What it is
Firmographics is company-level demographic data: the industry a company sits in, its headcount, its revenue band, where it is headquartered and its ownership structure (private, public, PE-backed, subsidiary). It does for a company what demographics does for a person, describing who they are in a handful of hard facts, without saying anything about intent or behaviour.
For a recruitment consultant, firmographics is usually the first filter applied to a market: which industries, which size band, which regions. It is the raw material an ICP is built from, though an ICP adds recruiter-specific criteria such as the disciplines the desk fills. On its own, a firmographic record tells you a company exists and roughly what shape it is, not whether it is about to hire.
Firmographics tells you what a company is. It never tells you whether now is the moment to call.
Why it matters
Firmographics is what turns a target list into a precise selection instead of a random scrape of the internet. Without it, a consultant qualifies every account by hand: checking company size, confirming the industry, working out whether it is a subsidiary of something bigger, before even deciding whether to bother approaching. With clean firmographic data, that qualification happens before an account ever reaches a desk.
It also decides how a signal or a piece of intelligence should be read. A funding round means something different to a 12-person seed-stage startup than to a 3,000-person PE-backed platform business, and headcount and ownership structure are exactly the fields that tell you which situation you are looking at. Get the firmographics wrong, a stale headcount or the wrong industry code, and every downstream decision built on that record inherits the error.
How boilr handles it
boilr attaches a firmographic profile, industry, headcount, revenue band, HQ location and ownership structure, to every company it discovers, and checks it against your ICP before the account ever reaches your task inbox. You never see a company outside your target shape. The profile lives in the Company Brain alongside technographics, signals and contact data, one record per company rather than a spreadsheet each consultant keeps privately.
Because firmographic data changes, headcount grows, a company gets acquired, ownership shifts, boilr keeps the profile current rather than treating it as a one-off import. When a company's firmographics shift into your ICP, headcount crossing a threshold for example, that shift itself can register as a signal worth acting on.
