Do I need to upload a list of contacts?

No. You paste your website and the agent finds matching companies and decision-makers itself, verifying each email address before anything is sent.

Does it send from my own domain?

No. Outreach is sent from warmed lookalike domains we operate on your behalf, so your real domain's email deliverability is never put at risk.

Prepaid credits, no subscription. Sending an email costs about $0.03 and verifying a contact about $0.01. New accounts start with $30 in credits.

Is cold email legal in the EU?

Business-to-business outreach is permitted in most EU countries under legitimate interest, provided the message is relevant to the recipient's role and opting out is easy. Pipestork includes a one-click unsubscribe and a postal address in every email, and blocks countries that require prior consent, including Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland.

How quickly should I email after a job is posted?

Not immediately. In the first week the internal team is still optimistic and agencies are an admission of failure. Weeks three to six is the window where the manager is worried and has not yet signed with someone else.

Hiring managers or HR?

Hiring managers, unless the company is large enough to have a preferred supplier list — in which case you are selling to Talent Acquisition and the pitch is about getting onto the list, not about one role.

Cold email by industry · recruitment agencies

Cold email for recruitment and staffing agencies

Recruitment is the one vertical where the trigger matters more than everything else combined. A perfectly written email to a company with no open roles is worthless; a mediocre email that arrives the day a req goes live gets a reply. Everything below is organised around that.

Who you are actually selling to

Hiring Manager: The person who owns the vacancy and feels the pain daily. Almost always a better target than HR, who are managing a process rather than a gap.
Head of Talent / TA Lead: Right target at companies hiring at volume. They have agency PSLs and the conversation is about getting on one.
Founder / MD: At companies under 100, where hiring is unstructured and urgent.

The trigger worth waiting for

A job posting that has been live more than three weeks. That is the single highest-value signal in this vertical: it means the internal route has failed and the manager is starting to worry. Reposted roles and roles where the salary band was just raised are the same signal, louder.

What works

+Referencing the specific role and how long it has been open. It proves you are not blanket-mailing.
+Leading with a candidate, not with your agency. "I have two people who fit your Senior Backend req" is a different email from "we specialise in tech recruitment".
+Being explicit about your fee up front. Hiring managers assume you are expensive and evasive; being neither is differentiating.
+Following up when the role is still open a fortnight later — the second email often outperforms the first because the pain has grown.

What fails

−"We are a leading recruitment agency specialising in..." — indistinguishable from the four other agencies who emailed that week.
−Emailing HR at a large company about a specific technical role. It goes into a process, not a conversation.
−Sending the same email to every open role at one company. It arrives in several inboxes at once and reads as automated.

A worked opener

Subject

your Senior Platform Engineer role (live 34 days)

Body

Your Senior Platform Engineer post has been up since the 12th of last month. At that point it is usually not a sourcing problem — it is that the band is under market for the stack you listed. I place platform engineers in Belgium and have three people currently looking who would clear your requirements. 18% and I will send profiles before you commit to anything. Want them?

Why it works: It names the role and the exact duration, offers a diagnosis rather than a service, states the fee, and reduces the ask to "want them?" — which is a one-word reply.

Compliance notes

Candidate data is personal data in the ordinary sense and is not covered by the B2B carve-outs — do not confuse the two pipelines. This page is about emailing hiring managers at their work addresses, which is standard B2B. Anything involving candidate sourcing needs its own legal basis and its own privacy notice.

Questions

How quickly should I email after a job is posted?: Not immediately. In the first week the internal team is still optimistic and agencies are an admission of failure. Weeks three to six is the window where the manager is worried and has not yet signed with someone else.
Hiring managers or HR?: Hiring managers, unless the company is large enough to have a preferred supplier list — in which case you are selling to Talent Acquisition and the pitch is about getting onto the list, not about one role.

Have the agents do this for you

Everything on this page is what a good recruitment agencies campaign needs someone to work out. Pipestork works it out from your website — the profile, the companies, the decision-makers, the sequences — and sends from warmed mailboxes, not your domain.

Try it with $30 in credits →