Outbound for specialist recruiting and executive search firms

Specialist recruiting and executive search firms sell placements in a defined niche: a function, an industry, a level. The buyer is a hiring manager, a head of talent or a CEO, and the trigger is almost perfectly observable because it is a public job posting. The hard part is not finding companies that are hiring. It is finding companies that are hiring badly in your niche, and reaching them before they default to the last firm they used.

We do not start from a list of companies that match your industry filters. We start from the question "who has the problem you solve, right now, and can we see it from the outside?" For recruiting and search firms, a bullseye account usually has all four of these.

• An open role squarely in your niche that has been posted for more than forty five days, reposted, or posted across several boards at once
• A company with no visible internal recruiting function for that level, or one that is clearly stretched
• A growth or change event that means this role is one of several coming: a funding round, a new office, a new product line, a leadership change
• A hiring manager we can name, because talent teams route by seniority of the request

Triggers are what separate a prospect from a name. These are the ones that matter most in this segment, and each one is something we can observe and date, so the angle can say "this happened in June" rather than "you might be experiencing."

• Role age and repost patterns on the company's own careers page and the major boards
• Multiple open roles in the same function, which usually means a leader was just hired and is building
• Funding announcements that mention headcount plans
• New leaders in the function you recruit for, especially those who are new to the company and have no bench
• Layoffs at competitors, which change the candidate market and create replacement hiring elsewhere
• Companies that just posted a role you have filled three times at similar firms

The angle for a search buyer is market knowledge they cannot get from a job board. "Your Head of Data Engineering role has been open since June. We have placed that role four times this year and the candidates who close are coming from two specific places, neither of which is where most firms look. Happy to share the comp range that is actually moving people." The email demonstrates that you know the market before you ask to be paid for knowing it.

The objection is "every recruiter emails every company with an open role, we will be noise." Correct, which is why the note cannot be about you. It has to contain something true about their role, their market or their candidate pool that they did not have this morning. Most recruiter emails say "we specialize in your space." Ours say what is happening in their space. That difference is the whole reply rate.

Send us your site and the kind of roles and clients you want more of. We come back with 10 companies with a live, aging role in your niche, the age and repost history of the role, the hiring manager we would contact, and the market observation we would open with.

The review is free and it is the whole first step. If it is right, the managed engagement takes the same method and runs it every week: fresh account research, angle development, the sequence itself, reply monitoring and a plain summary of what is worth your time. Here is how the engagement works, and here is current pricing.