How much does a reverse recruiter cost?
Prices in this market range over two orders of magnitude, and the spread is mostly explained by how much of the work a human actually does.
The three price bands
Full-service firms charge $1,500 to $3,000 a month on a retainer, and because their guarantees tend to require several consecutive months, one search runs $6,000 to $12,000. That price is honest: a person is spending real hours on your search, and hours are what you pay for. You usually also get coaching, interview prep and negotiation help bundled in.
Auto-apply tools cost a few dollars a month and send one generic resume to hundreds of listings. The price is honest here too — it reflects what is being done, which is very little.
In between sits the monthly service model, and that is where this product is: $99 a month, cancel anytime, with the first 7 days free. A person does the recruiting, software does the resume mechanics, there is no retainer and no account manager, and one operator carries 20 members rather than a book of fifty.
Work out what your own search costs
A properly tailored application takes most people 45 to 90 minutes: read the posting, rewrite the resume, fill in the form, re-enter your work history because the parser mangled it.
Apply to ten roles a month and that is eight to fifteen hours — a part-time job stacked on the job you are trying to leave. Reverse recruiting is worth it when your search costs you more than the service does, and the honest version of that sum includes the applications you did not send because you were tired.
The other cost is duration. Every extra month of searching is a month of the salary you have not started earning. Against that, the monthly price of almost any of these services is a rounding error — which is an argument for buying one, though not for buying an expensive one.
What to check before you pay
Whether the price is a retainer or a subscription you can cancel. Whether applications are actually submitted or only prepared. Whether you can see the receipts. Whether there is a cap on members, and whether anyone will tell you what it is.
For what it is worth, ours is 20, it is enforced at checkout rather than advertised loosely, and when it is full you go on a waitlist instead of being sold a seat that does not exist. The first 7 days include a resume audit written by a person and up to 5 applications actually filed, before your card is charged anything.