Fake job ads, scant vetting, urgent demands for large sums of cash: recruiting, once a crucial candidate-finder, has become a rush to funnel workers into a job at any cost — and employers are paying the price. “I always refer to it as a cowboy industry,” one former recruiter says. “I don’t necessarily think there was anything we did that would be illegal, but there was a lot that to many would be immoral. We did everything we could to bend the rules.”

Between a challenging jobs market and the advent of AI hiring tools, agents appear to be resorting to more aggressive means than ever. From business owners to job candidates themselves, many feel that this current landscape is licensing bad behaviour as recruiters battle to justify their existence.

Recruiters typically charge 15-25 per cent of a candidate’s first-year annual salary, along with VAT — a fee that easily runs into the tens of thousands for many middle-ranking white collar jobs. Those within the industry tell me that they have seen bad actors post fake job ads to make themselves seem in demand; inflate salaries during the hiring process to accrue more candidates — only to slash them at the 11th hour — and encourage people to “take a step back in their career to step forward”, aka take a pay cut in order to ensure the recruiter’s pockets remain lined.

At one agency, a candidate was put forward for a role that required a driving licence — even though theirs had expired; this same agency undertook multiple aggressive chases for fees, despite the workers they offered up having “failed to meet numerous requirements, lacked the necessary documentation, and was not even subjected to the most basic checks by the recruiter”.

This same cycle — put someone unsuitable forward while assuring the client verbally they are an excellent fit; demand payment despite concerns having been immediately raised about their suitability, then deny any responsibility on the basis that “informal discussions” do not overwrite contractual agreements — happened repeatedly. On at least one occasion, the individual sent to replace the first unqualified hire was yet worse than the one before.

The Standard has learned that multiple agencies provide no supporting documents for a candidate when they are put forward and use the fact they have sent on a CV as “proof” that they have done their jobs and thus must be paid — despite knowing those they are suggesting do not meet the necessary requirements.

According to one former user of an agency with a markedly poor Glassdoor rating, “their main interest is their fee and covering their backside”. As a result, reference-checking is “hopelessly inaccurate” — in one case, meaning that debt collection letters for one hire amassed at their employer’s door. Another disclosed that legal action was a necessary recourse in order to recoup the substantial agency costs they had paid out.

Recruiters brag that what sets them apart from both human and AI-powered services is their vast network of top-notch candidates. But Marina*, who recently used a nanny agency in London, found the reality altogether different. The “elite” agency charged her 22 per cent plus VAT — after which she saw that they had been “posting on nanny Facebook groups and charging families a f***-load of money for someone they’ve just sourced for free”.

Typically, contracts stipulate that if a candidate doesn’t work out, they will be replaced for free within a defined period (usually six months); the terms she was given offered this for four weeks only. “They do none of the contracts between employer and employee; they don’t help at all, none of the payroll. They don’t even send an offer letter. They literally do precisely f***-all,” the 38-year-old says. “It’s all a bit of a scam.”

Given the hefty fees and ultra-short payment terms (some agencies now expect payment within seven days, unlike at the once-ubiquitous end of the six-month probation period), employers have high expectations of the CVs being put on their desks.

Still, Andrew Hulbert, a non-executive director in London, says he has repeatedly been in interviews where he has asked why a candidate applied to his firm, only to be told: “‘the recruiter just sent my CV forward — I don’t really know what I’m doing here.’ That happened a lot more than it should have done,” he says. “They were just there because the recruiter sort of pushed them into it.”

This is the inevitable result of what the recruitment industry calls “the race to place”: getting a candidate in post as soon as possible — no matter how unsuitable they might be — in order to beat off the competition and secure their fee. With Office for National Statistics figures from May showing that job vacancies were down seven per cent on the same time last year, agencies are having to compete against one another to get more people into fewer spots. In the process, recruiting has become nothing more than “a volume game”, says Hulbert, 39. “They really need to find as many CVs as they can” in the hope that one might eventually land. Of the many hundreds he received, he estimates that only one in 10 were even suitable for interview.

Finlay Wellington has found much the same. When he used a recruitment platform for Wellington Web Co, his web design business, he was promised that candidates had been vetted. But “it seems a lot of their ‘vetting’ was more just identification vetting, [like] making sure that their phone number matched”. When it came down to ensuring that individuals’ credentials were what they seemed, there were no official checks — “which leaves it very open to lying… we end up getting really harmed by essentially hiring people that were just willing to say anything to get the money and get the job that they’re looking for.”

