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The best senior roles are never advertised. Score any target company across six hiring signals to find out whether conditions are right for a proactive approach — before you spend time on outreach.
Research consistently shows that between 60 and 80 percent of senior roles are filled without ever being publicly advertised. They're filled through networks, through proactive outreach, through recruiters who already have someone in mind — and through candidates who approached the right company at exactly the right moment.
The question isn't whether the hidden job market exists. It's whether you can identify which companies are in the conditions that create it. A company going through rapid growth, a leadership transition, a new funding round or a strategic pivot is almost always in the market for senior talent — even if they haven't written the job description yet.
The Empty Door Scorecard evaluates any target company against six signals that indicate hiring readiness. Score a company in under three minutes and know immediately whether a proactive approach is likely to land — or likely to be ignored.
Enter the company you want to evaluate. Works for any organisation — from FTSE 250 to PE-backed scale-ups to public sector bodies.
The tool walks you through six observable hiring signals you can identify from public sources — news, LinkedIn, job boards and company announcements.
Receive a score that tells you how likely this company is to be receptive to a proactive approach in the next 30–90 days.
Focus your energy on companies scoring above the threshold — and stop wasting time approaching organisations that aren't ready to hire.
Is the company expanding headcount, entering new markets or scaling a product? Growth creates roles before they're written.
Has a senior leader recently departed, been promoted or is a function visibly understaffed on LinkedIn? Gaps need filling.
A recent funding round, acquisition or PE ownership change almost always triggers senior hiring within 3–6 months.
Is the company publicly struggling with a problem you solve — a transformation challenge, a technology debt, a regulatory change?
Are they actively hiring roles adjacent to yours? A company building out a function around your specialism is likely to need your layer too.
Do you have first or second-degree connections inside the company? Warm outreach is 5–10x more likely to generate a response than cold.
When you apply to an advertised role, you're competing with 150–300 other candidates, all filtered through an ATS, all anchored to the same job description. The hiring manager is evaluating you against a fixed brief they've already compromised on.
When you approach a company proactively — before a role exists — you're having a completely different conversation. There's no brief to fail against. There's no competition. You're presenting a problem you can solve at the exact moment they're feeling it. The question shifts from "do you fit this box?" to "how could we use someone like you?"
The strategy only works if your timing is right. Approaching a company that isn't in growth or transition mode wastes both your time and theirs. The Empty Door Scorecard solves the timing problem — it tells you which companies are in the conditions that make a proactive conversation welcome rather than awkward.
The most effective way to use this tool is as part of a structured approach to a list of 20–40 target companies. Run each through the scorecard and split them into three buckets:
This approach concentrates your energy on conversations that are genuinely likely to go somewhere — and is the methodology behind the Opportunity Engine in the full AuthBuild platform.