A friend of mine recently started her own recruiting agency. She was putting in the work: finding companies, reaching out every day, following up. But she kept running into the same problem. How do you know which companies are actually worth reaching out to? - There are hundreds of companies hiring at any given time. - But a company having open roles doesn't necessarily mean they need an agency. - They might already have a big internal recruiting team. - They might have recruiters handling everything in-house. - Or they might not be hiring enough to really need outside help. So I started thinking about what would actually make a company a good prospect for a recruiting agency. Two things stood out: - They're hiring right now. - They don't seem to have anyone internally handling recruitment. I started building something to find exactly those companies for her. But while I was working on it, I realized there was another piece I hadn't thought about. She probably already knew people at a lot of these companies. - Former colleagues. - People she'd worked with. - Old clients. - 2nd-degree connections. People she'd met somewhere along the way and completely forgotten were in her network. And that felt like a much bigger opportunity than just giving her another list of companies to cold email. Because the company might be hiring right now, and she might already know someone inside. The problem is, LinkedIn doesn't really give you an easy way to connect those two things. So I started cross-checking them. Who do you know → where do they work → who's hiring right now → which of those companies don't appear to have an internal recruiting function. The result is a much smaller list of companies where there's already some kind of relationship on the inside. That got me thinking that this might actually be useful beyond just helping my friend.