White-collar workers are paying recruiters thousands of dollars to land roles, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week. The “reverse recruiting” trend is a striking sign of how tough the white-collar job market has become. 

Reverse recruiting flips the traditional model in which employers retain recruiters and pay them a fee when they successfully place a candidate. Instead, job seekers hire agencies or individual recruiters. These reverse recruiting agencies provide career coaching and resume-building services, in addition to applying to jobs on a candidate’s behalf. 

As payment for services, the agencies can charge considerable fees greater than $1,000 per month or take a cut of their client’s paycheck once they land a job, per WSJ. 

Reverse recruiting in action

One reverse recruiting transaction took place last year. Daniel Bejarano, 36, joined the service Refer after getting information about the provider in an email pitch. Refer’s AI agent helped connect him to a platform engineer and data scientist job at Golden, a volunteer management firm. After several rounds of interviews, he got the job. He paid Refer 20% of his first month’s paycheck in exchange. 

Bejarano told WSJ that the transaction was “refreshing” because he wasn’t lost in a pool of competitive candidates sorted through by an automated system. 

Refer currently accepts job candidates from 20 top-ranked universities, but will soon expand its customer base to anyone interested in tech. Andre Hamra, Refer’s CEO, told WSJ that about 50 new candidates sign up every day for the service, and about 2,000 companies use the platform. 

Another service, Reverse Recruiting Agency, charges job seekers $1,500 per month for career coaching, resume writing and the submission of up to 100 job applications per week with customized resumes. After obtaining a job, candidates pay 10% of their first-year salary, minus the first month’s fee they paid to the agency. 

Pushback and overall environment

While reverse recruiting options may be on the rise, there has been pushback from traditional recruiters who are skeptical of charging job seekers hefty fees for these services. These critics say a “pay to get recruited” model risks exploiting anxious job seekers. 

“These companies are really good at marketing, and I think job seekers who are vulnerable can be easily swayed,” one skeptic, recruiter Ken Jordan, told WSJ. 

The rise of reverse recruiting reflects a “low hire, low fire” environment in which overall unemployment remains modest, but getting a job is unusually difficult. Recent federal data shows that average job searches now last about 6 months. 

Recent jobs data present a glimmer of hope. The latest jobs report, released earlier this week by the U.S. Labor Department, exceeded analyst expectations as the economy added 130,000 jobs in January. The unemployment rate ticked down slightly to 4.3% for the month. 

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