101 interested leads on a market where everyone runs outbound

1. About the client

The client is a recruitment and HR outsourcing agency from the Tricity area, specialising in white-collar recruitment - office-based roles from specialists through to management. Its client list includes Big Four firms and leaders in automotive, retail, e-commerce and manufacturing.

In a conversation with a prospective client the agency holds two arguments most competitors lack. The first is access to passive candidates - people who are not currently looking for work, will not respond to any job posting, and remain out of reach of an internal HR team. The second is success fee billing - the client pays for a hired candidate, so adding the agency to its supplier list carries no entry cost.

The need concerned new clients - companies with open recruitment processes as well as those planning to hire in the near future.

2. Challenge

Recruitment and HR outsourcing is probably the most heavily exploited cold email channel in Poland. Practically every agency runs outbound here, and an HR team at a company above fifty people receives messages every time it publishes an opening. Inboxes are overloaded, spam filters are highly sensitive, and companies usually already have contracts with several suppliers at once.

Every competitor runs outbound here

Recruitment agencies discovered cold email early and have used it intensively for years. Recipients have a trained reflex for deleting such messages, and spam filters catch careless senders faster every year. At this intensity, holding deliverability stops being a technical matter and becomes the condition for a campaign existing at all.

A job posting triggers a wave of messages

Publishing a job opening is a public signal that every agency monitors using the same methods. A message sent the day after the posting lands in the inbox alongside several similar ones, and loses on order rather than on content. Getting ahead of that wave requires a different signal than the posting itself.

Companies already work with several agencies

An HR team is rarely looking for its first supplier - it usually has two or three. A partnership proposal therefore runs into the question of why anyone needs another agency. The conversation starts only when the offer contains something the current suppliers do not provide.

3. How we cut through the noise

An offer that answers "why another agency"

The starting point was the substance of the proposal. The message opened with arguments a company already using two or three agencies had not heard before.

The first argument was passive candidates. People who are not currently looking for work will not respond to any posting - and it is often precisely among them that the candidate a company needs is found. An internal HR team works with postings and its own network, so this part of the market stays out of its reach. This argument opened conversations even with companies that already had contracts with several suppliers.

The second was success fee billing. The client pays for a hired candidate, so adding the agency to its supplier list costs nothing - and replying to the message stops being a purchasing decision and becomes a simple opening of a door. On a market where every offer demands justification, an offer with no entry cost carries its own.

The third was trust. The agency worked for Big Four firms and for leaders in automotive, retail, e-commerce and manufacturing, so the message could rest on a shared point of reference. In a category where every sender declares effectiveness, a recognisable portfolio serves as the proof.

HR as a partner, regardless of current hiring

The first route bypassed the hiring moment entirely. Contact went to HR teams with a proposal to work together in future.

A company without an open recruitment process today will have one next quarter, and will then call the agency it already knows. This route built recognition in a segment where decisions are made in advance.

Messages written in this mode carried a different tone from the rest of the campaigns - no urgency, and instead a concrete offer to be the backup supplier for the moment the current ones fall behind.

The route delivered steadily, though more slowly than the signal-based campaigns. Its value lay in working continuously, including when the recruitment market slowed down.

Active hiring, with the decision-maker matched to company size

The second route was classic signal-based outreach - scraping active job postings and contacting the person responsible for recruitment.

We pulled postings and filtered them for the white-collar roles the agency has genuine experience with. A campaign aimed at recruitments outside that specialisation generates replies the client cannot service, and that damages the result on both sides.

At companies with a developed HR function the message went to the person responsible for hiring. At companies below fifty people, which often have no HR department at all, the contact was the CEO or managing director - in that structure they are the one who decides on working with an agency.

This route is the industry standard and every competitor does the same thing. That is exactly why it became the starting point for looking for something fewer people do.

Waterfall enrichment - from the role to the head of department

The third route bypassed HR and went straight to the person for whom the vacancy is a problem right now - the department head who needs someone.

