Background
Pinnacle Talent Group is a boutique recruiting firm specializing in placing sales leaders—VP of Sales, CRO, and Head of SDR roles—for Series A and Series B SaaS companies. The firm had two recruiters who spent four hours per day manually sourcing and emailing candidates.
Their monthly placement average was six. Their goal was twelve without hiring additional staff.
The Problem With Manual Outreach
Each recruiter was sending roughly 20 personalized candidate emails per day. The personalization was genuine but time-consuming. They were also limited to candidates actively on job boards, missing the passive candidate market entirely.
The Automated System They Built
Candidate sourcing:
- LinkedIn Recruiter for active candidate identification
- Apollo.io for contact data enrichment
- A custom filter that identified sales leaders at companies that had recently had layoffs, leadership changes, or funding events (triggers suggesting candidates might be open to a move)
Personalization at scale:
- Clay.com to pull each candidate's recent LinkedIn activity, posts, and career history
- GPT-4 to generate a personalized opening line based on their most recent post or career milestone
- Templates for the rest of the email, customized with role title, company stage, and compensation range
Sending:
- Smartlead.ai for sending (separate from their business email domain)
- 60 emails per recruiter per day (3x their previous volume)
- 3-step sequence: initial reach, follow-up with specific role details, final check-in
Results Over 90 Days
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Candidate emails/day | 40 (combined) | 120 (combined) |
| Reply rate | 14% | 19% |
| Qualified calls/month | 22 | 67 |
| Placements/month | 6 | 13 |
| Revenue impact | Baseline | +$104K/month |
What Changed the Reply Rates
The personalized opening line referencing a candidate's recent LinkedIn post dramatically improved replies from passive candidates. One message read: "Saw your post about building SDR teams at Series A companies—we're working with a client that needs exactly that expertise."
This felt like a human recruiter who had done research, even though the line was AI-generated from their LinkedIn data.
What They Still Do Manually
- Every reply gets a genuine human response
- All discovery calls are recruiter-led
- Final candidate presentations are crafted individually
Automation handles top-of-funnel volume. Humans handle everything that requires judgment and relationship-building.
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