How Do You Headhunt Candidates Anywhere in the Country?

You headhunt anywhere in the country by going outbound: you stop waiting for applications to arrive and start messaging people who already do the job, in the city where you need them, at a volume most business owners have never attempted. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and we ran a search out of Windsor, Ontario for a role in Los Angeles and closed two hires in 18 days. Not because we found a secret candidate pool in California. Because we sent a thousand messages and knew exactly what a thousand messages produce. Since March 2020 my team has built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US, and outbound is the single reason distance stopped being a constraint for us.

What does it actually mean to headhunt someone?

Headhunting means you go and get the person instead of waiting for them to find your posting. A job posting is a passive instrument. It sits on a board and collects whoever happens to be looking that week, which by definition excludes almost everyone who is good at the job and currently employed doing it. The best person for your role is not scrolling job boards on a Tuesday night. They are at work, they are busy, and they are reasonably happy. Headhunting inverts the whole thing: you build a list of people who already hold the title you need, in the market you need it, and you contact them directly. If your postings keep pulling the wrong people, the fix is usually a definition problem before it is a channel problem — but even a perfect posting only reaches people who are already looking.

What is the 10% rule in recruitment outreach?

The 10% rule says that roughly one in ten people move forward at every stage of outbound, so you plan the search backwards from the hire you need. Here is the actual math from the Los Angeles search: 1,000 messages sent, 100 replies, 10 qualified interviews, 2 elite hires. Message a thousand, hear back from a hundred, sit down with ten people who can genuinely do the work, hire two of them. Every step is about a 10% conversion, and the final step is better than that because by then you have filtered hard. The exact percentage will move a little by market and by role. That is not the point. The point is that once you know the ratio, the number you plan around is messages sent — something entirely under your control — instead of candidates hoped for, which is not.

How did we hire two people in Los Angeles from an office in Windsor?

We hired two people in Los Angeles from Windsor in 18 days by treating the search as a volume problem with a hard quality filter, not as a geography problem. Nobody on my team set foot in California. We defined the role precisely before a single message went out, built the list of people in that market who already held the title, ran the outreach, and interviewed on video. Eighteen days from launch to two accepted offers. For context, our average time-to-fill across all searches is 37 days, down from the 68 days it took us when CPG started — and an out-of-state search came in at half our own average, because outbound compresses the part of hiring that wastes the most time: waiting for the right person to notice you exist.

Why does distance stop mattering when you go outbound?

Distance stops mattering because every step that used to need proximity now happens on a screen. Sourcing is a search filter. First contact is a message. Screening is a phone call. Interviews are video, and have been for years. The only real thing local recruiting ever gave you was a shorter list of names, and a shorter list is not an advantage. What is left is the part that was always the hard part — deciding who you actually want and being disciplined about it — and that work is identical whether the person lives twenty minutes away or two thousand miles away. If you are hiring for a role that can be done remotely, or you are willing to relocate the right person, your candidate market is the entire country and it has been for some time.

What has to be right before you send the first message?

You have to know exactly who you are looking for before message number one, because a thousand messages aimed at a vague profile produces a thousand wrong conversations. Volume multiplies whatever you put into it, including confusion. Before we open LinkedIn we agree on the title, the non-negotiables, the things we will train, the compensation range, who is making the decision, and how fast that decision will be made. That is the entire purpose of the recruitment launch meeting. Skip it and the 10% rule works against you: you will still get your hundred replies, you will still run your ten interviews, and you will still make two offers — to the wrong two people, faster than you ever have before.

How do you write an outreach message people actually answer?

Write a short message that is about them, names the specific thing you are offering, and asks one easy question. The people you want are getting recruiter spam every week, and almost all of it reads the same: a wall of text, a generic compliment, a job description pasted underneath. Yours should be three or four lines. Say what the role is, say what is genuinely good about it — the money, the scope, the owner, the trajectory — and ask if they are open to hearing more. Do not attach a PDF. Do not ask for a resume in the first message. You are not trying to get an application, you are trying to get a reply, and a reply is a much smaller ask. At a hundred replies per thousand, small improvements in that first message change the whole funnel.

Is a thousand messages realistic for a business owner to run alone?

Honestly, no — not while you are also running the business, and that is the part nobody says out loud. A thousand targeted messages, a hundred conversations and ten interviews is a full-time job for two to three weeks. Most owners start it, get through two hundred messages in the cracks between everything else, get a handful of lukewarm replies, and conclude that outbound does not work. It does work. It just does not work at 20% of the volume. Either you block the time and run the full funnel, or you hand the volume to a team that runs it every day. That is exactly what CPG Recruitment does for clients who are hiring continuously, and it is the reason a Windsor office can fill a Los Angeles role in under three weeks. There is also a company-voice version of this breakdown on the CPG blog: how outbound headhunting fills a role in another city.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many LinkedIn messages does it take to fill one role?

Plan on roughly 500 messages per hire. Our Los Angeles search produced two hires from 1,000 messages, which is the 10% rule playing out across replies, interviews and offers. A very niche or senior role will need more; a role with a large local talent pool will need fewer.

Is it wrong to headhunt someone who already has a job?

No. Every good hire you have ever made was employed somewhere else the day before. Approaching someone respectfully with a better opportunity is how the labour market works - the person is free to say no, and most of them will. What is not acceptable is misrepresenting the role, the pay or the company to get someone to move.

Do you need LinkedIn Recruiter to do this?

No, but it makes the volume manageable. You can build a list and send connection notes on a standard account. The paid tools mainly buy you search filters and message limits, which matter once you are working at four figures of outreach rather than dozens.

How long should an out-of-market search take?

Three to six weeks is a reasonable expectation when the outreach actually runs at volume. We closed Los Angeles in 18 days and our all-in average is 37 days, down from 68. If a search has been open for three months, the bottleneck is almost never the market - it is either an undefined role or a decision nobody is making.

If you are hiring outside your own city and your postings are not producing anyone worth interviewing, the channel is the problem, not your market. Talk to CPG Recruitment about a done-for-you search, or reach me directly here and tell me the role you are trying to fill and where it is. Bringing in customers and having the right people to serve them are the two engines of any business — this one is the second engine, and geography is no longer an excuse for leaving it empty.