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Industry Filters

Industry filtering lets you focus your client search on the sectors where you have expertise and an existing candidate network. Instead of browsing thousands of companies across all industries, you can narrow your view to the specific sectors that matter for your recruitment practice. This is often the first filter recruiters apply, because industry specialization is one of the strongest differentiators in recruitment.

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How Industry Data Is Sourced

Industry classifications in Recruitier come directly from LinkedIn company profiles. When a company is enriched, Recruitier pulls the industry field from the company’s LinkedIn page. This classification is set by the company itself when they create their LinkedIn presence, which means it reflects how the company identifies itself rather than an external classification.
Because industry data comes from LinkedIn, it uses LinkedIn’s industry taxonomy. Industries like “Information Technology and Services”, “Hospital & Health Care”, “Financial Services”, and “Staffing and Recruiting” are standard LinkedIn categories, not custom Recruitier labels. This means the granularity and naming may differ from other industry classification systems you are used to.

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Available Industry Categories

The industry filter dropdown shows all industries that have at least one company in the Recruitier database, sorted by the number of companies in each category. Common industries you will see include:
  • Information Technology and Services
  • Financial Services
  • Hospital & Health Care
  • Manufacturing
  • Construction
  • Retail
  • Transportation and Logistics
  • Professional Services
  • Education
  • Telecommunications
  • Food & Beverages
  • Automotive
  • Real Estate
  • Energy
  • Insurance
  • And many more
The exact list depends on the current state of the database and the industries represented by companies with active job postings. Industries with more companies appear higher in the dropdown, making it easy to find the most populated categories.
The industry dropdown only shows industries that actually exist among companies with active job postings. If you do not see an industry you expect, it may mean that no companies in that sector currently have open positions in the database, or that those companies classify themselves under a different LinkedIn industry name.

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Selecting and Deselecting Industries

1

Open the Industry Filter

Click on the industry filter dropdown in the filter panel. This opens a list of all available industries with the number of companies in each category displayed next to each name.
2

Select One or More Industries

Click on an industry to select it. A checkmark appears next to selected industries. You can select as many industries as you want — there is no limit.
3

Results Update Automatically

The search results update as you make selections. Only companies matching at least one of your selected industries will appear. The total result count updates immediately to reflect the filter.
4

Clear Selections

Click a selected industry again to deselect it, or use the clear button to remove all industry filters at once and return to showing all industries.

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Multi-Industry Selection

When you select multiple industries, they work with OR logic — a company needs to match any one of the selected industries to appear in results. This is useful when your expertise spans related sectors:
  • Select both “Information Technology and Services” and “Computer Software” to capture the full tech sector.
  • Select “Hospital & Health Care” and “Pharmaceuticals” to cover the healthcare industry broadly.
  • Select “Financial Services”, “Banking”, and “Insurance” for comprehensive financial sector coverage.
  • Select “Manufacturing”, “Automotive”, and “Industrial Automation” for the broad manufacturing ecosystem.
Industry categories on LinkedIn can be surprisingly granular. A company you think of as “tech” might be classified under “Information Technology and Services”, “Computer Software”, “Internet”, or even “Telecommunications”. When in doubt, select multiple related industries to avoid missing companies. You can always review the results and remove categories that are bringing in irrelevant companies.

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Automatic Exclusion of Staffing and Recruiting

Recruitier automatically excludes companies classified under “Staffing and Recruiting” from all client search results. This is a deliberate design decision based on how recruiters use the platform.

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Why Are Competitors Excluded?

When you search for potential clients, you are looking for companies that need recruitment services. Staffing and recruiting agencies are your competitors, not your clients. Including them in search results would create noise and make it harder to find genuine business opportunities. A staffing agency with 50 open positions is looking for recruiters to hire, not looking to be your client.

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How the Exclusion Works

  • Companies with the industry “Staffing and Recruiting” never appear in client search results, regardless of any other filters or sorting.
  • The “Staffing and Recruiting” industry does not appear in the industry filter dropdown, since it is always excluded.
  • Companies without any industry data are not excluded — they still appear in results because the absence of industry data does not mean they are a staffing company.
The competitor exclusion applies only to client search. If a staffing agency posts a job that matches a candidate you are placing, that job will still appear in your job matching results. The exclusion is specific to the business development use case — it prevents staffing agencies from cluttering your client search, not from appearing elsewhere in the platform.

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What About Embedded Recruiters?

Some companies have internal recruitment teams but are not staffing agencies. These companies are classified under their actual industry (e.g., “Information Technology and Services”) and will appear in your search results normally. The exclusion only affects companies whose primary business is staffing and recruiting — the ones whose LinkedIn industry classification is “Staffing and Recruiting”.
If you come across a company that is misclassified on LinkedIn (for example, a tech company that LinkedIn shows as “Staffing and Recruiting”), the only way to fix this is for the company to update their own LinkedIn profile. Recruitier uses LinkedIn’s data as-is and does not reclassify companies.

