27.5% reply rate on cold LinkedIn outreach: AI sourcing for JB Recruitment

JB Recruitment places mid-career and senior sales professionals in the Netherlands and Belgium. For an international beauty & wellness platform, founder Jasper Borghesi was hiring several Field Sales Representatives at once, across five regions. Searching LinkedIn by hand took him far too much time. Alongside the Meta job campaign, Leadstars therefore launched AI sourcing within the Job Application Machine: AI selected matching sales profiles per region, every list was checked by hand, and each profile received a connection request from Jasper's own LinkedIn, not from a company page or InMail. Everyone who accepted got a short, concrete message with one question: are you open to a 10-minute call? Two short follow-ups came after that. In six weeks, 304 candidates were contacted. 134 accepted the request (44%), more than twice the 19.4% recruiter average. 269 messages produced 74 replies: a 27.5% reply rate, and 55% of all new connections replied. The first reply came within an hour and the first call was booked two days after launch. 15 candidates asked for a call or the job details themselves, and 6 of them proposed a time to call. These are passive candidates who were not actively looking. That makes AI sourcing the ideal complement to the Meta funnel: the funnel captures active job seekers, AI sourcing reaches the strong salespeople who already have a job.