TL;DR
Search job boards and company careers pages for your niche, then prioritise roles open 30+ days, reposted ads and companies that just raised. Email the hiring manager, not HR, about the specific role with one or two anonymised profiles.
Find hiring companies with ManyPIFor an agency recruiter, a live job ad is a company admitting in public that it has a problem it's willing to pay to solve. The companies most likely to take your call are the ones that have been trying to solve it alone for a while.
The process, start to finish:
Search job boards and company careers pages for your niche and location.
Rank roles by how long they've been open, whether they've been reposted, and how many similar roles the company has.
Find the hiring manager named or implied in the ad.
Email about that specific role, with one or two anonymised candidate profiles.
Check the role weekly. When it disappears, follow up.
Where hiring data lives
Source | What it shows | How to use it |
|---|---|---|
Big job boards (Indeed, Glassdoor, and others) | Broad coverage across companies | Sort by date and note roles you've seen before |
Niche job boards | Roles in one field, like engineering or healthcare | Smaller volume, higher fit |
Applicant tracking system pages (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable) | The company's own complete list of openings | Search engines index them, so a site search finds them by role |
Company careers pages | Every open role, including ones never advertised elsewhere | Shows how many roles the company is hiring for at once |
Funding news and filings | A hiring wave that hasn't been posted yet | See our guide to finding recently funded startups |
The applicant tracking system pages are the most underused source on that list. Companies on Greenhouse publish their jobs under greenhouse.io (on boards.greenhouse.io or job-boards.greenhouse.io), and Lever uses jobs.lever.co/companyname. A search engine query such as site:greenhouse.io "data engineer" "Austin" returns live roles straight from the companies' own systems, often before they spread to the big boards.
Signals that a company will take an agency's call
Plenty of companies with open roles don't want agency help. These signals make it more likely that they do:
The role has been open more than about 30 days. The internal approach has had a fair try.
The ad has been reposted. Same title, new date. Something didn't work the first time.
Several openings for the same role. Volume hiring stretches an in-house team.
A hard-to-fill niche. Specialist skills, unusual locations, or a security clearance.
A recent funding round or a new office. A hiring plan with a deadline attached.
No in-house recruiter. Small companies with no talent team are often the most open to agencies.
None of these guarantee a yes. Together, they decide who goes to the top of the list.
The signals that move a hiring company to the top of an agency's list.
Find the hiring manager, not just HR
Talent acquisition teams receive a lot of agency emails, and some treat agencies as competition for their own targets. The hiring manager feels the empty seat every day.
The ad usually tells you who that is. Phrases like "you'll report to the Head of Data" or "join our five-person platform team led by our VP Engineering" give you the role. At companies under about 50 people, the founder is often the hiring manager for senior roles. Find that person's name and work email, and verify the address before you send.
An email that gets a reply
Be specific about the role and show you can deliver. A generic "we place engineers" email gets ignored.
Subject: Your [role title] opening
Hi [Name],
I noticed the [role title] role has been open on your careers page for a few weeks. I place [type of role] in [location or market] and have two people in process right now who match what you've described: one [short anonymised profile], one [short anonymised profile].
Happy to send both profiles over on our standard terms. Would that help, or is the role close to filled?
The last question matters. It gives the reader an easy way to answer, even if the answer is "we've got someone", and that reply tells you to take the role off your list.
Keep the list fresh
Hiring data goes stale faster than almost any other lead data. Check your list every week:
A role that disappears was filled, paused or cancelled. A short "did the role get filled?" email often opens the next conversation.
A role that reappears was probably a failed hire. That's your best moment to call.
A company that posts a new role in your niche goes back to the top.
Doing it with ManyPI
Disclosure: ManyPI is our product.
You can describe the companies you're after in plain words, for example "SaaS companies in Austin hiring a senior backend engineer, with roles open for over 30 days, and the engineering manager's email". The agent reads job boards, careers pages and news live, records the hiring signal on each lead, and looks for the person to contact. Every email is checked before you send, and sequences go out from your own inbox and stop when someone replies.
A hiring search typed into the ManyPI agent.
If you want to try the idea without signing up, our free hiring signal finder groups live job posts by company. The recruiters page covers both client and candidate sourcing.
Tomorrow's call sheet can come from one search. Run a site search on Greenhouse or Lever for the role you place most often, in your main city, and note every company whose role is older than a month.
Written by
Ole Mai
Founder / ManyPI