Where did that recruiter get your resume?

Unsolicited recruiter email looks random. Much of it is not: it is your own earlier application, resurfacing from a staffing agency's database without a label saying where they got you. We measured this on one job board, with method and counts.

Where these numbers come from. One instrumented search submitted 2,800+ applications through a single large tech job board across 2026. Postings there are mostly staffing-agency posts, not end employers. We then matched every inbound email against the vocabulary of agencies we had applied to — and against recruiter names and addresses that appeared inside the postings themselves. Gates: recruiting-shaped subject, human sender, not an application receipt, and arrival after our first application to that agency. Queries at /stats.

The board's own channel is nearly silent

The board's recruiter-messaging relay delivered 3 messages, total, against 2,800+ applications. Counting only that relay, the channel looks dead. It is not — the responses just arrive somewhere else, unlabeled.

What attribution finds

21 staffing agencies we had applied to through the board later emailed directly from their own domains — 118 messages, none mentioning the board, pitching roles usually unrelated to the one we applied for. This is an application becoming a CRM record.
1 recruiter address printed inside a posting we applied to later wrote to us directly.
2 recruiters matched by personal name while writing from a domain we never applied to — consistent with a recruiter changing agencies and the candidate book moving with them.
A full-text search of every email received in 2026 (run 2026-11-04) found zero messages in which any recruiter said they found the resume on the board. Attribution had to be derived; nobody volunteers the source.

What this means if you are applying

An application to a staffing-agency posting is not a message to an employer. It is an entry in that agency's candidate database, from which you may hear — from a different person, about a different role, months later, with no provenance. That is not necessarily bad (it is a real inbound channel, and this measurement proves it), but it means two things: you cannot evaluate a job board by the mail that carries its name, and you cannot know who holds your resume once an agency has it.

What this page can and cannot say

Attribution by agency name or recruiter identity shows the agency obtained the resume via the board ecosystem; whether it was our application or the board's searchable resume database is not distinguishable from outside. Either way it is the same channel.
Counts are floors: matching is deliberately conservative (common recruiter names are never attributed on name alone; generic agency-name words are excluded).
One board, one search. No agency is named, and no claim is made about any individual message's sender.

This data is a by-product of running NetaJob — the source code that collected it. It is a one-time $189 for the full, readable Python, run on your own machine under your own accounts. It will not tell you whether you will get the job; nothing can. What it does is keep a record like the one above for your own search.

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