How do recruitment agencies find new clients?

Most start from live job ads: a company advertising a role is a company with a hiring need today. The work is finding the person who owns that hire and offering something specific, such as candidates you already know.

Should I contact HR or the hiring manager?

Usually the hiring manager, the head of the team the role sits in. HR often runs the process and fields many agency approaches; the manager feels the empty seat.

Can Sluice find candidates as well as clients?

It can find people by title, seniority, location and company in the directory, and flag job changes. It is built for selling, though, not as an applicant tracking system, so it will not manage pipelines of candidates.

Which plan suits a recruitment agency?

A solo recruiter can start on Working at $39. A desk-based agency with several specialisms can use Agency at $149 and set up one customer profile per desk.

Business development for recruitment agencies

Your best lead is a job ad

Recruitment has an advantage most sales teams envy: the buying signal is published. A company that posts "Senior Quantity Surveyor, Birmingham" has told the world it has a need, a budget line and a deadline. Your job is to get to the right person first with something useful.

The difficulty is volume and timing. Hundreds of roles go up in your patch each week, the best ones are filled within days, and every other agency saw the same ad.

How Sluice maps onto a recruiter's week

Companies hiring by role and place. Search "quantity surveyor" in "West Midlands", or "React developer" in "Manchester". See companies hiring.
People there. Turn any hiring company into a directory search for the people who decide: head of commercial, engineering manager, operations director. Previews are free.
Score and reveal. Each person is scored 0 to 100 against your customer profile. Only those scoring 70 or more are revealed (full name, LinkedIn, employer, usually a verified work email) at 5 cents each.
Draft and approve. First messages are drafted from what the company posted. Nothing sends unless you approve it, through an account you connect.
Job changes. People who scored well are re-read monthly, and anyone who moved company is flagged and re-scored. A hiring manager who has just moved is a likely new client. See job changes.

Which roles and places to search first

Not every ad is worth chasing. A rough priority order:

Signal	Why it matters	Priority
Same role reposted after several weeks	They are struggling to fill it	High
Several roles in one team at once	A team is being built; volume work	High
Senior or niche role in your specialism	Higher fee, fewer agencies can help	High
Single junior role, large employer with in-house talent team	Often filled directly	Low
Role posted only through a job board aggregator	May already be with an agency	Medium

The directory also has a "Hiring for" filter: people described by the roles their employer is hiring for. That is how you reach "heads of finance at companies hiring accountants" in one search rather than company by company.

Signals beyond job ads

Hiring managers also talk in public. Phrases of at least three words to watch on LinkedIn and Reddit:

"we are hiring a"
"struggling to find engineers"
"growing the team in"
"know anyone looking for"

On LinkedIn, the people who comment on a manager's "we're hiring" post are often candidates. That is useful on the other side of your desk.

What a first month might cost

A worked example for a two-desk agency on the Agency plan at $149 a month. The first month carries 20,000 credits (a credit is one cent), and lookups are billed at supplier cost plus 40%.

Six companies-hiring searches across two specialisms and three regions. The price depends on the source and is shown before each run. Say you cap these at 6,000 credits.
From those results, you pick 120 companies and run "People there" on each. Previews are free. Say 200 decision-makers score 70 or more: revealing them costs 200 x 5 = 1,000 credits ($10).
Email lookups for anyone without a verified work email, through the waterfall, which stops at the first supplier that has it. A miss is not billed.
Autopilot reruns the searches on a schedule under a daily ceiling with the remaining credits.

Two connected email accounts for sending add 2 x $10.80 = $21.60 a month. From month two, the plan carries 14,900 credits.

Writing to a hiring manager

The worst recruiter email says "I see you're hiring, I have great candidates." Every manager receives it daily.

A better message:

References the specific role and something only someone who read the ad would know ("the requirement for NEC4 experience").
Offers something concrete: "I spoke to two people this month with that background who are open to a move."
Asks a closed question: "Worth sending you anonymised profiles?"

Sluice drafts several versions and scores each one, with a reason, before it can be queued. Sequences stop the moment someone replies, says no or bounces, and a "no thanks" adds them to the do-not-contact list, which keeps you on the right side of managers you will want to call next year.

Where Sluice falls short for recruiters

It is not an ATS or CRM for candidates. HubSpot is the only CRM it syncs with.
No built-in dialer, and recruiters live on the phone. Mobile numbers are available but expensive.
It does not tell you whether a role is already with another agency.
It does not cover candidate-side job boards or CV databases.
It is new, without public reviews yet.

The plan for your desk

A solo recruiter covering one specialism: Working at $39, which adds Autopilot and connecting LinkedIn to send. An agency with several desks: Agency at $149, with unlimited customer profiles so each desk gets its own scoring. Read more about job change signals, then see pricing.