How Vocations built their recruiter platform on Hunter's API

Meet Vocations

Vocations is a startup that aggregates real-time job postings from across the internet and turns them into lead generation signals for staffing agencies and headhunting firms.

The idea came from personal experience: the founders, still students, were scraping job listings to help themselves find work and realized the underlying technology had far more commercial potential than their own job search. 

Vocations serves 300 active users per day, each using the platform to identify companies that are actively hiring, filter those openings by relevance, and then reach out to the right decision-makers. 

That last step - getting from a job posting to an actionable contact - is where Hunter comes in.

The challenge

Vocations' core technology is job scraping. Their platform covers the top of the recruiter funnel: finding which companies are hiring and when. But their users were clear from early on that a list of open roles was only half the picture.

"Users were saying, guys, this is amazing, but I need to have the contact of the person. Without having the email of the person, I wouldn't use Vocations."
Alessio Primo Gavinelli, CEO and co-founder

The feedback was unambiguous: without a way to surface the decision-maker's contact details alongside the job signal, the platform couldn't complete the workflow. 

Vocations needed a contact data partner they could integrate via API, one whose rate limits could handle high daily volume, whose data quality would hold up under real-world use, and whose team could support a small, fast-moving founding team that had never built a contact data integration before.

The solution

Vocations evaluated several providers and chose Hunter as their first - and only - contact data integration. 

The Email Finder API powers the 'unlock contact' function at the heart of their product: when a recruiter identifies a company posting a relevant job, they can use Vocations to surface the right person to reach out to and get their contact details directly within the platform.

• Hunter's API rate limits were specifically cited as a deciding factor. With 300 users generating requests every day, throughput matters - and Vocations found Hunter's limits well-matched to the volume of data they needed to serve.
• The Hunter customer success team guided Alessio through the integration in the early stages, walking him through how to use the API properly, how to handle the data, and what was possible. For a first-time API integrator building a company from scratch, that support reduced weeks of trial-and-error to a single day of setup.
• Data quality was the third pillar of the decision. Vocations passes Hunter's contact data directly to end users who act on it immediately. If the data is wrong, users notice - and they stop trusting the platform. Hunter's accuracy gave Vocations the confidence to build their contact layer on a single provider rather than investing in a more complex waterfall architecture.

Vocations also uses Hunter for their own business development outreach. They identify target companies by VAT number from Italian company registries, use Hunter's Email Finder API to find the right contact within each, and run personalized email sequences to generate awareness among staffing agencies.

The results

Every active session on the Vocations platform results in five contacts unlocked through Hunter. 

Across 300 daily users, that represents a significant and growing volume of API calls to find an average of 1,500 decision makers a day - all backed by a single, stable integration.

"We track how many contacts they ask and every session is probably about five contacts unlocked on average - which is something great." 
Alessio Primo Gavinelli, CEO and co-founder

More broadly, Hunter's contact data completes the Vocations value proposition. 

Without it, the platform was a job aggregator. With it, it becomes a full lead generation workflow that takes a recruiter from signal to outreach in one place. 

The decision to go with Hunter on day one means Vocations has been able to grow their user base without ever rebuilding their contact data layer.

The takeaway

For a startup integrating contact data into a product for the first time, the combination of API reliability, data quality, and human support made the choice straightforward. 

Vocations went from selecting Hunter to having it live in one day.

"It's super easy to set up - account, payment, the whole package. We set it up in a day, straight on. That was the most important thing. And then of course, all the value continues down the line." 
Alessio Primo Gavinelli, CEO and co-founder