Recruitment agencies: win mandates with hiring signals

Two jobs in one

A recruitment agency lives off two activities that feed each other: finding clients with roles to fill, and finding candidates to fill them. Most tools only handle the second. The first often relies on networking, word of mouth and exhausting cold outreach.

Yet there is a public, daily and highly reliable signal of hiring intent: the published job post. A company that posts a job has a need, a budget and a deadline. It is exactly the right moment to offer help.

Hiring signals as a prospecting trigger

Every day, thousands of jobs are posted on job boards, company careers pages and LinkedIn. One by one, they are ads. Aggregated and filtered on your niche, they become hiring signals: the list of companies hiring, today, the profiles you know how to place.

A good signal reads on three levels:

• The role: is it a job you know and already place?
• The company: do its size, industry and location match your clients?
• The timing: a post published two hours ago is not worth the same as one online for three months. A post that lingers is often a hard-to-fill role, which is a strong argument for an agency.

The six-step journey

1. Spot the job posts

You describe the roles you place, your area and your industries. The tool surfaces matching posts as they appear, with their source and publication date.

2. Pick the right decision-maker

A job post does not tell you who to write to. You need to identify the person who owns the hire: a talent acquisition manager locally, an HR business partner regionally, or an HR director nationally. Depending on the company’s size and the role, the right contact differs: it is often worth targeting several, each with their own angle.

3. Enrich the contact details

Once the decision-makers are chosen, you need their work contact details. It is the most tedious step done by hand, and the one best suited to automation.

4. Send a first approach

The best approach starts from the job post itself. “I saw you are hiring a Senior Account Executive in London. I place sales profiles in your industry and have three candidates in mind who already sell to your market.” Short, precise, useful. AI can draft that first version from the post: you review it, adjust it and send it.

5. Sign the mandate

A decision-maker replies that they are interested: the conversation begins. You already know the role, you already have an idea of the profiles, you are credible from the first exchange.

6. Source the candidates

Once the mandate is signed, you launch the candidate search on that exact role, with the same criteria as the post. On the same platform, without re-entering anything. This is where an AI sourcing agent takes over: ranked shortlist, contact details, outreach.

Good practice

• Define your niche. Better to own ten types of roles in one region than to watch the whole market.
• Be fast. A signal loses value over time. A daily alert saves you from finding the post a week too late.
• Talk about the role, not about you. The decision-maker has a specific problem; your message must show you understand it.
• Come with candidates. Nothing convinces better than “I have three profiles in mind”.
• Play by the rules. B2B outreach to professional contacts is regulated: messages relevant to their job, a way to opt out, and data kept to what is necessary.

And at night?

Spotting posts, finding decision-makers, preparing approaches: these steps repeat for every company in your niche. That is exactly what AI agents can do in the background while you sit with clients. In the morning, you find the companies spotted, the decision-makers found and the approaches ready, and you approve what goes out in your name.

With Profilr

Profilr brings both sides of the job onto one platform: the Adchase module spots the companies that are hiring and their decision-makers, and the sourcing agent finds candidates for the mandates you sign. Discover Profilr for recruitment agencies, or book a demo to see it on your niche.