Recruitment Lead Generation: 5–10 Qualified Leads Monthly
A three-week AI-assisted outbound system for an eight-person Dutch recruitment agency, with a 6%+ reply rate and 5–10 qualified leads a month.
- 6%+ reply rate
- 5–10 qualified leads per month
Result at a glance
Genial built an AI-assisted outbound system for an eight-person Dutch recruitment agency during a three-week implementation. Campaign reporting at handover recorded a 6%+ reply rate, 5–10 qualified leads per month, and multiple leads became paying clients.
The client
The client is a Dutch recruitment agency founded in 2006, with eight employees. It sells recruitment services to companies and wanted a repeatable client-acquisition channel alongside referrals.
The challenge
The agency was successful at placements but depended heavily on referrals for new client work. That made the sales pipeline uneven and left recruiters spending time identifying companies and researching decision-makers.
Earlier generic cold-email attempts had produced reply rates below 2%. The agency needed outbound messages tied to each company's actual context rather than another high-volume list of identical emails. This case covers outbound client acquisition for a recruitment agency. It does not cover candidate sourcing or job-post monitoring.
What we built
The system combined five parts:
- Prospect selection with Apollo. Filters identified companies and decision-makers that matched the agency's target profile.
- Company research with Perplexity. Each prospect record received relevant company context before a message was drafted.
- Message generation with OpenAI. Campaign templates incorporated the research while preserving the agency's offer and target audience.
- Workflow orchestration with n8n. Research, generation, campaign preparation, and follow-up steps moved through one workflow.
- Sending through Instantly. Dedicated domains, authenticated mailboxes (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), warmup, sending limits, and schedules were prepared before launch.
Week 1 set up the sending foundation and started warmup. Week 2 defined the Apollo targeting and connected Perplexity research. Week 3 connected OpenAI message generation, built the n8n workflow and follow-up sequence, and launched the first audience segment in Instantly. Recruiters still handled replies, qualification decisions, and client conversations.
Results
| Measurement | Recorded result |
|---|---|
| Reply rate | 6%+ (earlier generic campaigns: below 2%) |
| Qualified leads | 5–10 per month |
| Commercial outcome | Multiple leads became paying clients |
| Delivery time | Three weeks |
The useful comparison is with the agency's own earlier generic campaigns, not an external industry average. These figures describe this client's campaigns at the time of delivery; they are not a guarantee for another campaign.
For the same agency we also built job-post intelligence that finds companies actively hiring, and a similar outbound approach served a different buyer group in AI lead generation for a marketing training firm. For the broader commercial service behind systems like this, see Genial's AI implementation and process automation offer.