Recruitment agencies: which companies start hiring before the roles reach the job boards

A vacancy is the last step of a decision, not the first. First something happens: a site is opened, a contract is signed, money arrives with a purpose attached, or a new role on the management board turns up with a plan of its own. Then comes the budget, then the job description, and only then the posting. Weeks pass between the first step and the last, and those weeks are the window.

Once the ad is live, everyone can see it. The company has already answered the question you wanted to ask, and you are one more agency calling about the same role this week — so the call is about rates, because nothing else is left to discuss. A couple of weeks earlier the same call would have been about how to staff a second shift at a plant that has not opened yet, which is a conversation about terms rather than discounts.

Pursiva knows nothing before the public does. It reads public sources — company sites, announcements, news, the REGON register — and job boards are among them. The edge is not secret knowledge; it is which public trace you read and how quickly. An opening announcement, a grant decision or a board change usually surfaces before the first posting, not after it.

• New location or facility. A plant, a branch, a warehouse or a service centre has to be staffed in full, against a date that is already fixed. The opening announcement is often the only moment a company states the scale itself: how many roles, what kind, starting when. That is the earliest public trace of hiring that has to happen.
• Funding or an EU subsidy. A round, a loan or an awarded grant is a budget with a date and a purpose set out in a public statement. Statements in this category tend to name headcount directly, which hands you an opening sentence you did not have to invent.
• Headcount growth. It confirms the previous signal was not a one-off. A company that grows quarter after quarter eventually crosses the line where its own HR function stops keeping up — and that is the first time an external supplier is a real option rather than one more advert.
• Management change. A new role over operations, production or sales arrives with its own plan and its own budget, and that plan almost always contains people. The first months are when it is still being settled. People are described by role here: Pursiva stores and shows no names, addresses or numbers.

Here is a sketch of a single row, without a name: real names appear only once a run has found them against your own offer.

The company: a food manufacturer with one plant in central Poland, selling to retail chains. Why it fits: the profile built from your site says you fill production and maintenance roles at plants of that size, and this one runs its hiring entirely in-house, with no external support.

Why now: an announced second plant with a stated start-up date, and an awarded grant for a new line. The evidence: every “why now” sentence carries a link to the page it was read from and a date — the one the source gives, or the day the signal was found. A sentence without a link never reaches the list at all.

The row has a score and a rank; a run ranks at most 40 companies so the list can be read in one sitting. The whole thing reaches you within an hour of payment — automatically, with no queue in between.

The profile is built from your own site: which roles you fill, in which sectors, on what commercial model and at what size of assignment it makes sense. In this segment it usually comes down to companies large enough to hire repeatedly and to have someone accountable for it, and small enough that they have no internal recruitment team closing everything without help.

The exclusions matter more than the criteria, because they remove most of what merely looks like a fit. Agencies here typically exclude: other recruitment, temporary-work and outsourcing firms, which buy subcontracting rather than the service; sole traders and micro companies that hire once every few years; public institutions, unless you bid for tenders; subsidiaries of international groups where the supplier is chosen abroad; and companies you already serve.

You see the profile and correct it before you pay and before the expensive part — the research — begins. The finished list is then put through the exclusions in that profile, deterministically, by rule rather than by opinion, and a row that touches one is held back instead of landing in your inbox.

Frequently asked questions

Does Pursiva know about a vacancy before the job boards do?

It has no access to anyone's hiring plans and knows nothing that is not public. What tends to precede a posting is the trace of the decision that will force it: an opening announcement, an awarded grant, a change on the management board. Pursiva looks for those, and stores each one with a link to its source and a date, so you can judge for yourself whether the window is still open.

Will I get a contact for whoever owns the hiring?

No. Pursiva describes companies, not people: it stores and shows no first names, surnames, addresses or numbers, on the client side or the candidate side. A decision-maker is described by role, and the company itself is identified by its REGON register entry and KRS number. Who you approach, and how, stays with you.

Read next

• Buying signals
• You get no e-mail addresses and no phone numbers
• Start a run