Double dipping is treated as a moral problem because the moral framing is easier to argue about than the actual one. The actual one is that security contracting is structurally insecure work priced as if it isn't, and the behaviour everyone complains about is what rational people do when their next four weeks of income could vanish on a Friday. Call it what it is and the conversation changes.
What people mean by "double dipping"
The phrase covers at least three different things, and the confusion is most of the problem.
- A contractor on a live engagement applies to permanent roles without telling anyone, and is offered one. Recruiter calls this double dipping.
- A contractor finishes a Friday on one client, starts a Monday on another, and bills both for a handover week that overlaps. Procurement calls this double dipping.
- A contractor whose engagement is winding down quietly takes another short engagement on the side, doing both for a fortnight. Hiring managers, when they find out, call this double dipping.
Three different behaviours. One label. The label is doing a lot of work to flatten distinctions the people involved understand perfectly well.
The scenarios that actually drive it
Scenario one. The six-week cliff.
Contractor on £600 a day. Engagement ends in six weeks. They've been told there might be an extension, but there's no signed statement of work and the budget owner has gone quiet for a month. A permanent role at £90k crosses their inbox. They apply. The recruiter, seeing the day rate on the CV, assumes the contractor is gaming the market. The contractor is doing the most conservative thing available to them: lining up income before the cliff.
The recruiter is reading from the position of someone whose Friday is guaranteed. The contractor is reading from the position of someone whose Friday in seven weeks isn't. Same email, two different problems.
Scenario two. Parallel pipelines.
Contractor is billable now, but knows the average permanent process in security is eight to twelve weeks from first call to signed offer. If they wait until the engagement is ending to start interviewing, they're guaranteed a gap. So they run a permanent pipeline in the background. From the recruiter's view this looks like a lack of commitment. From the contractor's view it's the only way to land on the other side of the next gap without two months of unpaid time.
Scenario three. The exit attempt.
The contractor genuinely wants to stop contracting. They have a baby coming, or a mortgage application, or they're tired of rebuilding a pipeline every six months. They apply to permanent roles. The hiring manager assumes they'll bolt the moment the contract market improves. The candidate gets passed over for someone who looks more "committed", and the team hires its third permanent in eighteen months instead.
Scenario four. The actual abuse.
It does exist. A contractor takes two full-time engagements simultaneously, both remote, and quietly bills both for the same forty hours a week. It happens, especially since 2021. But it is rarer than the discourse suggests, and the visible signal usually isn't a CV pattern. It's missed standups, work that doesn't progress, and a slow drift in code quality. Those are the signals to act on, not "they were also interviewing".
Why the moral framing wins
The moral framing wins because it lets each side avoid the uncomfortable bit.
For the hiring side, "contractors aren't loyal" is easier to say out loud than "we built a contract-first security function because we didn't want to budget for permanent headcount, and now we're annoyed the contractors behave like contractors". The second sentence is true more often than the first, and harder to put in a Slack message.
For the contractor side, "the market made me do it" is easier than "I quoted day one for a three-month engagement and stayed eighteen months because the work was good and the money was better than the permanent equivalent, and now I'm acting surprised that the company sees me as a flight risk". Also often true.
The risk-and-incentive framing is less satisfying because nobody gets to be the villain. The contract market is structured to push exactly this behaviour, and the hiring market is structured to punish people for responding to it rationally.
What this means if you're hiring
If a contractor applies to your permanent role, the useful questions aren't "are they committed" and "will they leave". The useful questions are these.
- Why are they applying now. If the answer is a specific life-stage reason (mortgage, family, fatigue with the contracting cycle) that's a real reason and tends to hold. If the answer is vague, that's a yellow flag, not a red one.
- What's the gap between their day rate and your permanent package, all in. If the permanent package is genuinely close to the day rate annualised after pension and benefits, the economic incentive to leave the moment the contract market recovers is small. If you're 30% under, you're hiring someone who is going to do the maths in eight months and you should plan for that openly, not pretend it won't happen.
- What did their last contract look like. Long engagements with extensions are a much better signal of how someone behaves inside a team than the cleanest CV in the world. Short engagements with no extensions, repeatedly, is a real signal. One short engagement is not.
What this means if you're contracting
Two things, both unfashionable to say.
First, tell people. Most of the friction in scenario one and two comes from the contractor and the recruiter pretending the other situation isn't happening. If your engagement ends in six weeks, say so. If you're running a permanent search in parallel, say so. The hiring side reacts badly to being surprised, not to being told.
Second, don't take a permanent role you don't want. The contractor who takes a £90k role at month nine of a soft market and quits at month fourteen when day rates come back is the reason the next contractor through the door gets read as a flight risk. The behaviour the industry complains about is partly the behaviour of contractors who used the permanent market as a bridge, not a destination, and were honest about it only to themselves.
The bit nobody wants to print
Security contracting exists at the scale it does because most security functions are funded as projects, not as ongoing capability. Day rates are high because the work is high-stakes and the engagement is short. When the same companies then try to convert that capacity into permanent headcount at a 30 to 50% discount on the annualised day rate, they're not really hiring. They're trying to renegotiate a contract through a different door.
Double dipping, in the form most recruiters mean when they use the phrase, is mostly the rational response to that renegotiation. Call it that and you can build a hiring process around it. Call it disloyalty and you'll keep losing the candidates you actually wanted.
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