Why "before the posting" is the whole point
Once a job is posted, the company has a plan for filling it and you're one of forty recruiters emailing about it. The window that pays is the six to twelve weeks before that, when the manager knows a hire is coming and nobody has been assigned to make it happen. Every method below is about finding companies in that window, using hiring signals that show up in public before the job does.
Two rules before the list. First, decide your market before you start looking. "Companies that are hiring" is every company. "Series A to C software companies in Toronto adding sales headcount" is a list you can actually work. Second, write down where each lead came from. The source is the first line of your email.
The six places to look
In the order I'd check them each week.
1. Job boards, but read them for reposts, not postings
LinkedIn Jobs, Indeed and the niche boards for your market. Don't look for new postings, everyone does that. Look for postings that have been open more than 30 days, postings that have been reposted, and companies with five or more roles open in one function. Those companies have a hiring problem, and a hiring problem is what you sell into. Save a search per target role and check it weekly for the "reposted" and "30+ days" tells.
2. Company careers pages
The careers page is ahead of the job boards by days, and sometimes weeks, because posting internally is free and posting externally costs money. For your top 50 target companies, bookmark the careers page and check it in the weekly routine. A role appearing there that hasn't hit the boards is a manager who has a need and hasn't been given budget for an agency yet. That's your call.
3. LinkedIn company pages and Sales Navigator
The company page shows headcount trend over six months and two years. Sales Navigator shows the split by department and flags employees who changed jobs in the last 90 days. A department growing 15% or more in a quarter is hiring whether or not anything is posted. A department head who joined in the last 60 days will be hiring in the next 90. Set alerts on your saved account list so this comes to you.
4. Funding announcements
Crunchbase for the feed, the company's own newsroom for the detail, and local business journals for the companies too small for Crunchbase to care about. Every round comes with a use-of-funds sentence, and that sentence is usually a hiring plan. "To expand the go-to-market team" means sales and marketing hires inside 90 days. Write that sentence into your notes. It goes in the email.
5. Local business press and industry news
New office, new plant, new contract, new executive. The regional business journal and your industry's trade press cover these before anyone updates LinkedIn. A Google Alert on each of your top 50 companies plus one on "[your city] expansion" catches most of it. Expansion into a new city is the strongest of these, because in-house recruiters have no network there and you do.
6. Your own placed candidates
The most underused source on this list. Every person you placed now sits inside a company and hears about hiring plans months before they're public. A quarterly check-in call with placed candidates, framed as "how's it going," surfaces "actually, we're about to add three people to my team" more often than any database. This is also the source that converts best, because the referral is warm.
The 30-minute weekly routine
Monday morning, before email. Same order every week so it becomes automatic.
- Ten minutes: saved job board searches. Log every company with a repost, a 30-day-old role, or five-plus roles in one function.
- Five minutes: Sales Navigator alerts. Log job changes into or out of your target departments, and any account with a headcount jump.
- Five minutes: Google Alerts and Crunchbase. Log funding, expansion, executive moves, big customer wins.
- Five minutes: careers pages of the top 10 accounts you're actively working.
- Five minutes: sort the log by signal count. Anything with two or more signals gets a call this week. One signal gets the sequence. Zero signals waits.
That routine covers about 50 target companies well. If your market is 500 companies, the routine breaks, and this is where automation earns its place. Software watches all 500 and hands you the sorted list. The pitch still comes from you.
Talin reads job postings, department growth, leadership changes, funding and company news on every account in your target market, builds the prospect list from the companies showing signals now, and drafts the pitch with the signal in the first line.
See how Talin finds new businessTurning a company that's hiring into a reply
Finding the company is half the work. The email is the other half, and most recruiters waste the signal by opening with their agency. The order that works is the signal in one sentence, what you can do about it in one sentence, then a small ask.
If you have a candidate who fits the gap, lead with the candidate. That's an MPC pitch with a reason attached. "Saw the senior accountant role has been open since July. I work with a controller who cut month-end close from ten to four days and is available in four weeks. Worth a look?" The ten MPC templates all take a signal as the opening line.
If you don't have the candidate, offer the market read. "You added 14 people to sales last quarter. I placed six sales ops leads in this market this year. Want a five-minute read on what that hire costs and how long it takes right now?" You're still offering something, and the manager still learns you know the market.
The mistakes that waste a good signal
- Congratulating and stopping. "Congrats on the round!" with no candidate and no offer is noise. Signal, then substance, then ask.
- Acting on a single fresh posting. Most fill from applicants in two weeks. Wait for the repost.
- Emailing HR about a department signal. The manager who owns the growing team feels the pain. Find her.
- Using an old signal. A funding round from last year has already been hired against. Date every entry in the log and drop anything past 90 days.
- Skipping your own placements. The warmest source on this page and the one most recruiters never call.
