Building Huntly a targeting system for a market everyone assumes is unreachable
Huntly case study
Oriol SerraFounder & CEO
Recruitment is one of the most saturated cold email markets that exists. Every hiring manager with a public job posting receives several agency emails a week, and most of them are identical.
The standard conclusion is that outbound does not work there.
The accurate conclusion is that outbound built on job postings alone does not work there, because a job posting is a signal every competitor can see. If your targeting input is public and universal, your email arrives in a queue with fifteen others saying the same thing.
The question is not how to write a better email into that queue. It is what signal nobody else is using.
The company
Huntly is a tech recruitment marketplace connecting companies with recruiters to hire developers, charging 5 to 7% of a candidate’s salary against the 20 to 30% a traditional recruiter charges.
The offer is genuinely strong. Employers pick from a pool of pre-screened candidates, and Huntly charges on commission.
That matters for one reason. Outbound amplifies whatever offer you point it at. A weak offer with a good system produces a faster stream of rejections.
The situation
Huntly was growing, mostly on referrals, with no automated outbound motion underneath it.
Like most companies in that position, the manual version of prospecting was consuming time that should have gone to conversations. And the traditional SDR to AE structure they would otherwise have built was the wrong shape for the volume of research their targeting actually required.
The targeting logic
We built the system on two signals instead of one.
Signal 1: they are hiring for a role Huntly can fill. The public signal. Necessary, but shared with every competitor.
Signal 2: the company is growing fast. Six-month headcount growth, with a floor applied. This is the one that changed the outcome.
The reasoning is straightforward once you say it out loud. A company growing headcount aggressively has hiring targets it is already behind on. Meeting them through traditional recruiters means running several agency relationships in parallel, which is slow and expensive. For that specific company, at that specific moment, a pool of pre-screened candidates is not an interesting alternative. It is the obvious one.
The first signal tells you they have a need. The second tells you the need is urgent. Only the second one is hard for a competitor to replicate.
What we built
1. Scrape companies hiring for roles Huntly can fill 2. Use AI to identify company size and industry, exclude non-ICP 3. Enrich company for 6-month headcount growth 4. Filter out companies growing under 10% 5. Find decision-makers inside the surviving companies, enrich emails 6. Normalize job titles, so the copy never says “Engineer II senior” 7. Use AI to write the opening line from the enriched data 8. Detect the decision-maker’s timezone, route to the correct regional campaign
Two details carry more weight than they appear to.
Title normalization. Raw recruitment data is full of strings like “Engineer II senior”. If that lands unedited in a personalized line, the email reads as automated and the prospect is gone. Normalization is the difference between personalization and a visible mail merge.
Timezone routing. Records were split into regional campaigns based on the decision-maker’s actual location, so sends landed at a sensible local hour instead of at 3am.
The copy
The email led with the role they were hiring for, named the growth rate they were experiencing, asked whether hiring fast enough was a real constraint, and offered a short video showing access to pre-screened candidates for that exact role.
Every variable in it came out of the enrichment layer.
The results
Validation ran on fewer than 1,700 leads and produced 5 meetings and 1 closed client in the first 6 weeks.
That is one meeting per 340 leads contacted, and one client per 1,700, in a market where the assumption is that cold outreach does not convert at all.
The efficiency ratio matters more than the absolute numbers here. A validation run is supposed to answer one question: does the targeting logic hold. It did, on a small volume, which means the volume can be increased with a known cost per meeting instead of a hope.
Huntly reported the system settling into roughly $50,000 a month in pipeline value as it scaled.
What they own now
The system is the asset. Huntly’s team maintains it by testing copy, angles and plays, not by rebuilding the machine.
Any rep they hire onto it manages the inbox and has the conversations. The research, filtering, enrichment and routing happen before anyone opens a screen.
That is the structural argument against the traditional SDR model in a market like this one. The work that used to justify the headcount is the work the system does now.
Who this is for
Companies in saturated markets where the obvious targeting signal is available to every competitor.
If your list is built from the same public trigger everyone else uses, your email is competing on copy alone. That is a race you can win occasionally and never reliably.
The advantage comes from finding the second signal.
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30 minutes. We look at your targeting logic and tell you whether there is a signal your competitors are not using.
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