How to Tell if a Recruiter Is Fake

Check the person against the employer, not through anything they sent

Everything in a recruiter's first message is supplied by the recruiter. The company name, the logo in the signature, the job title, the pay band, the link to the careers portal — all of it arrives inside one message, so none of it verifies any other part of it.

The check has to start somewhere else. Type the company name into a search engine yourself, open the site from the search results, and find the phone number or contact form that lives on that site. Then ask a plain question. Does a person with this name work in your recruitment team, and are you hiring for this role.

Two things make it fail. A link, number or address that came in the message routes you straight back to whoever wrote it. And asking the recruiter to confirm themselves gets you a confirmation, which is what the message was for.

If the employer's own switchboard has never heard of the person, you are finished.

The domain test, and the near-miss spellings

Look at the part of the email address after the @ symbol. A recruiter working for a company sends from that company's domain. A recruiter at an agency sends from the agency's domain and can name the agency without hesitating.

The quiet failure is the near-miss: a domain that reads correctly at a glance and differs by one character.

• a letter swapped for a lookalike, a lowercase l standing in for a capital I, or rn where an m should be
• an extra word bolted on: careers, jobs, hr, hiring, group, global
• the right words in the wrong order, or joined without the hyphen the real one uses
• the same name on a cheaper ending than the company actually uses

Do not eyeball it. Open the employer's real site in another tab and read the two domains character by character, right to left. Reading backwards stops your brain autocorrecting the word into the one it expects.

Moving you onto an encrypted messaging app early

A hiring conversation that jumps to a personal messaging app before anyone has verified anything is the strongest single signal on this page.

Company email and hiring platforms leave a record the company controls. A thread on a personal app belongs to whoever set it up, disappears when they delete the account, and removes you from anywhere another person at the employer might see it.

The move is presented as convenience, and none of those reasons requires you to leave before you have confirmed the person exists. Say you are happy to continue on the app once you have spoken to the employer's main line, then go and make that call. A recruiter for a real employer has no reason to object.

Where the whole interview then happens in a chat window, questions typed rather than spoken, the mechanics are in what a chat-only remote job interview tells you.

Profiles that are new, thin, or borrowed

Read a profile in a fixed order, because the order stops you being convinced by the parts that are easiest to fake.

1. How long the account has existed, and how long the current job has sat on it. A profile created this month, for a senior role, with a stranger's career history attached, is a specific shape. 2. Activity that predates the message to you. Comments and reactions from before this week are hard to manufacture in bulk. 3. Connections to the employer. Somebody who recruits for a company is connected to people who work there. 4. The photograph, reverse-searched. A borrowed headshot turns up elsewhere under a different name. 5. Their name and the company name as one query. A real recruiter leaves job postings, event listings, an entry on the company's own team page.

None of these alone is proof. Items one and two together, no history and no activity, are enough to stop before you send anything else.

The one question a real recruiter answers without pausing

Ask who the hiring manager is, what their job title is, and which office or team the role sits in.

Somebody recruiting for a real vacancy knows this. They have spoken to that manager. They may hold back a full name early, but a title, a team and a location come back instantly, because those are the facts they work from all day.

A fabricated role has no manager behind it, so the answer arrives as a shape. The details are in the pack. Our client prefers to stay confidential. Let us get your paperwork in first.

Confidentiality is real in recruitment, and an agency sometimes cannot name the end client early. But it can still name itself, the team size, the city, and its own registered business. If nothing at all can be named, there is nothing to verify.

If you already sent a CV, or already sat the interview

Nothing here is recovered by worrying, so work through what left your hands.

Your CV carries your full name, phone number, email address, roughly where you live, everywhere you have worked, and sometimes referees with their contact details.

• Warn any referee whose number sits on that document, so a call from a stranger does not catch them cold.
• Change the password on the email account listed on the CV and turn on two-step verification. That address is the recovery route for everything else you own.
• Watch for a second approach that knows details only the CV contained. It feels legitimate precisely because it is accurate.

If you also sent a passport, license, national identity number, or a photograph of yourself holding a document, start with what to do after handing over identity documents.

Never pay a recruiter to secure a role, and never take money into your account to buy equipment on somebody's behalf.

Where this breaks down: real recruiting can look sloppy

Agency recruiting produces a lot of behavior that looks exactly like the warning signs above.

Real recruiters message people cold about roles that fit suspiciously well, because matching your public profile to a vacancy is the job. Real agencies hold the client's name back early. Real recruiters use free mailbox domains when the agency is one person at a kitchen table, write badly, get your name wrong, and chase three times in a week.

So none of these is a verdict on its own. They are reasons to run the check in the first section before you send a document, sit an interview, or take a call.

The verdict comes from elsewhere: the employer confirms the person, or does not. For the same rigour applied to the organization, run the five checks that show whether an employer is real. For the listing that started it, read what a fake work-from-home advert looks like.

If you cannot get confirmation from the employer's own side, do not proceed on the strength of how convincing the conversation felt.