Actually, the fear of circumventing wasn't the historical reason. I believe the bigger fear for most recruiters was other recruiters coming in and taking that c

Actually, the fear of circumventing wasn't the historical reason. I believe the bigger fear for most recruiters was other recruiters coming in and taking that client's business. Now that applying for jobs has become so easy, circumventing is an issue, but the trend of hiding company names goes back to when applying for jobs was much more time consuming. I do list my clients names publicly, but they also provide me some fee up front which helps justify this risk. Pure contingency search, which makes up the large majority of recruiting, comes with 100% risk on the recruiter and contingency firms are less likely to post names.