Why some job seekers are spending thousands on reverse recruiters: 'The old rules are gone,' says one recruiter

How much would you pay to get a new job?

Ask around, and job seekers will tell you it's harder to land an interview or offer today than it has been in years. It's not uncommon to hear from people who say they've applied to dozens, sometimes hundreds, of jobs and barely gotten anywhere. 

Data backs this up: The U.S. had almost no job growth in 2025, adding just 116,000 jobs for the year, compared to 1.46 million jobs added in 2024. A typical job opening in 2025 attracted an average of 244 applications, more than double the number in 2022, according to data from Greenhouse.

Economists are calling it a "low hire, low fire" job market, with one even referring to a "hiring recession."

As a result, some job seekers are turning to "reverse recruiting" and paying to outsource the search itself. In traditional recruiting, companies pay recruiters to find candidates for open positions. In reverse recruiting, job seekers pay recruiters to help them land a job.

From applying on candidates' behalf to negotiating offers, the model flips traditional hiring on its head, and its use may reveal deeper shifts in the labor market.

Knic Ebel says he was "out of options" when he learned about reverse recruiting.

Ebel, 50, of Charlotte, North Carolina, says he was laid off from his engineering job in November 2023 due to downsizing. For nearly two years, he says he tried applying for new roles with little luck while working a part-time, project-based job that barely covered his bills. By the summer of 2025, he heard about a company called Reverse Recruiting Agency and decided to give it a shot.

Reverse recruiters work in a few different ways but generally offer job seekers help in identifying new jobs to apply for, tailoring their resume and cover letter for each new role, and submitting applications on their behalf. Reverse recruiters keep the candidate up to date on the status of their applications, and may even send emails or LinkedIn messages on their behalf to people at the company to try and get traction.

Some agencies help job seekers set up and prepare for interviews, but it's up to the candidate to perform well with the hiring team once they get to that stage.

Some reverse recruiting companies charge a flat fee based on how many applications they'll send out for a candidate, while others charge on a monthly basis through the hiring process. Reverse Recruiting Agency, for example, charges a $1,500 monthly fee; once candidates land a job, they're refunded their first month's fee and then owe 10% of their first year's base salary, which the agency refers to as a "success fee."

Ebel signed up and began working directly with Alex Shinkarovsky, founder of Reverse Recruiting Agency, to overhaul his application strategy, including coming up with a target list of his desired jobs and companies, and then apply to new opportunities on his behalf with a tailored resume and cover letter.

Within a month of using Reverse Recruiting Agency, Ebel says he secured about a dozen interviews, "and within about three weeks of the interviewing starting, I had an offer in hand."

Ebel says paying thousands of dollars for reverse recruiting help was worth it for him because, without the investment, he could still be without a full-time job. "After months of of applying, you start to really question if there's a place left for you in this economy [and] this workforce," Ebel says.

Now, he says he's at a job he loves and has moved up in his career with a director-level role.

Shinkarovsky launched Reverse Recruiting Agency in 2024 with just three clients. So far, he says he's worked with 45 clients who completed the program, including 22 who landed job offers through his agency's efforts and six who landed offers on their own.

He thinks his business has picked up "because people don't know the formula for success in this market," he says. "It used to be that you could apply to 25 roles and get five interviews," he adds. But "the old rules are gone. The system is different."

Shinkarovsky says his agency submits 50 to 100 applications crafted "by a human" per week on behalf of each client, in addition to sending emails or LinkedIn messages to five to 10 people at each company being applied to in an attempt to make inroads with the hiring team.

Economists say rising interest in reverse recruiting reflects a weakening labor market, where finding a job is becoming more competitive day by day.

"The February jobs report was rather disappointing," says Svenja Gudell, chief economist with Indeed Hiring Lab. The U.S. job market lost 92,000 jobs and unemployment crept up to 4.4% for the month.

Meanwhile, the time to hire has been ticking up. It now takes a company an average 47 days to make an offer after posting an opening, as of November 2025, up from less than a month in late 2022, according to data from Indeed. Meanwhile, long-term unemployment is rising, with 1 in 4 job seekers looking for work for six months or longer.

A sluggish economy and higher interest rates have disproportionately hit sectors like tech, finance and professional services, says Kory Kantenga, LinkedIn's head of economics for the Americas.

AI tools have also made it easier for job seekers to quickly update their resumes and cover letters and apply to many jobs at once. That's creating a bottleneck for hiring teams. 

"If you are in a white collar role, it is a difficult time to find a job, which is why we do see some folks looking elsewhere and considering things like reverse recruiting," Kantenga says.

Faced with intense market competition, some candidates might be willing to pay for what feels like a partner to navigate a challenging search. 

"In this world of AI and increased technology, we are also reaching out to humans again to help us find jobs and to actually engage with someone that you can talk to," Gudell says. "It's like me constantly pressing zero on the phone to talk to a representative."

Reverse recruiting may be buzzy, but it also has plenty of critics and calls for caution. One critique is that it could give a career advantage to people who can pay up.

"One of the concerns around reverse recruiting is that for those folks who can't afford it, they'll be less competitive in the job market, even if they have the skill set," Kantenga says.

Others warn about the risk of scams.

It's crucial to check the credentials of your reverse recruiter before signing on, says Bonnie Dilber, senior manager of talent acquisition at Zapier. She recommends doing extensive research by getting independent referrals and seeing if recruiters have proven success in finding jobs for candidates in your specific industry. It's also a good idea to check online forums like Reddit and Trustpilot reviews for mentions of scams, she says.

Beyond that, Dilber says using a service like reverse recruiting could be deemed fraudulent by some companies who view it as misrepresenting yourself during the hiring process.

"You need to be hands-on, because the reality is if they misrepresent your experience, then you might just end up spending a lot of money on these services without really getting the results you want," Dilber says.

After doing his own research, Washington, D.C.-based job seeker Howard Pan decided to try reverse recruiting himself.

Pan, who was laid off from Amazon Web Services in January, paid $299 for a service called ApplyAll, which says it will apply to 200 jobs on his behalf. He says the biggest benefit to using the service is that it helps him find jobs at companies he doesn't know about yet, and applies to them faster than he could on his own.

With the help of a reverse recruiter, "I can get my name out there in front of other applicants," says Pan, 35.

However, he says job seekers shouldn't rely on just one method when searching for work. "I would not use this service as the only method of job seeking," he says, adding that he sees reverse recruiting services "as a complement to the traditional way of job seeking, such as through LinkedIn, through recruiters reaching out, through in-person hiring events, hiring fairs [and] things like that."

Ebel says the service likely isn't a fit for everyone. He wouldn't recommend it to anyone new to the workforce who isn't established in their career, or who isn't completely clear about what type of job they're looking for.

Anyone applying to jobs on their own and getting a 10% interview rate — as in, one interview offer for every 10 applications submitted — especially within the first month or two of their search, may not need reverse recruiting help either, Shinkarovsky says.

Ultimately, when working with a reverse recruiter, landing interviews or an offer isn't a guarantee, no matter how much money you pay.

"It's hard to put a dollar amount on how much people should spend on their job search," Dilber says. Other job-search services could also be worthwhile, she says, like a resume writer with good experience in your industry if you haven't updated your materials in a few years, or a career coach to help you understand your strengths or transition to a new field.

And although reverse recruiting in particular has gotten buzzier in a frustrating job market, some economists say demand could slow if hiring picks up and job seekers feel better about their prospects.

"Like many trends, once people learn something, they tend to stick with it. So we might see this persist," Kantenga says. "But I expect as the job market improves, people will find opportunities and they won't need to rely so much on expert recruiting."

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