How we find firms, read their websites and decide what counts as published. Q4 2026 edition, data checked Nov 1–4, 2026.
123RFP records what U.S. direct-hire recruiting firms say about their fees, guarantees and terms on their own websites. It is a record of what firms publish, not a review, a rating or an endorsement.
The Q4 2026 study summarizes these findings: read the study.
We start from a list of 5,123 U.S. recruiting firms and look up each firm’s website. Firms that offer only temporary or contract staffing are left out of the fee and guarantee figures, because those terms work differently.
We visit each firm’s public pages once per quarter with an automated reader that identifies itself and follows each site’s robots.txt rules. We read the pages most likely to state terms: services, fees, guarantee, FAQ, terms and employer pages. We never log in, fill in forms or get around a site’s bot protection.
For every firm, we searched its own website for fee, guarantee and client-agreement pages, including PDF agreements, then read the full text of everything we found.
A value counts only when the firm states it as its own term on its own site, and we keep the exact sentence and the page it came from. We drop industry averages, blog explainers, figures about other firms, savings claims ("30% less than traditional firms") and time-to-fill promises.
Conditional values: a fee or guarantee stated with "up to", "starting at", "typically" or "as low as" counts as published, is marked conditional, and is left out of averages.
Guarantee mentioned, no term: a firm that says it offers a guarantee but never says how long is counted separately, not as publishing a guarantee.
Guarantee lengths are shown in months (days divided by 30, one decimal); 365 days is shown as 12 months and 730 as 24.
Contingency includes firms that collect a small upfront deposit (under $1,000 or under 10% of the fee) before the hire. Retained means $1,000+ or 10%+ of the fee is due before the hire.
Some firms can’t be read: 6% block automated visitors, 32.8% have no website we could find, and 1.1% didn’t respond. We report these counts rather than guess.
A firm is established when it has been in business for 2+ years by its domain registration date (WHOIS/RDAP) or the first archived copy of its site (Wayback Machine). Named leadership and a LinkedIn company page are recorded but not required. Other firms are listed, labeled "New firm" or "Not yet verified", and left out of category figures.
Fees at or below 10%, guarantees over 730 days (two years) and guarantees under 30 days are held until a person reviews them, and are shown and counted only once approved.
A guarantee longer than the firm has existed is flagged.
Every firm is read with the same rules, and nothing is ranked. Default order is by name. 123RFP is operated by beep! Directed LLC, which also operates #twiceasnice Recruiting and Rhodes Wolfe; both are listed under the same rules as every other firm.
Firms can point us to a page on their own public site that we missed or misread. We never take values from emails or forms. Corrections appear after the next quarterly check. False or misleading claims mean removal, with a public note.
Every listed firm, one row each, with its fee model, fee, guarantee and remedy as shown on its page, each value's source URL and as-of date, and the date we last checked the firm: /data/123rfp-q4-2026.csv (CSV). Quoted sentences are on the firm pages and are not in the file.
Dataset (c) beep! Directed LLC, licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Quoted text on firm pages remains its authors'.