Find recruiters
Find recruiting firms by niche, size, and open-role volume
Recruitment splits into two businesses that look the same from outside. Retained search runs a handful of long mandates; contingent desks run many at once. They buy very differently.
Niche is the whole business model in recruitment. A firm that places heads of engineering at funded startups and a firm that fills clinical roles for hospital groups share an industry code and nothing else, including the software they need.
Niche is readable from the mandates they advertise. TheirStack supplies those ads and the seniority inside them, which also separates retained work from high-volume contingent desks. Open Web Ninja and People Data Labs supply offices and consultant counts, and Blitz API heads the contact chain with LeadMagic behind it.
Consultants matter as much as firms here, because a desk lead often chooses her own tools. The people layer expands into rows linked to the firm, so you can sell to the desk rather than only to the letterhead.
Example searches
Ask for it the way you'd say it
Every search below runs on the same hosted Tables, with the cost previewed before anything is spent.
Niche from the mandates
search firms advertising vp and c-level roles in medical devices over the past year
Seniority and function are read from the ads themselves, which distinguishes a genuine search boutique from a generalist desk.
Retained or contingent
recruitment firms running fewer than twenty long-lived mandates rather than high volume desks
Mandate count and duration sit in their own columns, so the working model is visible instead of inferred from the firm's own wording.
Consultant-level contacts
for each firm list the partners and desk leads working technology mandates
Consultants become rows linked to the firm, which lets a desk lead and a managing partner receive different messages.
Plays
Three motions you can run this week
Each one is a chain of Oxygen primitives — the same hosted objects your workspace already has, composed.
Niche-matched firm list
Only firms placing the roles your product serves reach the outreach stage.
- 1Source firms by region, then attach advertised mandates and their seniority to each row.
- 2Keep firms whose mandates match your niche and promote those to Records.
oxygen search runSell to the desk, not the letterhead
Desk leads hear about the product that fits their own mandates.
- 1Expand consultants into rows linked to the firm and tag each row with its function.
- 2Enroll by function so a technology desk and a finance desk get different copy.
oxygen sequences enrollCatch new boutiques early
Spin-out firms are contacted while they are still choosing tooling.
- 1Bind the niche and region search as a feed with a per-cycle ceiling, so firms that were not in the last sweep arrive as new rows.
- 2Route arrivals through a workflow that checks size before anyone is enrolled.
oxygen feeds bind
Who you can reach
Roles you can find at recruitment and executive search firms
Reachability is per channel: a role marked for mobile is one the phone waterfall usually resolves, not a guarantee for every record.
| Role | Seniority | Reachable by |
|---|---|---|
| Managing partner | Owner/Founder | Work emailLinkedInMobile |
| Practice or desk lead | Director | Work emailLinkedIn |
| Head of research | Manager | Work emailLinkedIn |
| Chief operating officer | C-level | Work emailLinkedIn |
| Executive search consultant | IC | Work emailLinkedIn |
| Head of talent operations | VP | Work emailLinkedIn |
Filters you can search on
- Function and industry of advertised mandates
- Seniority of roles placed
- Consultant headcount band
- Retained, contingent, or mixed
- Country, region, or city
- Number of offices
- Firm founded before or after a given year
Firms that advertise mandates publicly resolve well on niche and seniority. Pure retained search is the blind spot, because the best mandates are never advertised at all, so the ad columns come back empty for exactly the firms you may most want. For those rows, rank on consultant titles and published placements instead and accept a shorter, slower list.
Data sources
What the data actually comes from
Every value lands with its provider and cost recorded on the cell.
TheirStack
Advertised mandates and the seniority inside them, which is how niche and working model are inferred.
- Op
Open Web Ninja
Office listings with address, phone, and site, useful for multi-office and regional firms.
People Data Labs
Consultant counts and the partners and desk leads attached to each firm.
Blitz API
Leads the work-email chain, resolving most consultants before the metered lanes engage.
LeadMagic
Takes the residual rows and returns email or mobile, charged only on a result.
Run these on Oxygen's managed credits, or connect your own provider keys and pay the vendor directly — the same columns, the same runs, the same provenance either way. See every integration.
Limits
Where this stops
- Retained search is deliberately quiet. A firm placing only board-level roles may advertise nothing all year, so absence of ads is never evidence that a firm is small or inactive.
FAQ
Questions people ask first
How do you separate retained search from contingent desks?
Can I target individual recruiters rather than firms?
What about firms that never advertise?
Will I catch new firms as they spin out?
How do I handle one-person recruitment desks?
Can two desks share one workspace without colliding?
Build your recruitment and executive search firms list
Start with a search, preview the cost before anything is spent, and keep the rows, sources, and runs in a workspace you own.