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The Challenge: SMBs Are Losing the War for Talent

In Germany, 71.7% of the skilled-worker gap falls on small and mid-sized businesses. These companies need qualified candidates — software engineers, sales professionals, operations managers — but they’re competing against enterprises with dedicated recruiting teams and six-figure talent acquisition budgets. The numbers tell the story. The average cost per hire sits at 4,700–4,700–4,800. Time to fill an open role: 43 days. And in a market where top candidates are off the table within 10 days, a 6-week hiring process means systematically losing the best people to faster-moving competitors. SMBs rarely have the in-house capacity to build automated recruiting systems. Most still rely on job postings and inbound applications — a passive approach that misses the 70% of professionals who are open to new opportunities but aren’t actively job-hunting. This is the gap a small European AI agency set out to close.

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The Solution: A 6-Step Candidate Sourcing Pipeline

The agency — a 3-person team, founded in 2024 — built a fully automated candidate sourcing pipeline using Anysite’s LinkedIn endpoints as the data layer. Their SMB clients get a system that finds, qualifies, and surfaces candidates ready for outreach — in hours, not weeks. Here’s how the pipeline works: Each step feeds the next. The pipeline starts broad — thousands of potential candidates matched by role, skills, and location — and narrows to a shortlist of verified, enriched profiles with contact information ready for personalized outreach.

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The “Company Loop”: An Account-Based Twist

The most interesting pattern in the data isn’t the candidate-first flow — it’s what happens at steps 3 and 4. Company research accounts for 31.3% of all API calls (over 9,100 calls per quarter across company, company/employees, and search_companies endpoints). The agency doesn’t just find individual candidates. They identify high-quality employers, then map those companies’ entire workforce to discover additional talent. This “company loop” is an account-based recruiting strategy: find one strong candidate, research their employer, then surface every qualified colleague at the same company. One good company yields dozens of potential candidates — a multiplier effect that a manual recruiter could never replicate at this speed.

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The Conversion Funnel: Quality Over Quantity

The pipeline is deliberately selective. Not every searched candidate makes it to outreach — and that’s by design. Overall: ~18% of searched candidates reach the outreach stage. This isn’t spray-and-pray mass outreach. It’s a targeted pipeline that ensures every candidate who receives an email has been verified against the job requirements — leading to higher response rates and better-quality conversations.

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Results and Business Impact

For the agency’s SMB clients:
  • Speed: Candidates identified and contacted in hours, not the industry-average 43 days
  • Cost savings: Each faster fill saves an estimated 6,000–6,000–10,000 in vacancy costs (based on ~300–300–500/day mid-level role vacancy cost and ~20 days saved)
  • Reach: Access to LinkedIn’s 1B+ member network — far beyond the reach of job postings and inbound applications
For the agency’s business model:
  • 324 API calls per day powering production client pipelines — not a prototype, a real product
  • **0.057perAPIcall∗∗onAnysite′sProplan—comparedto0.057 per API call** on Anysite's Pro plan — compared to 0.49+/call on Proxycurl or $15,000+/year minimums on enterprise platforms like ZoomInfo
  • One Pro subscription serves multiple client pipelines simultaneously, making the unit economics work even for a 3-person operation
The cost advantage is significant. Running this same pipeline on a competitor’s API would cost roughly 14,300perquarter—over8xmorethanthe14,300 per quarter — over 8x more than the 1,647 spent on Anysite during the same period.

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Key Anysite Endpoints Used

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Key Takeaways

  • A small team can build big products. Three people, one Anysite Pro plan, and a well-designed pipeline process 300+ candidates per day across multiple client engagements.
  • Company intelligence is a force multiplier. The account-based approach — researching companies to find candidates, not just searching for individuals — accounted for nearly a third of all API usage and dramatically expanded the candidate pool.
  • Selectivity drives quality. An 18% search-to-outreach conversion rate means every contacted candidate has been vetted — leading to better response rates and faster placements.
  • Cost matters at the data layer. At $0.057 per call, Anysite makes it economically viable for small agencies to build recruitment products that compete with enterprise-grade solutions.