The best time to offer help is after they have tried without you
Most outreach built on job adverts chases the freshest ones, which is exactly when a hiring manager is least interested. The advert went up this week, applications are arriving, and an agency fee looks like money they do not need to spend.
Go back to the same manager after the role has sat open for weeks and the conversation is different. The applicants were wrong, the one good candidate took another offer, and the team is covering the gap. Nothing about your service has changed. Their appetite for it has.
So this play sorts a market by age instead of by recency. It differs from find every company hiring in your market, which counts how many roles a company has open. Here the question is how long one role has gone unfilled.
What you get back
A table of stale roles, oldest first: company, title, location, the link to the advert, the date the role was first seen, the date it was last seen, and the days between first seen and today. Employers with several ageing roles in your discipline are marked, because that is a pattern and not bad luck. For each role, the manager who owns it with title and verified work email, and a draft pitch.
Below it, two lists: roles that could not be dated, and employers the job data had no record of.
Variations worth knowing
Date a list you already hold. If you have target accounts, skip the sweep and date the open roles at those companies only. Every result is pre-qualified, and the cost is one lookup per account. Watch your target accounts for roles is the play that keeps that list under review.
Narrow by function. The dating lookup can be limited to a job category, such as software development or sales, which keeps a large employer's unrelated vacancies out of the result.
Where this goes wrong
Evergreen adverts. Some companies leave a role up permanently to collect applications. It looks stale and nobody is struggling with it. Several identical long-open roles at a large employer is the usual tell.
First seen is not first posted. The date is when the source noticed the role. Treat the age as a minimum, and never put a number of days in an email.
Coverage has gaps. Job data does not hold every company, and small employers are the likeliest to be missing. Those roles stay on the list undated instead of being dropped or guessed.
Re-listed adverts. If a company takes a role down and lists it again, it may look fresh. The play does not detect that, so some of the most stubborn vacancies will be under-aged.
Telling them what you know. Opening with how long their advert has been up reads as surveillance. Offer help with a hard hire and let them tell you how long it has been.