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Combining Industry with Other Filters

Industry filters become most powerful when combined with other criteria:
CombinationUse Case
Industry + SkillsFind tech companies hiring Python developers
Industry + LocationFind healthcare companies in the Randstad area
Industry + Employee CountFind mid-size manufacturing companies (100-500 employees)
Industry + Hiring ActivityFind financial services companies that started hiring this week
Industry + Hotness SortFind the most aggressively hiring companies in a specific sector

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Example: Finding IT Companies That Need DevOps Engineers

  1. Select “Information Technology and Services” and “Computer Software” as industries.
  2. Add “DevOps”, “Kubernetes”, and “AWS” as technology filters.
  3. Set skill match mode to “Match Any” to find companies using any of these technologies.
  4. Sort by Hotness Score to see the most actively hiring companies first.
This search surfaces IT companies that are posting DevOps-related roles, sorted by how urgently they appear to be hiring relative to their size.

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Example: Finding Healthcare Companies in Your Region

  1. Select “Hospital & Health Care” and “Pharmaceuticals” as industries.
  2. Set location to your city with a 50 km radius.
  3. Set employee count to 50-500 to target mid-size organizations.
  4. Sort by Job Count to see the companies with the most openings.
This targets healthcare organizations in your geographic area that are large enough to have regular hiring needs.

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Companies Without Industry Data

Not all companies in the database have industry classifications. This can happen when:
  • The company’s LinkedIn page does not include an industry field.
  • The company has not been fully enriched yet (enrichment is an ongoing process).
  • The company’s LinkedIn page could not be found during enrichment.
  • The company was recently added to the database and enrichment has not completed.
These companies are included in search results when no industry filter is applied. If you apply an industry filter, companies without industry data will be excluded from those filtered results (since they cannot match a specific industry they do not have).
The inclusion of unenriched companies is intentional. A company that recently started posting jobs may not have been enriched with LinkedIn data yet. Excluding it from all searches would mean missing potentially valuable opportunities. When you encounter a company with missing industry data, you can still evaluate it based on its job postings, employee count, and other available data.

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Advanced

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How Industry Filtering Works Under the Hood

The industry filter operates on the industry field of the GlobalCompany entity. This field is populated during the enrichment process that pulls data from LinkedIn company profiles. The filter dropdown is generated by a SELECT DISTINCT industry query that also excludes the EXCLUDED_CLIENT_INDUSTRIES list (currently just “Staffing and Recruiting”). When you select industries, the query adds a WHERE industry IN (...) clause. The exclusion of staffing companies uses a separate filter: WHERE (industry IS NULL OR industry NOT IN (...excluded list...)). These two filters work independently — the staffing exclusion is always applied, while your industry selection is only applied when you make a choice. The key SQL logic is:
  • No industry filter selected: WHERE (industry IS NULL OR industry NOT IN ('Staffing and Recruiting'))
  • Industry filter selected: WHERE industry IN ('IT and Services', 'Computer Software') AND (industry IS NULL OR industry NOT IN ('Staffing and Recruiting'))
In the second case, the staffing exclusion is technically redundant (since the IN clause would not match it), but it is applied consistently for safety.

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How Industry Connects to Other Features

  • Hiring Trends: When viewing a company’s hiring trend chart, the industry context helps you interpret seasonal patterns. Healthcare companies may have different hiring cycles than IT companies.
  • Decision Makers: The relevance ranking of decision makers considers the company context. At a healthcare company, a Chief Medical Officer might be more relevant for specialized recruitment than at a tech company.
  • Hotness Score: Industry does not directly affect the hotness score calculation, but it contextualizes the score. A hotness score of 0.05 at a tech startup has different implications than the same score at a manufacturing firm.
  • Saved Searches: Your selected industries are preserved in saved searches and included when notifications check for new companies.

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Power User Tips

  • Use industry as your first filter: Starting with industry narrows the result set dramatically and makes subsequent filters (skills, location) more meaningful.
  • Watch for LinkedIn miscategorization: Some companies classify themselves under unexpected industries. A SaaS company might be under “Computer Software” instead of “Information Technology and Services”. If your results seem incomplete, try adding related industry categories.
  • Industry + Skills is the power combination: Industry tells you the sector; skills tell you what technologies they use. Together, they identify companies that are both in your sector and need your specific type of candidates.
  • Companies change industries: If a company pivots or updates their LinkedIn profile, their industry may change. This means the same company could appear or disappear from industry-filtered results over time.

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Business Logic Rules

  • The EXCLUDED_CLIENT_INDUSTRIES list is maintained in the codebase and currently contains only “Staffing and Recruiting”. If additional industries need to be excluded in the future, they would be added to this list.
  • The industry dropdown is dynamically generated from the data — it shows only industries that currently exist among companies with at least one active job posting.
  • NULL industry values are handled with explicit IS NULL allowances in the WHERE clause, ensuring unenriched companies are not accidentally excluded.
  • Industry matching is exact string comparison — “Financial Services” and “financial services” would not match (though LinkedIn standardizes capitalization).