How to build a list of UK companies that are hiring
Companies that are hiring are companies that are growing — budgets are moving and priorities are in flux, which is the moment a new supplier actually gets heard. The problem is finding them as a clean list you can prospect: job boards give you vacancies, not a usable file of the companies behind them, and the raw Companies House register has no signal of who's trading, let alone who's hiring. Firmfeed treats active hiring as a buying signal: company-level data with verified websites, where a live careers page is one of the signals we score.
The hiring figures below come from Firmfeed's own July 2026 scan of established UK digital & marketing agencies. Competitor prices were read from their public pages in July 2026 — check their sites for current figures.
What the hiring signal looks like in real data
We scanned thousands of established UK digital and marketing agencies and read the public hiring signal — a live careers page or roles advertised on the company's own site — off each verified website. Across the verified cohort, about 24% were actively hiring at the snapshot date. The signal climbs steeply with company size, which is why a hiring filter doubles as a rough proxy for scale:
| Company size (employees) | Share showing an active-hiring signal |
|---|---|
| Micro (0–10) | 13% |
| Small (11–50) | 23% |
| Large (250+) | 68% |
Full method, caveats and the wider signal picture are in the UK digital sector signals report. The discovery method is free-tier and biased toward companies with a findable website, and hiring detection is read from the company's own site rather than a third-party job feed — both stated so the number means what it says.
Ways to build a hiring-companies list, honestly compared
| Approach | Cost (as of July 2026) | Best for | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Job boards (Indeed, LinkedIn Jobs) | Free to browse | Reading individual live vacancies | No exportable company list; you'd copy employers out by hand, with no register match or website verification |
| Hiring-intent platforms (recruiting data tools) | Enterprise / quote-only | Real-time job-change and vacancy feeds at scale | Priced for recruiters; sold with personal contact data and the GDPR diligence that carries |
| Fiverr / Apify scrapers | ~£5–50 per job | Cheap one-off scrapes of a specific job site | Unverified, no register match, breaks when the source site changes |
| Firmfeed | £49–£99 datasets; custom from £149 | A clean, register-matched company list filtered on an active-hiring signal, with verified websites | Hiring is a site-read signal at a snapshot date, not a live vacancy feed; company-level only, no personal contacts |
When Firmfeed is the right tool
- You want the companies that are hiring as a prospecting file — not a list of individual job adverts.
- You target growing companies and want hiring as one filter alongside verified website, sector, region and size.
- You feed lists into your own stack (CRM, Apollo, Sales Navigator) and want a clean CSV, not another platform login.
- Your compliance team prefers company-level public data with no scraped personal contacts in the file.
When a job board is the better choice
Honest answer: if what you actually need is the live vacancies — the roles, salaries and application links — a job board is the right tool and Firmfeed isn't a substitute for it. We sell the companies behind the hiring, matched to the register and verified, as a list you can prospect. If you need the roles themselves, start on a job board.
UK Digital & Marketing Agencies — Verified + Buying Signals. 1,596 established UK agencies with a verified website, a contact route and a live buying-signal score that includes active hiring. £99 one-off, no subscription — with a free 50-row sample.
Need hiring companies in a different sector? Any SIC code, region, company age or size band — filtered on the same active-hiring signal, with verified-website enrichment — delivered within 48 hours from £149.
Related guides
See the full UK company data providers guide for how to choose a source, or filter the same data another way with by location, by SIC code or by technology.
Frequently asked questions
Is this a job board or a list of open vacancies?
No. Firmfeed doesn't sell job postings or recruiter contacts. We sell company-level datasets where 'actively hiring' is one detectable buying signal — a company running a live careers page or advertising roles on its own site. You use it to target companies that are growing right now, then reach out through your own channels. If you want the vacancies themselves, a job board is the right tool; if you want the companies behind them as a clean prospecting list, that's what this is.
How does Firmfeed detect that a company is hiring?
We check each verified company website for live hiring signals: a careers or jobs page, and role listings published on the company's own domain. It's an observable, public signal read from the company's site at the dataset's snapshot date — not a scraped feed of third-party job boards and not a real-time ATS integration. Every dataset states its snapshot date so you know how fresh the signal is.
Does the file include recruiter names, emails or phone numbers?
No, deliberately. Firmfeed is company-level only: the registered company, its verified website, and observable buying signals such as active hiring. No scraped personal contacts, which keeps the file straightforward to use for B2B prospecting under UK GDPR. You enrich the right contact yourself in the tools you already pay for, like Apollo or LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Which companies does the ready-made dataset cover?
The off-the-shelf flagship covers established UK digital and marketing agencies — 1,596 verified rows, each with a working website, a contact route and a live buying-signal score that includes hiring. If you need hiring-signal companies in a different sector, region, age or size band, the custom service builds that exact cut within 48 hours from £149.
Why target hiring companies at all?
Hiring is one of the cleaner public growth signals: a company adding staff usually has budget moving and priorities in flux, which is when new suppliers get a hearing. In our July 2026 scan of established UK digital and marketing agencies, active hiring rose sharply with size — from roughly 13% of micro firms to 68% of the largest — so a hiring filter is also a rough proxy for scale and momentum, not just headcount.