Who is the decision maker for a vacancy?

Usually the person the role reports into, because they own the headcount and the budget and they carry the cost of the seat staying empty. Internal recruiters and HR run the process, and they matter, but they are rarely the person who decides that an agency gets engaged.

Should I contact HR or the hiring manager?

It depends on what you want. HR and internal talent teams control the process and often the supplier list, so they are the right route if the company has a formal PSL. The hiring manager feels the vacancy directly and can usually create an exception when the need is urgent. Most successful approaches acknowledge both rather than pretending one does not exist.

Why is job title a poor guide to who owns a hire?

Titles are inconsistent between companies and often between departments in the same company. A Head of Engineering at a fifty person business may personally own every technical hire. The same title at a large employer may sit three levels away from the decision. Title tells you roughly where someone sits, not what they control.

What makes contact data actually usable?

It has to be current, it has to be the right person for that specific hire, and it has to be a route they actually read. A guessed email pattern that reaches a shared inbox is not a contact. Verification before use matters more than volume, because a bounced send costs sender reputation as well as the opportunity.

Guide

How to find the decision maker behind a vacancy

The decision maker for a vacancy is usually the person the role reports into, because they own the headcount and the budget and they carry the cost of the seat staying empty. Identify them by working out who is most inconvenienced by the role staying open, not by scanning job titles.

That is the short answer. The rest of this guide covers why titles mislead, how to handle the HR question, and what separates contact data that works from contact data that just exists.

Every recruiter has done the version of this that does not work. You spot a role, you find the company on LinkedIn, you scroll until you see someone with a plausible title, you guess an email address from the pattern on their website, and you send. Then you do it again forty times and wonder why the response rate is what it is.

The problem is not the outreach. It is that three separate questions got collapsed into one guess. Who owns this hire. How do I reach them. And why would they read it.

Who actually owns a hire

In most companies the person who owns a vacancy is the person the role reports into. They asked for the headcount, they hold the budget, and they are the one carrying the workload while the seat is empty. That last part is what makes them worth talking to. They have a problem, and it is getting worse every week.

Internal recruiters and HR run the process around that. They matter, sometimes a great deal, but the distinction is worth being clear about: they usually control how a hire happens, while the hiring manager controls whether it is urgent enough to change the plan. Those are different levers.

A useful test. Ask who is most inconvenienced by this role staying open for another two months. That person is almost always the one worth reaching, and it is rarely the person whose job title contains the word "recruitment".

Why job titles mislead

Title is the obvious signal and it is a weaker one than it looks, because titles are not standardised across companies and often not within them.

A Head of Engineering at a fifty person business probably signs off every technical hire personally. The same title at a company of five thousand might be three levels below the person who does. Operations Director means one thing in a contracting business and something quite different in a software company. And plenty of people who own hires have titles that give no clue at all.

Title tells you roughly where somebody sits in an organisation. It does not tell you what they control. Company size, department structure and how the specific role fits into the team matter more, and none of those are visible from a title alone.

The gatekeeper question

Recruiters ask a lot about getting past HR, and the framing itself causes problems. Treating internal talent teams as an obstacle to be routed around tends to be both ineffective and memorable, in the wrong way.

It is more useful to work out what each side actually controls. If a company has a formal preferred supplier list, going straight to the hiring manager will usually result in you being forwarded to procurement anyway, and now you have made a slightly awkward first impression. If there is no PSL, or the role is urgent enough that the manager is willing to push, the direct approach is exactly right.

The judgement call depends on the company, and getting it right requires knowing something about how they buy before you send anything. That is research, not a script.

What makes contact data usable

Contact data gets sold by volume, which is a strange way to price something whose value depends almost entirely on precision. Three things determine whether a contact is worth anything.

It is current. People change roles constantly. A record that was accurate eighteen months ago is a coin flip today, and the more senior the person the more likely they have moved.
It is the right person for this hire. Not someone senior at the company. The person connected to this specific role. A CEO's email address is easy to find and almost never the right destination.
It reaches them. A guessed address that lands in a generic inbox is not a contact, it is a bounce waiting to happen. Repeated bounces damage your sending reputation, which quietly reduces the deliverability of everything else you send.

This is why verification before use matters more than database size. A hundred contacts that reach the right person beat ten thousand that mostly do not, and the second option actively costs you something.

Doing this at scale is the hard part

Any competent recruiter can work out who owns a hire at one company given twenty minutes and LinkedIn. The difficulty is that twenty minutes per vacancy does not survive contact with a real desk.

Say you are working thirty live roles. That is ten hours of research before you have sent a single message, and by the time you finish the earliest ones have moved on. So in practice the research gets skipped, the guess gets made, and the response rate reflects it.

The bottleneck is not knowing how to do the work. It is that the work does not fit in the day.

How Elephant approaches it

Elephant maps the decision maker to the vacancy rather than to the company. When a role is surfaced, the person accountable for it is identified alongside it, with verified contact details, so the research step is already done when the vacancy reaches you.

Contacts are verified before they are revealed rather than sold in bulk, and revealing one uses credits from a monthly allowance. That pricing is deliberate. It means the incentive is to give you contacts that work, not contacts that count.

Elephant maps more than 900,000 UK hiring decision makers against 1.1 million tracked companies, so the person attached to a vacancy is drawn from a pool built for this specific purpose rather than filtered out of a general business contact database.

	Contact database	Decision maker mapped to a vacancy
What you search	People, filtered by company and title	Live roles, with the owner attached
Hiring context	None. You check separately whether they are hiring	Built in. The vacancy is why the contact is there
Reason to make contact	You construct one	A specific open role you can name
Research per lead	Significant, and repeated for every contact	Already done
Failure mode	Right person, wrong moment	Wrong person, which verification is there to catch

What good looks like

The measure of this is not how many contacts you can pull. It is how often the first message lands with someone who has the problem you are describing, at a point where they still care about solving it.

A recruiter calling about a role that went live yesterday, speaking to the manager who raised it, is having a completely different conversation from one calling about a board advert that thirty other agencies also saw. Same effort, same call length. The difference is entirely in what was known before dialling.

Elephant does this research for you

Every vacancy arrives with the decision maker mapped to it and their contact details verified before they are revealed.

See how it works