In my experience, they usually won't tell you who the clients are unless they are actually interested in you for the role. I have tried this with one recruiter, and it didn't work well.
Any decent internal recruiter has an agreement that if they reached out to you, even if you bypassed them to contact the company, they get credit. And you are probably being contacted through a CRM that automates it for them.
I'd love to see how this is written into the contract. I've worked on the company side with a lot of contingency recruiters and the wording is never broad enough to cover "we talked to them but didn't actually send them to you".
I wouldn't want to hire someone who goes behind the back of the recruiter who did the work to connect the company with a prospective employee. It seems demonstrative of a lack of ethics.
Seems obvious in isolation like that, but the employer probably wouldn’t know you skipped past the recruiter. All they would know is that you came to them direct, and direct hires are a lot cheaper
Bingo! I always ask for salary, tech stack, industry and client name. The first three are to help me decide if I care. The last one is so I can research the company, position, salaries, etc.
I find it slightly annoying if they don't give those details up front. If they refuse to give them when asked, we have nothing more to talk about.
If they did bait and switch you, it will come out when you get to salary negotiations with the client. The client might not know how slimy their recruiter is and probably won't honor their promises.