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 4,800. 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.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:| Step | Action | Endpoint | Volume |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Discover | Find candidates by role, skills, location | search_users | 6,006 calls (20.6%) |
| 2. Verify | Check work history and qualifications | user/experience | 4,684 calls (16.0%) |
| 3. Research | Investigate target employers | company | 7,268 calls (24.9%) |
| 4. Expand | Map talent at target companies | company/employees | 4,194 calls (14.4%) |
| 5. Enrich | Pull full profiles for shortlist | user | 3,612 calls (12.4%) |
| 6. Contact | Get email for direct outreach | user/email | 1,108 calls (3.8%) |
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 acrosscompany, 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.
The Conversion Funnel: Quality Over Quantity
The pipeline is deliberately selective. Not every searched candidate makes it to outreach — and that’s by design.| Stage | Volume | Conversion |
|---|---|---|
| Candidates searched | 6,006 | — |
| Experience verified | 4,684 | 78% pass initial filter |
| Full profiles pulled | 3,612 | 77% pass experience check |
| Emails retrieved | 1,108 | 31% reach outreach stage |
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 10,000 in vacancy costs (based on ~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
- 324 API calls per day powering production client pipelines — not a prototype, a real product
- **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
Key Anysite Endpoints Used
| Endpoint | Pipeline Role | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
linkedin/search/users | Find candidates by role, skills, location | The pipeline’s entry point — defines the candidate pool |
linkedin/user/experience | Verify work history and seniority | Turns raw search results into qualified candidates |
linkedin/company | Research target employers | Powers the account-based “company loop” strategy |
linkedin/company/employees | Map talent at target companies | Multiplier: one company yields many candidates |
linkedin/user | Full profile for shortlisted candidates | Enables personalized, informed outreach |
linkedin/user/email | Contact information for outreach | The pipeline’s output — actionable contact data |
linkedin/search/companies | Discover companies by industry and size | Feeds the company-first discovery channel |
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.