between desk-level speed and central-function oversight — compliance, technology, brand — where local consultants want quick answers and central teams want consistency. Firms organised more centrally tend to see the opposite: individual desks feeling that decisions relevant to their specific market move too slowly because they route through a central process that was not built with their particular nuance in mind. Neither structure eliminates the tension; each simply relocates where it shows up.
What the Bain research points toward, without prescribing a specific method for achieving it, is simply that clarity about where a decision belongs is itself valuable, independent of any particular way of documenting it. A firm that has never made this explicit is not necessarily making worse individual decisions than one that has — but it is more exposed to the same type of decision being worked out differently, informally, each time it recurs, which is precisely the source of the inconsistency growing firms notice without always tracing it back to its origin.
A further complication specific to recruitment firms is that the two customer groups do not always surface bottlenecks at the same pace. A pricing or terms decision affecting the client relationship might resolve relatively quickly if a strong desk consultant pushes it, while a decision affecting candidate experience — communication standards, feedback turnaround — can stall for far longer, simply because no single loud voice is pushing it from the candidate side of the business with the same commercial urgency a client complaint carries.
Where this shows up
This perspective is written with recruitment businesses in mind. It sits within the Professional and Knowledge-Based grouping, and the questions it raises recur in other sectors too.
Questions worth considering
- Where in this firm do decisions most often stall, and who actually holds the information needed to make them well?
- As the firm has added desks, offices, or central functions, has anyone reviewed whether decision authority still sits where the relevant knowledge sits?
- Is inconsistency across different parts of the firm a sign of poor discipline, or a sign that decision rights were never made explicit in the first place?
Your team is facing similar challenges?
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