Recruitment agency business development: a LinkedIn and email playbook

To get clients for a recruitment agency, pick one niche, list the companies hiring in it each week, write to the person who owns the vacancy, and follow up on LinkedIn and email until they answer. Keep each message about one role. Sellinger can run the outreach and follow ups, then hand interested people to you.

This is the hub of a five post series on recruitment agency business development: winning clients, meaning the hiring companies, not sourcing candidates. If you recruit candidates at scale, read LinkedIn outreach for recruiters instead. Here we cover the client side, in the order a good week of business development runs.

Why do recruitment agencies struggle to get clients?

Most agencies grow on referrals and repeat business, which is fine until a client leaves, a sector cools or a founder stops having time to network. The usual response is a burst of outreach, then silence. Three patterns cause most of the damage.

• No niche. "We recruit across all sectors" gives the reader nothing to remember. A hiring manager answers someone who fills their kind of role.
• Writing to the wrong company at the wrong time. A company with no open role has no reason to talk to you. A company that posted the role last night does.
• Stopping after one message. Most replies come after a follow up, so a single email is a test you ran badly.

The playbook below fixes each of these in turn. It is a process, not a promise: we publish no result for recruiters, because we have none to show.

Step 1: choose a niche narrow enough to write one sentence about

Complete this sentence: "We place [role family] in [company type] in [place]." For example, "We place backend engineers in seed to Series B software companies in Berlin and London." If the sentence needs the word "and" more than twice, the niche is still too wide.

A narrow niche also makes the list possible. You can name 300 companies of that type. You cannot name 300 companies "in tech".

Step 2: build a list of companies that are hiring right now

Timing is the whole advantage a recruiter has over other suppliers. A role posted this week means someone is feeling the gap today. The detail is in how to find companies that are hiring right now, but the short version is three signals:

1. A live job post for a role in your niche, especially one that has been open for a few weeks.
2. A funding announcement, which usually leads to hiring within months.
3. Headcount changes: a new leader, a new office, or a burst of new joiners.

Sellinger's intent signals cover these as company activity templates: funding by round type, hiring for a position, live job listings, new joiners and new offices. They are among 26 templates in 8 categories and are included in every plan. See intent signals. A signal is a hint, not a purchase plan, so qualify it before you write.

Step 3: reach the person who owns the vacancy

The best first contact is the hiring manager, the person whose team has the gap. Second best is the head of the function. In a company under about 50 people it is usually the founder. If the company has an internal talent team that controls agency use, write to the head of talent and be plain about what you add.

Use a lookup to find the person and a verified email. Sellinger lookups cost $0.01 each, and its database holds over 700 million contacts. Check every name against the live job post, so the message names the right role and the right person.

Step 4: write about one role, not about your agency

A first message for a hiring manager has four jobs: show you noticed the role, say something specific about the market for it, make one small offer and ask a question that is easy to answer. The post on BD messages for recruiters on LinkedIn has eight made up examples, with the connection notes and follow ups. Here is the shape.

Make sure every term you state is a term you can honour. Do not mention a fee structure you have not agreed internally. If you use a template, start from the staffing agency client outreach email.

Step 5: pick the channel for each person

Three first touches are open to you. A connection request is free and starts a relationship. An InMail reaches someone you are not connected to and normally costs a credit, unless the person has an Open Profile. Email suits a verified address and a message that needs a few lines. The full comparison, with a decision table, is in InMail vs connection request vs email for recruiters.

A workable default is a connection request for hiring managers in your niche, an InMail for the few who matter most and cannot be reached otherwise, and email as the second channel for everyone with a verified address. If your clients are phone led and want a dialer, a tool built around a dialer fits that part better. Sellinger works through LinkedIn, email, WhatsApp, Instagram and live chat.

Step 6: follow up four times, then stop

A follow up is not a nudge, it is a new reason. Spread four touches over about three weeks: the first message, a second that adds a fact about the market, a third that offers something useful (a salary range, a candidate summary with no names) and a short closing note. Then stop, and come back only when a new signal appears, such as another job post. The data on how many follow ups to send is in how many follow ups depends on the relationship.

Step 7: stay inside the rules

Three sets of rules apply. LinkedIn's rules govern what you do on its platform, and it restricts accounts for sending many invitations quickly. Data protection law governs the details you hold about hiring managers, which are personal data even at a company address. Email marketing law governs the sending. All three are covered in GDPR basics for recruiters doing BD outreach. Honour every opt out at once: Article 21 of the GDPR gives people the right to object to direct marketing at any time, and after an objection the data must no longer be processed for it. Sellinger puts an opt out on its suppression list and stops the agent, but you remain responsible for who you contact and why. This is not legal advice.

What a week of recruiter business development looks like

These times are our estimate for a single recruiter on one niche, not measured. The point is that the outreach itself should not be the work. The reading of signals and the intro calls are.

Where does Sellinger fit?

Sellinger is an AI SDR: it finds the right buyers, writes to each one on LinkedIn, email or WhatsApp, answers the replies and books the meetings. For an agency that means it can watch company signals, write to the hiring manager, run the follow ups and put the call in your calendar. A campaign can run in approval mode, where every message waits for you to approve it, and you can take over any conversation. Each LinkedIn account has a default of 20 invitations a day, and no tool can guarantee that LinkedIn will never restrict an account.

Plans are Start $490, Growth $1,490 and Scale $3,900 a month, with five AI colleagues in every plan. There is no self serve trial, so you talk to us to start. See pricing and the recruiter use case, or the industry page for recruitment and staffing agencies.

For evidence of the approach on a real account, the Sellinger case study reports over 1,500 calls booked in the last 12 months using on average 7.5 LinkedIn accounts. That is Sellinger selling its own product, not a recruiting result.

The series

1. Finding companies that are hiring right now
2. BD outreach messages for recruiters on LinkedIn
3. InMail vs connection request vs email for recruiters
4. GDPR basics for recruiters doing BD outreach