Random calls and old connections.
I work at an 8-person recruitment agency in Latvia. My title is project manager, but most of my job is sales, and I've done it for a year.
New business came from two places: checking job ads and calling companies more or less at random, and working the team's previous connections. It worked. We still won clients. But I got tired of random calling. Every agency sees the same new ads, and a new ad tells you nothing about whether the company is struggling. I wanted an edge.
A reposted ad means they didn’t find the person.
When a company publishes a vacancy, lets it expire and then publishes the same vacancy again, its first search failed. It has spent weeks on the role and still has an empty seat. That is the moment a recruiter is most useful.
So I built a system that watches for exactly that, and nothing else.
Four steps, built in two weeks.
- 01
Scrape the job boards
Scrapers collect every new listing from the three Latvian job boards that matter: CV-Online, CVMarket and NVA, the State Employment Agency’s vacancy portal.
- 02
Spot the reposts
When an ad ends and the same company publishes it again, that’s a hot lead. If a company is looking for a CEO, the ad closes, and a few weeks later the same CEO ad is back, they didn’t find the person.
- 03
Check Pipedrive
Each hot lead is looked up in Pipedrive through its API. If the company is already there, the lead shows who owns it and when they last contacted them. Nobody calls a colleague’s account by accident.
- 04
Deliver it every day
Every day, recruiters get the new hot leads with a phone number or a ready-made email, so they can pick up the phone straight away.
Used from the first day.
The system went live after two weeks of building and the team used it from day one. It finds around 50 hot leads a week. That number is small because Latvia is small.
The first client came in two weeks after launch, a €4.5k deal. About 15% of cold calls to hot leads turn into a meeting. And it saves time: recruiters don't have to scroll job boards looking for someone to call, because the list is already waiting for them.
- Calls go to companies that have already failed to hire once
- No double-calls: every lead shows its Pipedrive owner and last contact
- Less time hunting through job boards for who to call
The same system, on UK job boards.
SmartEmploy is me bringing this system to UK recruitment agencies. The UK market is much bigger than Latvia's, but every niche and region is different, so the numbers above aren't a promise.