The leads a recruitment agency needs are briefs, not CVs. We build the marketing engine that puts your firm in front of hiring managers at the moment a role gets signed off, so your consultants spend the week placing rather than prospecting.
Trusted by Recruitment Agencies Across the UK
The Timing Problem
A hiring manager is only in the market for a few days a year. A resignation lands, a budget clears, a team gets signed off, and for about a fortnight they need an agency. Cold outreach is a bet that your email arrives inside that fortnight.
One desk, one year
Fifty-two weeks of chasing to land on three. That is the whole problem, and no amount of extra sending volume fixes it. The firms that win the brief are the ones already in the room when the budget clears.
Every hour a consultant spends prospecting is an hour they are not placing. The desk pays for that outreach twice: once in the time, and again in the fees nobody billed.
Hiring contacts move, get promoted and change employer constantly. A list bought in January is largely fiction by the summer, and the bounce rate takes your sending domain down with it.
Hiring managers are approached by agencies most weeks. One more note about your extensive network and your proven track record is deleted before the second line.
When the role is finally signed off it goes to the agency they know, or the one they find. If you are neither, you never learn the brief existed.
Definitions
Lead generation for a recruitment agency is the work of getting hiring companies to raise a brief with you. It is not candidate sourcing and it is not CV volume. A lead is an employer with a role to fill, a budget signed off, and a reason to believe your firm will fill it better than the agency they used last time.
Not a lead
Candidate supply is a different problem with a different budget. Plenty of agencies are drowning in CVs and starving for briefs.
A lead
Every one of these arrives because the buyer already decided you were worth contacting. That decision is what marketing buys you.
The Engine
No bought lists, no burner domains, no consultants stuck on a dialler. We build the marketing function that makes hiring managers arrive already knowing who you are.
The build order
Not the HR department. The precise person, in the precise kind of company, whose problem your desk solves better than anyone else: the engineering director at a scale-up who has lost two people this quarter and cannot afford a third. Everything downstream is built for them, which is why everything downstream works.
When a role is signed off, the buyer searches. Recruitment SEO puts your firm on the page for the sector, seniority and location terms that carry real briefs. It is slow to build and very hard to take away, which is exactly what you want from the channel that catches the moment.
Hiring managers vet you long before they contact you. Salary benchmarks, market maps and honest hiring guides do the qualifying for you, so the first conversation starts from credibility rather than a pitch.
Buyers hire the firm they have been quietly reading for a year. A consistent presence in the feed means that when the moment comes you are not a cold approach, you are the name they already half-trust.
Most of your market has no live role today, and that is fine. Email holds the relationship until they do, on your own list and your own domain, so the asset survives every algorithm change and every platform you do not control.
Clicks do not pay salaries. We report on enquiries, briefs won and fees billed, and we tell you which channels are carrying the pipeline and which are not earning their place. The ones that are not get cut.
Where Leads Come From
No single channel fills a recruitment pipeline on its own. Search catches the moment, content earns the trust, LinkedIn keeps you familiar and email holds the relationship until the budget clears. Run as one function, they compound.
The terms a hiring manager types the week a role lands. Competition on recruitment search is unusually thin, intent is unusually high, and it is the only channel that keeps delivering briefs after you stop paying for it. This is where most of the pipeline ends up coming from.
Recruitment SEOSalary benchmarks, market maps and hiring guides that prove you know the sector before anyone speaks to you.
Content MarketingWhere hiring managers spend their attention. Consistent presence, so your firm is the familiar name when the brief appears.
LinkedIn MarketingYour list, your domain, your relationship. The channel that carries a prospect through the eleven months of the year when they are not hiring, and the one nobody can switch off but you.
Email MarketingBuy the moment when the term is worth it and the queue is short. Genuinely useful for a new sector, a new city, or while the SEO is still compounding.
PPCWhere every channel lands. If it does not make a hiring manager trust you in a few seconds, nothing upstream matters.
