Vetting recruitment partners

Your careers service is vetting recruitment partners on vibes. Here's a checklist instead.

A data-driven checklist for vetting recruitment partners

When your careers service points students toward a partner, you're lending your institution's trust to that relationship. Relationship-based vetting doesn't scale. Structural signals do.

⚠️ TL;DR We analysed 246,000 UK job postings for structural red flags — reposting patterns, salary disclosure, name consistency — that don't require a single student review to detect. 1 in 8 (12.5%) of high-volume repeated job titles showed a single-location template-repost pattern. 84.7% of advertisers disclosed real salary figures most or all of the time — the 1.4% who never do are the real outliers, not the norm.

1️⃣ Check posting concentration

A partner with a real client base posts a varied mix across sectors and locations. Postings clustered around one "trainee" title, from one office, over months — 12.5% of high-volume titles market-wide show this — warrants a direct conversation.

2️⃣ Ask what happens after applying

The most useful signal, and hardest to see from outside. Does the partner respond within a reasonable window, or optimise for pipeline over placement?

3️⃣ Check whether "the job" is a course

Confirm in writing whether any part of the process involves a paid course, training fee, or "guaranteed placement" model — before students are deep into the conversation.

4️⃣ Use salary transparency as a proxy

84.7% of advertisers disclose real pay most or all of the time — it's the norm. A partner unusually opaque about pay often correlates with opacity elsewhere too.

🎯 Don't rely on name recognition alone
Large, well-known agency names aren't automatically safer than smaller ones — high posting volume mostly reflects scale, not quality of candidate treatment. Track record with your own students, checked directly, is a better signal than brand recognition.

Consider formalising a lightweight annual review: which partners are your students actually getting outcomes through, versus which simply post the most and get referred by default? A partner's visibility to your office is not the same as their value to your students.

Vet partners with data, not just relationships

GetJobzi is building structured trust scoring for recruitment partners to support institutional vetting.

👉 GetJobzi.com — Talk to us