Using Intent Data in Recruitment to Target Clients Before They Start Hiring

Recruitment businesses often find themselves in a reactive position, waiting for companies to advertise vacancies before reaching out. But what if you could anticipate which businesses are about to start hiring and engage them before your competitors do?

This is where intent data comes in. By leveraging intent data, recruiters can identify early hiring signals, target clients before they publicly advertise roles, and position themselves as trusted talent partners from the outset.

What is intent data?

Intent data is information collected from digital behaviours that indicate a company’s likelihood to take a specific action—in this case, beginning a hiring process. This data can come from multiple sources, including:

• Online searches (e.g., “How to scale a sales team,” “Best recruitment agencies for tech talent”)
• Website visits (e.g., frequent visits to career pages, checking salary benchmarks)
• Content consumption (e.g., downloading reports on hiring trends, engaging with HR-related LinkedIn posts)
• Technology adoption (e.g., a company investing in HR software may be preparing for hiring growth)
• Job postings (e.g., a surge in specific job roles or hiring patterns)

Intent data helps filter out companies that aren’t actively hiring or expanding, so your sales and marketing efforts are laser-focused on warm leads, businesses that actually need recruitment support.

Cold outreach often results in low response rates but when you approach potential clients with insights that align with their hiring needs, your outreach is more relevant, timely, and effective, increasing the chances of a positive response.

How to use intent data? (step by step)

1. Identify intent signals

The first step is to determine which digital behaviours indicate a company is about to start hiring. For example:

Job posting patterns

• A company suddenly starts posting multiple vacancies in a short timeframe.
• New job roles appear in expansion areas (e.g., a UK-based firm starts advertising roles in Germany).
  Repeated job postings for the same position, suggesting difficulty in hiring (a great opportunity to offer your expertise).

Website engagement and search behaviour

• Increased visits to career pages and team expansion sections.
• Executives searching for salary benchmarks, industry hiring trends, or talent acquisition strategies.
• Job descriptions being updated or rewritten, signalling a business is refining its hiring needs.

Company growth triggers

• Funding rounds and investment announcements – Newly funded companies often scale quickly.
• Mergers & acquisitions – These typically lead to restructuring and hiring shifts.
• Leadership changes – A new CEO, CHRO, or department head often brings in fresh talent.

Technology & Business Expansion Indicators

• A company adopting new HR, ATS, or CRM software, signalling hiring process upgrades.
• An increase in press releases about product launches, suggests they need more employees.
• Sudden LinkedIn activity around hiring, HR, or recruitment-related discussions.

2. Use the right intent data tools

To effectively track and analyse intent data, you will need the right technology stack. These tools will help you identify early hiring signals, segment high-intent prospects, and automate outreach for maximum efficiency.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the most popular intent data tools:

Lead intelligence and hiring signal tracking tools

These tools provide comprehensive insights into a company's hiring activities and growth patterns, enabling recruiters to identify potential opportunities before they become public knowledge. By monitoring various indicators such as job posting frequency, leadership changes, and company expansion activities, recruiters can identify businesses that are likely to require recruitment services.

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator – Tracks headcount growth, job postings, and new hiring decision-makers.
• ZoomInfo – Monitors job listings, leadership changes, and company expansion activity.
• Apollo.io – Uses AI to score companies based on hiring signals and decision-maker movements.
• Crunchbase – Tracks funding rounds and mergers, often leading to hiring surges.
• Lusha - Collects real-time hiring data and enriches contact details for recruitment business development. It verifies email addresses, phone numbers, and LinkedIn profiles to ensure outreach accuracy.
• Cognism - Provides real-time data on company growth trends and ensures all contact details are GDPR-compliant. It uses AI to score and verify leads, filtering out low-intent prospects.
  
  

AI-driven lead enrichment and outreach automation

These tools enrich hiring intent data with verified contact details and automate personalised outreach.

• Clay -AI-powered lead enrichment platform that pulls real-time hiring data from multiple sources, including job boards, LinkedIn, and company websites. It automatically verifies decision-maker contacts, making it easier for recruiters to reach the right prospects. You can use Clay’s automation workflows to instantly generate personalised outreach emails for companies with high hiring intent.
• HubSpot CRM + Breeze Intelligence - Analyses company behaviour, website visits, and CRM engagement to detect hiring intent. It assigns lead scores based on the likelihood to hire and automatically triggers outreach sequences when a prospect shows strong intent.
• Seamless.AI - Scrapes hiring signals from company websites, job boards, and press releases to detect recruitment intent. It enriches contact data and integrates with CRM tools for automated follow-ups.

3. Personalise your outreach based on intent data

Once you've identified companies with hiring intent, the next step is creating personalised, data-driven outreach. Rather than generic cold emails, your approach should be tailored based on the insights you've gathered.

To achieve this, here are a few tactics you can implement:

Warm LinkedIn engagement

Begin by identifying and connecting with key decision-makers within the companies you are targeting. Before making any pitches, take the time to understand their professional interests and challenges by reviewing their LinkedIn profiles and recent activities.

Engage with their posts by liking, sharing, or commenting thoughtfully on hiring-related discussions they initiate or participate in. This not only demonstrates your genuine interest in their business but also helps you build a rapport and establish a relationship based on mutual professional interests.

Email personalisation

Creating personalised emails is really important to effectively engage with potential clients, especially when leveraging intent data. Ensure your subject lines reflect specific hiring insights or company activities. For instance, if a company is expanding its operations into a new market, your subject line could read, “Expanding into Germany? Here’s how we can help.” This immediately signals relevance and captures attention.

In the body of the email, use the data you've gathered to create custom messaging that speaks directly to the recipient's current situation.

Provide value before selling

Before jumping into a sales pitch, it's important to establish trust and demonstrate your expertise by offering tangible value to potential clients. Start by sharing industry reports that provide insights into current market dynamics, emerging trends, etc. These reports can help your prospects understand the broader context of their hiring needs and make informed decisions. Additionally, provides detailed salary benchmarks that are tailored to specific roles and regions, enabling companies to align their compensation strategies with industry standards and attract top talent.

4. Automate and scale your intent data strategy

To maximise efficiency, recruitment agencies should automate lead tracking, segmentation, and outreach using CRM workflows and intent-based triggers.

This process begins with the implementation of CRM workflows that are designed to seamlessly track leads from the moment they are identified. These workflows can capture a wide array of data points, such as the frequency of a company's job postings, the nature of roles being advertised, and any notable changes in leadership or company structure. By segmenting leads based on their hiring intent, recruiters can categorise potential clients into different tiers of interest, ensuring that each lead receives the appropriate level of attention and resources.

This automation not only saves time but also enhances the precision of targeting, allowing recruiters to focus their efforts on hot opportunities.

Are you ready to start using intent data? Get in touch to learn how to integrate these tools into your recruitment strategy today.