The people you want to hire have a job. They are not on job boards, they do not read career pages, and their LinkedIn inbox has forty messages from recruiters that all start with "I came across your profile." Reaching them is outreach, with the same rules as sales and a few differences that matter.
Signals for candidates
A candidate worth messaging this month has something going on, the same way a prospect does. agaria reads the same kinds of signals, with different meaning:
- Tenure. Four years in one role is the point where people start listening. Eight months is not.
- Company events. A layoff, a merger, an acquisition, a team folded into another. Nobody enjoys the week after, and a calm message that week gets read.
- Activity. A post about on-call load, burnout, or "what I learned in three years at X" is a person thinking out loud. Answer the thought.
- Location. Someone who just moved to Berlin is rebuilding a network and a routine. A role in Berlin is timely.
- Overlap with you. A former colleague, a shared conference, a repo they starred. The digital twin surfaces these.
How the first message differs from sales
The three-sentence shape from the sales post holds, but the content shifts.
Sentence one names the work, not the company. "Your PyCon talk on on-call load" beats "I saw you work at Fjordline." Engineers are proud of what they built, not where they sit.
Sentence two says why them. Not "your profile matches our requirements", which is a database talking. "You've spent four years on the billing system that every fintech copies" is a person who read the profile.
Sentence three offers a conversation, not a process. "If you're ever curious, I'm happy to tell you what we're building and why, no forms" is an offer. A link to apply is a task. Nobody who has a job applies to a stranger's link.
And the whole thing stays under a phone screen. A candidate reads it between meetings, on the day it arrives or never.
Running it in agaria
A recruiting campaign is a campaign with a different target. Tell the builder who: "senior backend engineers in Berlin, four or more years at their current company." Tell it the offer: the role, the team, the one thing that makes it worth a conversation. Tell it the objective: a call, not an application.
Everything else is the same machine. LinkedIn actions run from your own account through the extension, within daily action limits. Drafts wait for your approval, or go out automatically if you turn that on for the campaign. Replies land in the conversation, and a "sure, tell me more" gets a drafted answer ready for you to send.
Two rules recruiters break
Do not lead with the salary. It reads as "this is the only reason you would move" and it usually is not.
Do not follow up more than twice. A candidate who did not answer two considered messages is not going to answer a third. The follow-up post applies, with one step fewer. The best recruiting outreach leaves the person thinking "that was decent," because in a year, when they are ready, that is who they message back.