800 Connections, 571 Replies, 2 Weeks: A Recruiting Masterclass

Scaling from $10K to $160K MRR in five months sounds like a dream. Until you realize you need to hire an army of people to keep up. That's exactly where Nikola Sokolov found himself - staring down a hiring crisis that would make most people reach for the whiskey.

He decided to build something brilliant.

Here's the setup: Sales Navigator searches are great, but they're not great enough for this job, according to Nikola. You can filter by job title and company size all day long, but you can't filter for "won't job-hop after 12 months" or "actually has diverse growth experience." Those nuances live in the profile itself, buried in job descriptions and timelines.

So he started pulling 500-1,000 LinkedIn profiles per search and dumping them into Clay. Nothing fancy yet, just URLs in a table.

Then came the magic. He built an AI-powered scoring system based on red flags his recruiter kept seeing. Job tenure under 18 months? Deduct five points. No SEO experience (huge for his business)? Deduct one. Not in growth, demand, or product roles? Deduct three.

The prompt became a living checklist of what actually matters.

What used to take his recruiter hours - manually visiting profiles, cross-referencing experience, making judgment calls - now happened in seconds. The AI wasn't perfect, but it was fast and consistent. Good enough to separate "definitely not" from "maybe worth a conversation."

Candidates who passed the scoring threshold got added to a LinkedIn outreach campaign. And here's where things got absurd.

In two weeks, he had 800 accepted connections and 571 replies. Let that sink in. 🤯

Here's how the campaign look like:

And here's their DM template:

Heeeeey {FIRST_NAME} - we have a (hyper) growth lead role open at influencers.club.

A few things about us:

Went from $110K ARR in Jan to $1.8M ARR nowMost of our growth is organic (150k monthly visitors)
We’re the go-to data provider in the creator economy, powering companies like Amazon, L'Oréal, and TikTok
We’re looking for a founding member of our marketing team.

If you don’t follow a set of rules when it comes to growth, let me send some more details on the position?

I promise it will be a quick read (2-3 min max).

But he wasn't done. Replies are great until they pile up in your inbox like digital laundry. So he built a Make automation to process every reply and feed it into a pipeline. Each response got tagged with campaign source, reply date, sentiment analysis, and that Clay quality score.

His recruiter could now see at a glance: Who replied? Are they excited or just being polite? Do they actually fit the role based on the initial scoring? What stage are they in? The system mirrored a sales pipeline, but for hiring. Clean, organized, and ridiculously efficient.

The result? Mostly qualified candidates flowing through a repeatable process in a timeframe that would make most HR teams weep with envy.

The founder's takeaway was simple: this system saved his life. When you're growing fast and need to hire faster, you don't have time to manually vet hundreds of profiles. But you also can't afford to hire the wrong people.