We taught the system to map the advertised role onto the decision-maker in the relevant department. A posting for a sales specialist leads to the head of sales, a posting for a marketing specialist to whoever runs marketing. That person's title depends on company size, so the AI selected it case by case - from team lead and manager through to director and VP.

The result was two-track outreach. The same company received a message to its HR team and a separate one to the department head who raised the hiring need. The second of those talks about the problem rather than the procedure.

Finding one specific person's address from a job posting alone takes several sources arranged in sequence - and this is the part most agencies never build, because it means building a system rather than buying a database.

The LinkedIn signal - the best result of the project

The fourth route proved the most effective. A weekly automation caught recruitment posts on LinkedIn before the opening reached the places everyone else searches.

Every week the system searched posts for phrases signalling hiring - "we're hiring", "we're looking for", "opening a recruitment" and dozens of variants. Every hit was verified for whether it concerned an actual vacancy rather than, say, a report from a job fair.

We then checked fit against the client profile - whether the role fell within the agency's specialisations and whether company size matched its model. Only the filtered list went into waterfall enrichment for the post author's name and address.

The message concerned the specific role that person had just written about publicly. Campaigns on this route converted roughly three times better than outreach to a broad database of HR departments - the signal was fresh and, unlike job board postings, had not yet been worn out by the industry.

Deliverability as the condition for a campaign existing

At this level of competition, sending without your own control over infrastructure ends in the spam folder. Everything ran through our software monitoring each mailbox separately.

Our internal tool tracks replies and bounces per mailbox and per domain, flags the ones that stop performing, and swaps them out before a reputation drop spreads to the rest of the infrastructure. Each mailbox's volume is allocated based on how it actually delivers.

In a category where spam filters are at their most sensitive, this layer decides whether a campaign exists at all. The best-written message in a spam folder has zero effect.

In parallel we ran 84 campaigns, swapped and rebuilt on the basis of results. That number is a measure of the market we worked on - finding the few routes that work there took that many hypotheses.

4. Results

Across seven months the campaigns ran along six parallel routes - from a general proposal to HR teams, through job postings and decision-maker mapping, to the weekly LinkedIn signal. The agency received 101 interested leads.

The differences between routes turned out to be larger than the differences between copy variants within a single route. Outreach to a broad database of HR departments delivered steadily and slowly. A message to someone who had written publicly about an opening a few days earlier converted roughly three times better - with the same offer and similar copy.

That signal had limited capacity, because recruitment posts are far scarcer than job board listings. The remaining routes therefore stayed in the campaign as the source of volume, while the LinkedIn signal accounted for quality. This division of roles is repeatable and we apply it on other markets today.

5. Lessons

Three principles from a market where everyone does the same thing.

A fresh signal beats a popular signal

Every agency sees a job board posting on the same day and every one of them reacts the same way. A recruitment post on LinkedIn carries the same information, but far fewer companies monitor it - which is why a message sent off that signal lands in an inbox that does not yet hold five similar ones.

The offer has to answer the question about another supplier

An HR team usually already works with several agencies, so a partnership proposal starts from a defensive position. Access to passive candidates and success fee billing gave the recipient a reason to talk that the current suppliers did not have - one widened the reach of the recruitment, the other took the risk out of the decision.

On a crowded market, deliverability is part of the strategy

Where spam filters are most sensitive, control over infrastructure stops being a technical topic. Monitoring mailboxes and domains separately, with automatic rotation of the ones that stop performing, decides whether a campaign reaches the inbox at all.

On the most crowded outbound market, the winner is whoever finds a way to sound different from everyone else and to write at a moment when the others are not writing yet.

6. Summary

A recruitment and HR outsourcing agency from the Tricity area, specialising in white-collar roles, needed new clients on a market where every competitor runs outbound. We built six parallel routes to the decision-maker - from partnership proposals to HR teams, through waterfall enrichment leading from the advertised role to the department head, to a weekly signal from recruitment posts on LinkedIn. The result was 101 interested leads in seven months.