Wellington, 20, says he has had repeated incidents with remote staff where there would be daily communication — “and then they’d just disappear”. The first handful of times, he assumed that it was the result of a personal emergency. Yet “the more the same issue started to occur, the more I was starting to think that it was actually a more prominent problem than [the platform] was letting on to be”. On the last three occasions, he has terminated the person in question’s contract, then emailed the service with the complaint that “I am paying for these services and what you’re supplying as a result is essentially false advertising.” From his six attempts at communication, he has heard nothing back. “This lack of replies has led to me handling these issues myself which most of the time resulted in a lack of repercussions” — for the worker, and the platform.

Hulbert says when he challenged agencies about hires not working out, he felt somewhat held “to ransom… often they’ll try and get them to stay for six months” so they get their fee. “Then often they’ll just go back and find them a different job” — a tactic recruiters use to double their earnings with a second placement fee in the space of a year.

One of the most “frustrating aspects” of using recruiters, agrees Oliver Moheda, who runs Total Artist Management, “is the lack of accountability” when things go wrong. Once payment has been made, “many agencies disappear when problems emerge… The recruitment industry markets itself as reducing risk for employers, but in our experience it can sometimes introduce even greater risk.”

Hulbert adds that there seems to be no recourse for the worst offenders, who can simply start a new firm on a whim. “The barriers to entry are almost nothing — you just literally need a phone number or an email address,” he says. “They run up debts, they go bust, they write it off and they just start another one the next day.”

Many firms are worried that upcoming legislative changes will make this current maelstrom worse. Currently, staff cannot claim unfair dismissal before they have been in a role for two years. But come January 1 next year, that period will be reduced to six months — meaning that many who have been lumped with poor hires could face handing over a wad of cash to recruiters, and then find themselves challenged to an employment tribunal at the exact same time.

It is no wonder, then, that employers are becoming wary. Data from HR platform Deel published earlier this year showed that more than 40 per cent of companies had extended new employees’ probation periods due to growing challenges in assessing candidates’ skills during the application process.

The AI boom has created difficulties on both sides of the jobseeking divide. There are record numbers of job scams designed to extract money from wannabe workers; and blunt tools being used to screen applicants at pace, leading to great candidates being jettisoned by dodgy algorithms.

Recruiters are now fighting to cut above this noise, and the encroachment of social media. While platforms like LinkedIn have already dented some of their power (who needs to pay 25 per cent of a hire’s salary to an agency when posting online is free?), the company is now one of many using AI to purportedly ease the hiring process.

LinkedIn Hiring Assistant claims to save users more than four hours of time spent screening each role, and reduce the number of profiles to review by 62 per cent. While the rise of technology like this has been touted as a timesaver across the board (including for applicants, who can use chatbots to whip up a covering letter in seconds), the knock-on effects could be seismic for the industry. “AI is not merely assisting recruiters — it is replacing them,” according to Forbes. “A world where talent is sourced, evaluated and onboarded without human involvement is not science fiction.”

Given Britain’s current jobs crisis, pushing good recruiters out of the market would help no one. London has the UK’s highest unemployment rate among 16-24-year-olds: agents with the right intentions, who take the time to understand candidates’ skills and place them in roles that would really get their careers started, have never been more necessary.

Lyndsey Fitheridge, who runs Foxgroves Recruitment, says that despite the many assertions people make about the likes of AI, “the rise of technology has always seemed to make recruitment harder. It eases off parts of it, but it just causes its own issues as it develops. So I think there will always be a place, I’m hoping, for recruiters to give that human connection.”

Fitheridge, 43, describes herself as “a bit of a life coach as well as a recruitment consultant; you’re really coaxing and helping those people through a really big part of their life change. I don’t know how AI can do that.” She is well aware that recruitment has a reputation problem, and that “you can’t hide away from what people feel”. But what many don’t realise is that recruitment is “bloody difficult”, she says. Payment issues can cut both ways: one London solicitor says he has recovered £13.3 million for recruiters in just five years who were wrongly left short by clients; while today’s jobseekers come with an unprecedented set of demands about what they will and won’t accept in a role, Fitheridge says, causing untold headaches for agents.

Sympathy will be hard-won among those who have been burned by recruiters before, however. Wellington has started hiring through his own extended networks; Hulbert created a staff recruiting role, reasoning that the £60,000 salary would cost him less than the amount he was wasting on agencies. He accepts, however, that a recruiter-less future is unlikely anytime soon. “They’re a bit of a necessary evil, I think.”

Have you had experience of ethically dubious or fraudulent practice with recruiters? Get in touch with us at [email protected] or