A company posts a job ad because it wants to fill a role without paying a fee. Completely rational. Worth a try. But a job ad is also a public record with a date on it, and dates are ruthless.

An ad still live on week six is not an advert any more. It is a company announcing, at its own expense, that it cannot fill a role on its own. Same for the ad drawing three applications, or the role quietly relisted for the third time. Most recruiters scroll straight past these on the way to the candidates. That scroll is where the money is.

A job ad on week six is a cry for help

Think about what an aged ad means inside that building. Somebody wrote a spec, agreed a salary, paid for a listing and told the team help was coming. That was six weeks ago. Either nobody worth interviewing applied, or the good ones vanished into other offers while the CVs sat in an inbox. Meanwhile the work has not stopped: overtime is up, a project has slipped, a manager is doing a job and a half, and someone gets asked about the empty desk every Monday morning.

That company has already tried the cheap option. It did not work. They are the warmest cold prospect in your market, and they marked themselves for you.

The five signals worth acting on

  • Age. A role still advertised after four to six weeks in market. The single strongest signal, because the cost of it is compounding weekly.
  • The repost. Same role, relisted, wording lightly reshuffled. Someone hoped a fresh date stamp would fix a broken funnel.
  • The salary bump. A relist with a higher band. They have diagnosed the problem as money. It usually is not, which is exactly the conversation you want to have.
  • The multi-board spread. One role on three boards at once. Budget is being thrown at visibility. Visibility was never the problem.
  • The cluster. Several roles open at the same company. Now it is not a vacancy, it is a capacity problem, and capacity problems have budgets attached.

One signal is interesting. Two stacked together is a call to make today.

Filter before you flatter

Before a company earns a place on your list, spend one minute on Companies House. It is free and it answers three questions: is this a live, trading entity; is it roughly the size it appears; and is it actually the employer, rather than an RPO or a franchise office posting on someone else's behalf. Skipping this step is how you end up pitching a brass plate. The board gives you the pain. The registry tells you whether the patient is real.

What to say when you call

Do not open with your agency's origin story. The stuck role is the icebreaker, so use it:

One sentence of evidence, one question that is easy and slightly interesting to answer. You have proved you did thirty seconds of homework, you have shown you know how roles actually stall, and you have invited them to talk about their problem instead of your brochure. Diagnose first. Pitch when asked, and only then.

Tone matters here. You are not gloating about their misery. You are the person who noticed, which is more than their last three suppliers managed.

Make it a habit, or make it someone's job

The catch: this only works as a daily habit, because the value is in the timing. The company that hit week six today is a different call from the one that hit it two months ago and gave up. Twenty minutes each morning reading your market's boards with a client lens will change what your pipeline looks like by autumn.

If your desk cannot spare twenty minutes a day, that is not a moral failing, it is a capacity fact. Reading the boards at scale, checking the registry and turning the evidence into booked meetings is exactly the machine Link Think runs. And if you would rather run it yourself, the full playbook is free in the vault. Either way: someone should be reading the boards for clients. In your market, this week, somebody probably already is.