Recruiting

Email Verification for Recruiting

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Recruiting has a decay problem that almost no other industry has to deal with at the same speed. Your entire database is built on people who are, by definition, likely to change employer. The moment they do, the work address you have on file is deactivated, sometimes within hours. You will never be told. The candidate certainly will not think to update you.

So a database built over five years of sourcing, referrals, applications and conference badge scans is not a database of contactable people. It is a database of contactable people mixed with a large and growing population of addresses that were switched off at some point between then and now. And because your outreach volume is high by nature, you send to that mixture constantly.

Bounces are how a recruiter gets filtered

Sourcing outreach is already fighting for the inbox. It is unsolicited, it is high volume, and it looks structurally like spam to a filter. The one thing you cannot afford on top of that is a bounce rate that tells mailbox providers you are mailing addresses you have no relationship with. Once your sending domain is treated as a spam source, it is not just the dead addresses that stop landing. It is the live candidates too, and the hiring managers, and the client updates.

Personal versus work addresses

The candidate address that survives a job change is the personal one, which is why experienced recruiters try to capture both. Verification helps you find out which of the two you actually have working. Run the database, see which work addresses have gone dark, and prioritise finding a personal address for the candidates who matter.

What Mailthentic checks, and what it will not pretend

Syntax, domain and MX records, disposable domain detection across over 800 known throwaway services, catch-all detection, role-based flagging across more than 150 prefixes, and risky or invalid detection. Every result returns the status, the reason, the SMTP response code and a confidence score.

What it will not do is pretend to confirm the unconfirmable. Corporate domains are very frequently configured as catch-all, meaning they accept mail to every address whether the mailbox exists or not. No verifier can confirm an individual mailbox on a catch-all domain. Gmail, Google Workspace, Outlook and Microsoft 365 return a 250 OK even for addresses that do not exist, deliberately, to stop harvesting. Since a huge share of your candidate base sits behind exactly those two situations, a vendor that reports them all as valid is handing you a fantasy. Mailthentic labels them for what they are.

Bulk CSV upload for your ATS export, with duplicates removed before processing so you are not charged for them.
Real-time API for application forms and candidate registration.
Credits that never expire, which suits recruiting where a big sourcing push is followed by a quiet quarter.

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The Recruiting deliverability challenge

Work addresses die the day the candidate resigns

Your database is built on people whose defining characteristic is that they move jobs. Every placement, every career change, every layoff kills another batch of the work addresses you spent years collecting, and nobody tells you.

High-volume outreach plus bounces gets you blacklisted

Sourcing email is already unsolicited and high volume, which is the profile filters are built to catch. Add a heavy bounce rate on top and your sending domain stops reaching live candidates, hiring managers and clients too.

The ATS looks full and is half empty

A database of fifty thousand candidates feels like an asset. If a large slice of it has been undeliverable for years, it is not an asset, it is a number on a dashboard, and every campaign you run against it burns reputation.

Corporate domains hide the truth

Company mail servers are often catch-all, so they accept every address whether the mailbox exists or not. A candidate who left the business a year ago can still look reachable, and a verifier that calls that valid is lying to you.

How Mailthentic helps Recruiting teams

Run the ATS export and see what is really left

Upload your candidate database as a CSV. Duplicates are removed before processing, so you are not charged for them, and every row comes back with a status, a reason, an SMTP response code and a confidence score.

Find out which work addresses have gone dark

Invalid results on corporate domains are a strong hint that the candidate has moved on. That is a prompt to go and find their personal address before you lose the relationship entirely.

Protect the domain your placements depend on

Removing dead addresses before a sourcing campaign keeps your bounce rate down, which is exactly what mailbox providers use to decide whether your outreach reaches the inbox or the spam folder.

Verify applications as they arrive

The real-time API catches typos and throwaway inboxes on your application and registration forms, so a candidate you actually want does not disappear because they mistyped their own address.

A candidate database you can trust rather than one you hope in
Dead work addresses identified so you can chase a personal one
Lower bounce rates on high-volume sourcing outreach
A sending domain that still reaches hiring managers and clients
Catch-all corporate domains labelled honestly instead of inflated to valid
Credits that never expire, which fits the stop-start rhythm of recruiting

Frequently asked questions

How often should a recruiter clean their candidate database?

More often than most industries, because your contacts move jobs by definition. A reasonable pattern is to verify before any significant sourcing campaign, and to run the full database periodically so you can see which segments have gone stale. If you have never cleaned it at all, start with the oldest records, because that is where the decay is concentrated.

Why do so many candidate addresses come back as catch-all?

Because corporate mail servers are frequently configured to accept mail to every address, existing or not. That is a catch-all domain. It means no verifier can confirm whether one specific mailbox on it is live, so a candidate who left the company a year ago can still look reachable. Mailthentic reports these as catch-all rather than inflating them to valid, so you know the result is unconfirmed.

Can verification tell me a candidate has changed jobs?

Not directly, but an invalid result on a corporate address is a strong signal. When a work address that used to work stops existing, the usual explanation is that the person left. That is a prompt to find their personal address or reach them another way, and it is far more useful than discovering it when a placement opportunity is on the table.

Should I email role addresses like hr@ or careers@?

For client outreach they can be useful, but they are shared inboxes and your message competes with everything else in them. Mailthentic flags over 150 role prefixes so you can see exactly which of your contacts are shared mailboxes rather than named people, and treat the two differently.

Will this stop my outreach from going to spam?

It removes one of the biggest causes, which is a high bounce rate. Mailbox providers watch how many of your sends hit addresses that do not exist, and a sender who mails a lot of dead addresses gets treated as a spammer. Verification does not fix bad copy, poor targeting or missing authentication records, but it removes the problem that no amount of good copy can survive.

Do credits expire?

Pay-as-you-go credits never expire. That matters in recruiting because volume is lumpy. A big sourcing push in one quarter and a quiet one after it should not mean you lose what you paid for. There is also a monthly plan if your throughput is steady enough to justify it.

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