It's very similar to financial/wealth managers. You don't want to work with a "Financial Manager", but you would probably happily give your portfolio to Warren

It's very similar to financial/wealth managers. You don't want to work with a "Financial Manager", but you would probably happily give your portfolio to Warren Buffet or Seth Klarman (there's 1000s of other people in this sphere, whose names we don't know). I think it's close to the 80/20 principle: 80% of people whose job title would be "third party recruiter" are not (or are just barely) worth your time, but 20% will do wonders for your career and network. Good recruiters are primarily skilled at building a wide but high-quality professional network, keeping information flowing through it, and, generally, significantly raising the signal:noise ratio of the connection process for both sides. This earns them repeat customers on both sides. Hires convert into hiring managers convert into founders, and good reputation for quality on both ends goes a long way. It's actually not too dissimilar from good LPs in a VC firm, and there's some VC firms that function pretty explicitly as recruiting hubs. The practical differences: good third party recruiters invest in long-term relationships, with an incrementally increasing quality bar for people and companies admitted into those relationships. Mediocre third party recruiters are more transactional (maybe they see it as an in-between gig, or don't get/want to get the bigger picture) and follow the money with minimal attention paid to quality. The latter are more numerous and more vocal. The good ones exist, but there's probably not a lot of them, and they don't reach out as often. IME, you can usually distinguish between the two based on the portfolio of companies they work with, if you're familiar with the companies you can draw your own opinions. However, with anything qualitatively-differentiated like this, it is hard to persuade somebody that this thing exists. You would know it when you see it.