Email deliverability for recruitment firms
Where the addresses come from
- CV submissions, which usually carry a personal address and are the most durable rows in the database.
- LinkedIn and job board sourcing, where the work address was inferred from a pattern rather than given.
- Client contacts at hiring companies, who move between employers as often as candidates do.
- Placed candidates, whose work address is guaranteed to be wrong within a few years by definition.
A successful placement invalidates your own data
Place a candidate and their old work address stops working. Place enough of them and a meaningful share of your database is addresses at employers those people have left, which is an unusual position: the business succeeding is what degrades the asset.
The same applies to client contacts. The hiring manager who briefed you last year has moved, and the brief arrived at an address that now bounces.
Recruitment databases also live for years. A candidate placed in 2021 is a candidate again in 2026, and the record you have is the one you captured five years ago.
What the results tend to look like
Heavy on business domains, so catch-all rates run high. Personal addresses in the database resolve better and last longer. Guessed work addresses from a pattern produce a high invalid rate, which is exactly what you would expect from an inferred address.
What to do about it
Always capture a personal address alongside the work one
The personal address survives every placement you make. It is the only row in the record with a reasonable lifespan.
Re-check the database annually at minimum
Employment turnover is the decay mechanism and it runs faster in this sector than anywhere else, because you are the mechanism.
Flag guessed addresses as guesses
An address derived from a naming pattern is a hypothesis. Storing it identically to one a candidate gave you means nobody knows which is which.
Watch individual sends as well as campaigns
Recruiters send one-to-one from a mailbox, where a bounce is a message nobody reads. Those failures never reach a campaign report.
Questions people ask
How fast does a recruitment database decay?
Faster than any other sector, because job changes are the decay mechanism and placing people is the business. Work addresses in a five-year-old database are largely obsolete.
Should guessed work addresses be checked?
Yes, and they will produce a much higher invalid rate than addresses people gave you. That is useful information about your sourcing rather than a problem with the check.
Why do so many hiring company domains come back catch-all?
Because business domains often accept every recipient, either by administrator setting or through a security gateway. Around 28% of a B2B benchmark sat on domains set up that way.
Related sectors
See the breakdown on your own list
100 free checks a month, no card. Addresses we could not get an answer on come back labeled rather than guessed at, and we do not bill them.