Website DesignWho We Build It For
A temp desk and a retained search practice are not running the same business, and they cannot run the same lead generation. The channels overlap. The weighting, the language and the patience required do not.
Generalist and specialist desks fighting for the same briefs as everyone else on the same page of results. We build the search and content position that makes your firm the one they find first, and the reason they call you rather than the incumbent.
Marketing for recruitment agencies
Retained mandates are won on credibility built years before the brief exists. Thought leadership and a search presence that put your firm on the shortlist while the board is still deciding whether to appoint at all.
Marketing for executive search firms
Discretion cuts both ways. If nobody knows your name, nobody calls it. A quiet, credible presence that generates approaches from the companies you want, without a bought list or a burner domain in sight.
Marketing for headhunters
Long cycles, large contracts and procurement standing at the door. Content and search that get your firm into the conversation before the tender is written, which is the only point at which it can still be shaped.
Marketing for rpo providers
Volume desks need volume enquiry. Local search, fast landing pages and campaigns built to fill the phone with employers who need people on site this week, not next quarter.
Marketing for staffing agenciesThe Comparison
There are three ways to fill a recruitment pipeline, and each of them is right for somebody. Here is the honest comparison, including the row where we come off worst.
Bought Lists
Rented data, cold sending, fast to start
Marketing-Led Inbound
Slower to land, compounds, yours to keep
Consultants Doing BD
Free at the point of use, paid for in billings
Who makes first contact
You do, uninvited
They do
Your billers do
When it reaches them
Whenever you send
When they have a brief
Whenever the desk is quiet
First leads appear
Days
Two to six months
Days
Cost per lead over time
Rises with volume
Falls
Rises with salaries
If you stop
Pipeline stops that week
Keeps delivering for months
Pipeline stops that day
Effect on your brand
Erodes it
Builds it
Neutral
Risk to your domain
Real
None
None
Bought Lists
Rented data, cold sending, fast to start
Marketing-Led Inbound
Slower to land, compounds, yours to keep
Consultants Doing BD
Free at the point of use, paid for in billings
Read the third row carefully. If you need briefs this fortnight, a cold outreach firm will beat us and we will happily say so. Inbound is the wrong tool for an emergency. It is the right tool for never having the emergency again.
The Economics
Nobody in this market publishes a price, so here is ours, along with the only sum that actually decides whether it is worth doing.
Marketing-led lead generation
£3,600
per month, to start
One permanent placement
£10,000
A 20% fee on a £50,000 salary, which is a modest desk in most sectors
So the programme costs £43,200 a year, and pays for itself at roughly five extra placements. Not five a month. Five a year. If your average fee is higher, or your clients come back with a second brief, that number drops fast.
Cumulative fees billed
Against £43,200 of annual cost
1
2
3
4
5
Placements billed in the year
That is the whole question. Not cost per lead, not cost per click. How many extra briefs does this have to produce before it is free? For most desks the honest answer is four or five, and a good year produces considerably more than that.
When the maths does not work
We will tell you. If you bill £4,000 a placement and need volume above all else, outbound will beat us on cost per conversation and you should go and buy outbound. If you need a brief inside a fortnight to make payroll, marketing is not your answer this month. We would rather say that on a call than eight weeks into a retainer.
What Clients Say
26+
Finalised Projects
98%
Client satisfaction rate
18
Brand Transformations
01 / 05
“Limivex now controls our entire sales and marketing activity across Europe and the US, and I'm having calls every week with my ideal clients.”
Lead Generation FAQ
Or, email us at info@limivex.com
From The Journal
Hire a fractional CMO for professional services: strategy, pipeline and brand without a full-time hire. When to hire, what it costs and what to expect. UK boutique firms.
Working with a marketing agency should make life easier, not add another moving part to manage. But too often, recruitment agencies and search firms only get a fraction of the value available to them.
Developing a role based portal may sound straightforward, but in practice it raises challenges around access, navigation, and scalability. In this blog, I share the process of building a custom portal for a maritime recruitment agency, where different groups of users needed tailored access to content.
Keep Exploring