10x Qualified Candidates with These Recruiting Filters

For decades, inbound recruiting has been the standard in the talent space. You’d post a job, wait for applications to trickle in, then sort through dozens, if not hundreds, of resumes searching for qualified talent. But hiring timelines are speeding up and the need for specialized talent is growing. 

Recruiters can no longer afford to take a passive approach.

Recruitment agencies need to go outbound to not only identify new business, but find best-fit candidates for your clients that align with exactly what they need out of a new hire — at speed and at scale.

Learn how to take back control of the hiring process with recruiting filters that help you pinpoint your best opportunities and automated plays to engage them at the right time.

Increase offers accepted with outbound recruitment

Outbound recruiting is when recruiters actively search for and contact candidates for a new position — regardless of their employment status. It offers a few distinct advantages:

• Target the skills you want and need. Outbound recruiting empowers organizations to target candidates with precise skill sets or backgrounds for specific roles, which is especially valuable to specialized industries.

• Speed up hiring. Forbes found that simply sorting through applications in an ATS can take up to 40% of a recruiter’s time, despite up to 88% of applicants being unqualified. Outbound recruiting gives you more control of the hiring timeline. Instead of waiting for qualified applicants, you can proactively engage with potential candidates that you know have the qualities you’re looking for.

• Expand your talent pool. People can be enticed. With outbound, you can connect with folks who may not be actively seeking new roles but would be open to it if they see enough value and opportunities.

Research also shows that the benefits of outbound recruiting trickle all the way down to offer-accepted. 6% of outbound candidates are ultimately hired as compared to 1% of inbound candidates. Not to mention that those 6% are the candidates you handpicked and actively want.

Ultimately, it’s not about one or the other. The best recruiting processes blend inbound, outbound, and employee referral recruitment based on their industry, open roles, and skills required. But in a job market more competitive than ever, a precise outbound recruiting system can become the driving engine of your agency. 

Execute data-driven client and candidate searches

B2B databases infinitely expand your agency’s potential accounts and the pool of candidates you have to fill their roles. 

As you look to fill the top of your client funnel, there are a few key Apollo filters you can use to hone in on the right people.

1. Job Postings

Apollo’s job postings filter identifies exactly which companies have active job listings and across which specific roles and departments.

Or, in other words, it shows you the accounts that have an explicit need for recruiting services…

With it, you can get hyper-granular and hone in on: 

• Specific roles companies are hiring for
• Geographical location
• # of active job postings
• And the date range of the listings

Bonus: You can also set up job change alerts for automatic updates and enrichment on saved contacts!

2. Headcount growth

Headcount growth allows you to filter across companies who’ve grown their headcount by X amount, over a specific timeframe and across which departments.

Similar to job postings, this helps recruiting agencies identify exactly which companies are growing and could likely have the resources to continue expansion.

3. News

Open roles and growing headcount aren’t the only indicators that a company needs recruitment support.

Use the News filter to get the scoop on company’s who were recently acquired, went through expansion, received new investment, and other factors that indicate they could be a good fit for your agency.

4. Job Changes

Studies show that 59% of American workers are considering changing their jobs or careers and 44% already have a specific plan to make the change. Ideal candidates are constantly on the move — and it’s important you get ahead of it.

Apollo’s Job Change filter puts candidates who enter new roles, or leave their old ones, directly on your radar. This allows you to do three things:

1. Source new job opportunities with former clients at new companies 
2. Stay up to date on the candidates in your funnel
3. Source new job opportunities with former employers who lost employees

Bonus: You can also “schedule enrichment” for hands-off updates that update contact’s new roles automatically.

Bring your most important filters together with Personas

Recruiters, it’s time to get hyper-strategic.

By layering the above ‘pivot’ filters on top of Personas (i.e. descriptions of buyers or candidates that get the most out of your services based on titles, industry, and departments), you can easily find contacts who are in the best position to buy from you or get hired by one of your clients.

Take, for example, John Kim, CEO and Founder of recruiting agency Paraform. He used a combination of personas and high-intent filters to source his startup’s first 100 customers by conducting searches of 1) recently-funded accounts that also had 2) open headcount and 3) newly listed job postings.

“Tools like Apollo make it easy. [I found] when someone was hiring, their buying intent, and used awesome filters to find, for example, a high-intent head of talent that started their job within the last 6 months,” says John.

Learn more about filtering in Apollo’s database with this search filters overview.

Automating candidate and client engagement

Once you have your perfect list of folks, it’s time to reach out. 

And not in one big email blast (we know “spray and pray” outreach just doesn’t work). Instead you can use Apollo Plays to automate timely engagement and other actions, like adding or removing contacts from a sequence or list, scheduling tasks for your recruiters, or updating contact job changes.

Here are a few impactful plays we recommend building out.

Play #1: Automatically route new opportunities to your recruiters

Every morning at 8AM (or on whatever schedule you prefer), this play will scan Apollo’s database to identify companies with relevant job listings — then automatically take action.

In this case, it will add those new contacts to one of your lists and automatically notify your team via Slack and Email that these accounts are ready to be worked.

Success story: Plays like these saved Aligned over 5 hours a week of manual work 👀

Play #2: Source new job opportunities with former clients at new companies

Old customers can be your biggest champions in their new roles. 

Break into new accounts and stay ahead of competition by building a play that targets contacts who have engaged with you in the past and have recently changed jobs.

The above example uses “purchased add-ons” as a signal for who was a previous customer and who to add into a sequence.

Other attributes you can apply to weed out previous customers include:

• Emails opened or clicked
• Email meeting booked
• Conversation history
• Or last activity

In a more competitive job market than ever, timing and precision is everything.

For a step-by-step walk through of building your first play, check out this video case study.