Every recruiter I have dealt with (on the hiring side) has had a provision in the contract: if they have a documented exchange with a candidate whom we hire during or within (a month, two months...) of the contract end, the recruiter is deemed to have done the work. Contrarily, if we have a documented exchange with a candidate before the recruiter does, the recruiter is not owed anything.

So: the recruiter has an incentive to mention the hiring company as soon as they get a response from you.

If they don't do that, they are either bad at writing contracts or don't actually have authority to recruit. Mostly the second: you would not be surprised at the number of cold emails I get saying that they represent a candidate (or a pool of candidates) who are exactly right for the position that we filled last month.

My favorite was the game of trying to figure out if multiple recruiters were trying to forward me to the exact same job/hiring company and trying to get them to stop stepping on each other's toes and try to a pick a "winner" recruiter for that specific role.

It's a weird thing to miss, but this layoff cycle so far I haven't seen any recent recruiter emails at all, which seems strange on multiple levels.

> This is not in the recruiter's interest though, because you may just go past them and apply to the company directly, so they miss out on their revenue.

There's the definition of a redundant job, though I think nothing can beat SEO on this.

Not exactly. Recruiters often can guarantee an interview with the hiring manager while if you submitted your resume to the company directly, you'll just get lost in the sea of resumes so not much point going around them. I also always give them a PDF resume and I'm pretty sure they don't edit them as sometimes during a video interview the employer pulls up my resume as a screen share to go through it and it's always been the exact one I've had with all my personal contact details.

It's simply not worth it for either the employer and interviewee to go around the recruiter because they act as a filter for both sides initially.

I can't get interested in a job without knowing who the people behind it are, and what the actual mission of the company is.

Recruiters say things like "autonomous robotics systems"

For what? Weapons? Hell no. Doing dangerous industrial jobs humans shouldn't be doing? Hell yes.

That makes no sense becasue contacting the company directly is usually just a communication blackhole

Depends- my current position was via a staffing firm that was engaged directly by my new company to fill the position, since they had an existing trust relationship.

But they indeed were comfortable revealing the hiring company early in the process due to that trust level…

Or they don't have a job opening at all and are just looking to bolster the database.

I remember the annual cycle back in the day. During quieter times of the year, I'd suddenly get a tonne of calls from various recruiters with a job (no company name) ... almost as if they'd been told, "ok, no one's hiring or placing right now, no point you sitting there on your arse while I pay you. So pick up the phone and get some qualified leads"

fwiw my experience building a small tech talent agency / recruiting shop disagrees with this. Cold application pipelines are overwhelmed by gen AI applications and many of the (very qualified) candidates we place report getting totally ghosted on all cold applications - even when we’re able to get them several interviews a week with companies in our network.

Seems like companies still value a curated pipeline. 15-20% of first year salary (numbers we see these days) appears to be worth saving the company time interviewing unscreened candidates. Recruiting can be a real time suck and a bad hire can be catastrophic.

Email only is not a good option for them. They need candidates that aren't at least a total embarrassment when presented to their clients, so the phone call really is a first screening interview.

If you want a conversation between humans, a phone call may be a good option. With email only, there is a good chance it will turn into a talk between bots. Bots can make phone calls too, but it is more complicated and a bit too obvious.

> I really wish some of them had an email only option.

But why? If they need to convince someone you're a good hire, they will want to talk to you.