AI Recruitment Agency — 6-Step Candidate Sourcing Pipeline

How a 3-person AI agency built a recruitment pipeline processing 300+ candidates per day using Anysite's LinkedIn endpoints.

The Challenge: SMBs Are Losing the War for Talent

In Germany, 71.7% of the skilled-worker gap falls on small and mid-sized businesses. These companies need qualified candidates — software engineers, sales professionals, operations managers — but they're competing against enterprises with dedicated recruiting teams and six-figure talent acquisition budgets.

The numbers tell the story. The average cost per hire sits at $4,700–$4,800. Time to fill an open role: 43 days. And in a market where top candidates are off the table within 10 days, a 6-week hiring process means systematically losing the best people to faster-moving competitors.

SMBs rarely have the in-house capacity to build automated recruiting systems. Most still rely on job postings and inbound applications — a passive approach that misses the 70% of professionals who are open to new opportunities but aren't actively job-hunting.

This is the gap a small European AI agency set out to close.

The Solution: A 6-Step Candidate Sourcing Pipeline

The agency — a 3-person team, founded in 2024 — built a fully automated candidate sourcing pipeline using Anysite's LinkedIn endpoints as the data layer. Their SMB clients get a system that finds, qualifies, and surfaces candidates ready for outreach — in hours, not weeks.

Here's how the pipeline works:

Step	Action	Endpoint	Volume
1. Discover	Find candidates by role, skills, location	search_users	6,006 calls (20.6%)
2. Verify	Check work history and qualifications	user/experience	4,684 calls (16.0%)
3. Research	Investigate target employers	company	7,268 calls (24.9%)
4. Expand	Map talent at target companies	company/employees	4,194 calls (14.4%)
5. Enrich	Pull full profiles for shortlist	user	3,612 calls (12.4%)
6. Contact	Get email for direct outreach	user/email	1,108 calls (3.8%)

Each step feeds the next. The pipeline starts broad — thousands of potential candidates matched by role, skills, and location — and narrows to a shortlist of verified, enriched profiles with contact information ready for personalized outreach.

The "Company Loop": An Account-Based Twist

The most interesting pattern in the data isn't the candidate-first flow — it's what happens at steps 3 and 4.

Company research accounts for 31.3% of all API calls (over 9,100 calls per quarter across company, company/employees, and search_companies endpoints). The agency doesn't just find individual candidates. They identify high-quality employers, then map those companies' entire workforce to discover additional talent.

This "company loop" is an account-based recruiting strategy: find one strong candidate, research their employer, then surface every qualified colleague at the same company. One good company yields dozens of potential candidates — a multiplier effect that a manual recruiter could never replicate at this speed.

The Conversion Funnel: Quality Over Quantity

The pipeline is deliberately selective. Not every searched candidate makes it to outreach — and that's by design.

Stage	Volume	Conversion
Candidates searched	6,006	—
Experience verified	4,684	78% pass initial filter
Full profiles pulled	3,612	77% pass experience check
Emails retrieved	1,108	31% reach outreach stage

Overall: ~18% of searched candidates reach the outreach stage. This isn't spray-and-pray mass outreach. It's a targeted pipeline that ensures every candidate who receives an email has been verified against the job requirements — leading to higher response rates and better-quality conversations.

Results and Business Impact

For the agency's SMB clients:

• Speed: Candidates identified and contacted in hours, not the industry-average 43 days
• Cost savings: Each faster fill saves an estimated $6,000–$10,000 in vacancy costs (based on ~$300–$500/day mid-level role vacancy cost and ~20 days saved)
• Reach: Access to LinkedIn's 1B+ member network — far beyond the reach of job postings and inbound applications

For the agency's business model:

• 324 API calls per day powering production client pipelines — not a prototype, a real product
• $0.057 per API call on Anysite's Pro plan — compared to $0.49+/call on Proxycurl or $15,000+/year minimums on enterprise platforms like ZoomInfo
• One Pro subscription serves multiple client pipelines simultaneously, making the unit economics work even for a 3-person operation

The cost advantage is significant. Running this same pipeline on a competitor's API would cost roughly $14,300 per quarter — over 8x more than the $1,647 spent on Anysite during the same period.

Key Anysite Endpoints Used

Endpoint	Pipeline Role	Why It Matters
linkedin/search/users	Find candidates by role, skills, location	The pipeline's entry point — defines the candidate pool
linkedin/user/experience	Verify work history and seniority	Turns raw search results into qualified candidates
linkedin/company	Research target employers	Powers the account-based "company loop" strategy
linkedin/company/employees	Map talent at target companies	Multiplier: one company yields many candidates
linkedin/user	Full profile for shortlisted candidates	Enables personalized, informed outreach
linkedin/user/email	Contact information for outreach	The pipeline's output — actionable contact data
linkedin/search/companies	Discover companies by industry and size	Feeds the company-first discovery channel

Key Takeaways

• A small team can build big products. Three people, one Anysite Pro plan, and a well-designed pipeline process 300+ candidates per day across multiple client engagements.
• Company intelligence is a force multiplier. The account-based approach — researching companies to find candidates, not just searching for individuals — accounted for nearly a third of all API usage and dramatically expanded the candidate pool.
• Selectivity drives quality. An 18% search-to-outreach conversion rate means every contacted candidate has been vetted — leading to better response rates and faster placements.
• Cost matters at the data layer. At $0.057 per call, Anysite makes it economically viable for small agencies to build recruitment products that compete with enterprise-grade solutions.