How to tell a real reverse recruiter from a resume mill

Both kinds of provider use the same words. Done-for-you, hands-on, dedicated recruiter, personalised outreach. The websites are equally polished and the monthly fees overlap, so the marketing cannot separate them. What separates them is what happens after you pay, which is exactly what you cannot see when you are deciding.

You can get most of the way there with nine questions on one call. None of them are clever, and that is the point: they are all questions with a specific factual answer, which means evasiveness is itself the answer.

Run this on me too. That is what the last section is for.

1. How many roles a week

Good answer: a number in the low tens, offered without hesitation, with a reason attached to it. Something like fifteen, because a properly worked role takes about an hour.

Bad answer: fifty. Eighty. “As many as match your profile.” “There is no cap, we want to maximise your exposure.”

This is the single most efficient question, because the arithmetic is not negotiable. Nobody has eighty hours a week for one client. Fortune reported in March 2026 on an agency submitting 50 to 100 applications a week per client, with its own average at 863 applications per placement. That is a real business, and it is a different business from the one that reads postings.

2. Can I see the shortlist before anything is sent

Good answer: yes, every week, and you can strike roles off it.

Bad answer: any version of “we handle that so you do not have to.” Also any answer where you see the roles after submission.

This one constrains everything upstream of it. A provider who has to show you fifteen roles and defend each choice cannot pad the list, and cannot quietly widen the target to keep the count up.

3. What is in the tracker, and can I open it myself

Good answer: a live document you have access to, listing per role the company, the role, the date the posting went live, the date the application went in, the name and title of every person contacted, and the date of each follow-up.

Bad answer: a weekly summary email. A dashboard of counts. “We send a report every Friday.” Anything where the unit is a number rather than a named person and a date.

This is the load-bearing question of the whole list. A count can be produced without doing the work. A list of named people and dated actions cannot. If a provider will not show you the tracker, or shows you a version with the names removed, you are looking at the count model with better design.

4. Who is contacted on each role

Good answer: the hiring manager and the internal recruiter, both, on every role, by name.

Bad answer: “we apply through the portal.” “We use the application system so nothing gets missed.” Silence about outreach, or outreach described only as connection requests.

An application with nobody attached to it lands in a queue. The outreach is the part that makes it an approach rather than a submission, and it is the first thing cut when volume goes up, because it is the most time-expensive step per role.

5. When in a posting’s life do you apply

Good answer: a window, expressed in days from the posting going live, with a reason.

Bad answer: “as soon as we find it.” “We work through a backlog.” No concept of posting age at all.

A posting that opened yesterday and one that has been live for six weeks are not the same opportunity, and a provider with no view on this is not sorting the pipeline, just consuming it.

6. What does the follow-up schedule look like

Good answer: specific days, applied to every role, recorded. Day four and day eight, or whatever their equivalent is, but named.

Bad answer: “we follow up as appropriate.” “Our recruiters stay on top of it.”

Follow-ups are unglamorous and they are where activity quietly disappears, because nobody notices a follow-up that was never sent. A schedule with numbers in it can be checked against the tracker. A schedule described with an adverb cannot.

7. Does my resume get rewritten per posting, or once

Good answer: a variant per posting, with the rewriting concentrated where a screener looks first.

Bad answer: one strong base resume used everywhere. Also, at the other extreme, any claim that the resume is regenerated by a tool for each application, which is the same thing as not rewriting it.

One good document is a legitimate product and it is what a resume writer sells, more cheaply. If you are paying a monthly retainer, the per-posting work is a large part of what you are paying for. Which of the three services you actually need is covered in reverse recruiting compared with a career coach and a resume writer.

8. What happens when four weeks produce very little

Good answer: a diagnostic, using the tracker to separate the causes. Applications with no replies at all points at the target or the documents. Replies but no first calls points at screening. First calls that stop points at something the search itself cannot fix.

Bad answer: “it is a numbers game.” “We would push the volume up.” Anything that treats a bad month as a reason to do more of the same.

A provider who cannot tell you what a bad month would mean has no method, only an activity. This is also the question that reveals whether they will tell you to stop paying them when stopping is the right answer.

9. Who should not hire you

Good answer: a real list, delivered without discomfort, that costs them business. People whose target is undecided. People running their own search competently already. People with no savings for whom a monthly retainer is the wrong risk.

Bad answer: “we can help anyone.” “Everyone benefits from having someone in their corner.” A pause, followed by a reframe of the question.

Nobody who has done this work for a few years lacks an answer. A provider without one either has not thought about it or is unwilling to say it out loud on a sales call, and both tell you what the next few months will be like.

The pricing questions sit alongside this

None of the nine ask about money, because the price only becomes meaningful once you know which model you are buying. Whether the total is capped, whether there is a percentage of your first-year salary attached, and what any guarantee actually obliges the provider to do are separate questions, and they are in what reverse recruiting costs and what the price is buying.

Running it on me

Fair, and here are my answers so you can hold me to them rather than take my word for the checklist.

Roles a week is in the low tens, because a role properly worked is about an hour and I would rather run fifteen well than eighty badly. You see the shortlist before anything is sent, every week, and you strike off whatever you do not want. The tracker is live from the first week, you open it yourself without asking me for a summary, and it names the person contacted and the date of every follow-up. Both the hiring manager and the internal recruiter get contacted on every role. Submission happens inside the first five days a posting is live. Follow-ups are day four and day eight, recorded against the role. Each posting gets its own resume variant, with the top third rewritten in the language of that posting. A quiet month gets the diagnostic above rather than more volume.

And the ninth: if your target is undecided, if you are already running your own search well and getting interviews from it, or if you are out of work with no savings behind you, I am the wrong purchase, and the reasons are written out on the reverse recruiting page rather than saved for the call. Whether the purchase makes sense for you at all comes down to the four inputs in is reverse recruiting worth it.

The whole point of a checklist is that it does not care who wrote it.