By Ben Fielding, Quinset
The number that should worry every agency owner
Here is a fact from the real world. In an audit of 490 UK recruitment agencies, more than half had no DMARC record on their primary sending domain. Most of the rest had DMARC set to monitor-only, which means it does nothing to protect delivery. A significant number had SPF records configured in ways that actively harm deliverability. Almost none had any systematic view of what was happening to their emails after they were sent.
These are not small agencies struggling with tech. These are businesses spending tens of thousands of pounds a year on LinkedIn Recruiter seats, Bullhorn licences, and outreach platforms. Some of them have dedicated marketing people. They have brand guidelines. They track click-through rates on their candidate campaigns. And yet the fundamental question, whether the email arrived, is one they cannot answer.
That is not a technical oversight. That is a strategic blind spot. And it is quietly costing the recruitment industry more revenue than it realises.
What changed, and when
Email deliverability has always mattered, in the same vague way that “data hygiene” has always mattered. For years, the consequences of getting it wrong were diffuse enough to ignore. An email went to spam? The candidate didn’t reply. The client didn’t respond. The job order went elsewhere. Easy to blame the economy, the market, the quality of the brief.
That changed materially in February 2024, when Google and Yahoo simultaneously enforced new bulk sender requirements. For the first time, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication were no longer optional best practices. They became table stakes for any domain sending more than a handful of emails per day. One-click unsubscribe became mandatory. Spam complaint thresholds became enforceable, with Gmail capping tolerance at 0.3% before throttling begins.
Microsoft followed. Their TERRL and MERRL reputation systems, refined over the past 18 months, now make Outlook and Hotmail significantly harder to land in than they were two years ago. For UK agencies, this matters enormously: a large proportion of their candidates and clients are on Microsoft-hosted email. Some of those agencies are now on the wrong side of Microsoft’s filters and do not know it.
Alongside the platform changes, cold outreach volume exploded. AI writing tools made it trivially easy to produce high-volume, superficially personalised email sequences. Every recruiter and their competitors are sending more. Inbox providers responded by becoming more aggressive in their filtering. The result is that the bar for what constitutes “normal sending behaviour” has risen sharply, and the penalties for falling below it have become immediate rather than gradual.
The recruitment sector, which has always been a heavy user of outbound email, is disproportionately exposed to all three of these shifts at once.
The vanity metric problem
If you ask most recruitment marketing people how their email campaigns are performing, they will tell you about open rates. Perhaps click rates. Maybe reply rates if they are more sophisticated than average.
What almost none of them can tell you is their spam placement rate. Their domain reputation score with Google Postmaster Tools. Whether their DKIM signatures are passing consistently. What their DMARC reports show about third-party tools sending on their behalf.
Open rates, in particular, have become structurally misleading since Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection in 2021. A significant portion of “opens” are now machine-generated, triggered by Apple’s proxy servers pre-loading email content regardless of whether a human ever looked at it. Agencies are optimising subject lines and send times based on data that includes a large percentage of ghost opens. They are measuring the wrong thing with precision while the important thing goes unmeasured entirely.
This is not a criticism of recruitment marketers. It is a systems problem. The tools they use surface what is easy to surface. Nobody in the CRM market is particularly incentivised to tell an agency that their deliverability is broken, because the fix involves infrastructure work that sits outside the CRM’s scope. So the dashboard shows open rates, the benchmark says 30% is good, and everyone carries on.
The argument I keep making
I have spoken to a lot of recruitment agency owners over the past few years. Many of them come to Quinset after a specific event: a campaign that performed strangely badly, a client who mentioned they never received an email, a sudden drop in reply rates with no obvious cause. In most cases, the problem has been building for months. It just became visible.
What strikes me consistently is that these are commercially switched-on people. They scrutinise their cost per placement. They know their conversion rates at every stage of the pipeline. They will debate for an hour whether a particular job board is worth its subscription. And yet the email infrastructure that underpins almost every client and candidate interaction in their business has never been audited.
The argument I keep making is this: email deliverability is not a technical problem that happens to affect recruitment. It is a revenue problem that manifests in technical ways. When a candidate application acknowledgement lands in spam, you lose a candidate relationship. When a client terms email is filtered, you lose a commercial opportunity. When your outreach sequences stop reaching inboxes at the rate they used to, your sequencing tool looks like it is underperforming. You blame the tool, or the market, or the list. You do not check the infrastructure.
The other argument, which takes slightly longer to make, is that this is not hard to fix. It requires some deliberate attention and someone who knows what they are looking at, but it is not open-heart surgery. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC can all be configured correctly in a matter of days. Domain reputation, once damaged, can be rebuilt over weeks. List hygiene can transform bounce rates within a single campaign cycle. The problem is not that it is complex. The problem is that it is invisible until it is not.
Where this goes next
The email landscape will continue to tighten. That is not speculation; it follows directly from the financial incentives of the large inbox providers. Google and Microsoft both have strong reasons to keep their users’ inboxes clean. Every enforcement change they have made in the past three years has moved in one direction: higher standards, faster penalties, less tolerance for domains with poor authentication or poor reputation.
The agencies that will be most affected are those sending from multiple domains without a coherent domain strategy, those using sequencing tools without understanding how those tools interact with their sending reputation, and those measuring success entirely through metrics that do not tell them whether their emails arrived.
But I am not pessimistic about this. The gap between what most agencies are doing and what they should be doing is genuinely wide, which means the upside of getting it right is also significant. I have seen agencies double their candidate response rates after fixing authentication and cleaning their lists. Not because their emails got better, but because their emails actually arrived.
The agencies that treat email infrastructure as a growth lever rather than a utility bill will be in a materially better position over the next two to three years. The ones that keep measuring open rates and assuming that means things are fine will keep wondering why their sequencing tools are not performing like they used to.
The infrastructure is broken for a lot of agencies. The measurement is pointing at the wrong things. The changes in the email environment are accelerating.
It is not complicated. It is just being ignored.
Ben Fielding is the founder of Quinset, an email deliverability consultancy that works with UK and US recruitment agencies.
If you would like to speak with Ben, please book a call with him here.
