Company Type

Every company in TheirStack carries a company type that tells you who the hiring is for:

• Direct employer — hires for its own roles.
• Recruiting agency — posts jobs to hire on behalf of other companies (staffing firms, headhunters, ETTs).

This lets you filter out intermediaries when you want to reach the company that actually owns the role. In company search and the companies API it's exposed as the Company type filter (company_type), and in the company dataset as the is_recruiting_agency column.

How we classify it

Company type is our own classification, not a field we copy from any single provider. We don't compute it from a company's hiring behavior (we don't count how many distinct companies it posts for). Instead we infer it from a combination of signals attached to the company:

• The company name (e.g. names that read like staffing firms, headhunters, or talent-acquisition agencies).
• The company descriptions we collect from multiple sources (LinkedIn, Apollo, InfoJobs, Indeed, and others).
• Industry keywords such as staffing, outsourcing, or human resources.

Because it's a best-effort heuristic, it isn't perfect: some agencies are missed and a few direct employers may be flagged. But it's good enough to remove the bulk of intermediaries from a list.

Catching agencies that hide behind a different industry

A lot of recruiting and staffing firms don't label themselves as "Staffing and Recruiting" on LinkedIn. They self-report as Information Technology, Internet, Consulting, or another vertical they recruit for. If we relied only on the industry category, those agencies would slip through as direct employers.

That's the main thing our classification does on top of the raw industry: even when a company's industry says "Information Technology", we still inspect its name and descriptions, and if they reveal a recruiting business, we mark it as a recruiting agency anyway. The goal is to catch intermediaries regardless of how they categorize themselves.

Company type vs. the Industry filter

These two filters are easy to confuse, but they measure different things and come from different sources, so they overlap without matching exactly:

Company type already accounts for the Staffing and Recruiting industry: in practice, a company whose industry is Staffing and Recruiting is never labelled a direct employer, because the industry name itself is one of the signals that flags it as an agency. So filtering on company type = direct employer is enough to drop agencies, and additionally excluding the Staffing and Recruiting industry does not remove any extra agencies.

Excluding an industry also drops companies with no industry

There is one subtlety worth knowing. The industry filter only applies to companies that have an industry on file, and a large share of companies (especially smaller ones) don't. When you exclude an industry, those unknown-industry companies are dropped too, not just the ones in the excluded industry.

So a search for direct employer returns more companies than direct employer AND not Staffing & Recruiting, but the difference is not staffing agencies (company type already removed those). The difference is companies for which we don't have an industry. Use an industry exclusion only when you specifically want companies with a known industry; otherwise it silently removes a big chunk of valid end employers.

Further reading